Mary’s Place is a laneway in the inner-Sydney suburb of Surry Hills, running just off Bourke St next to the Beresford Hotel. The place name itself is a memorial: it was changed from the original Flood Lane in 1997 as an acknowledgement of the brutal bashing and rape, a year earlier, of a young woman named Mary. The attack was homophobic in nature, in an area with a strong gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender (GLBT) community.
Since its renaming, Mary’s Place has been the site of two artistic memorials, the first created in 1997 at the same time as the renaming of the laneway. This was part of the Mary’s Place Project instigated by the local organisation the Lesbian and Gay Anti-Violence Project and grew out of a spontaneous outpouring of distress and community support in the months following the attack. The memorial consisted of a series of paintings creating a kind of ‘carpet’ effect along the laneway, with each artist bringing a slightly different interpretation. The artwork was destroyed when the Beresford was renovated in the mid-2000s and the laneway was resurfaced. There are few remaining images, apart from those included in a documentary (titled Mary’s Place) created in 1998 and directed by Melissa Lee.
In 2010, the current Lamp for Mary memorial was installed, following a public art commissioning process by the City of Sydney. The artist Mikela Dwyer designed this memorial, which is an oversize hot pink lamp. It is accompanied by text which runs along the side of the laneway, written by poet Prof Michael Taussig after consultation with various community groups. The text is also hot pink, and reads:
“This is a lane with a name and a lamp in memory of the woman who survived being beaten and raped here. She happened to be lesbian. When the sun sets this lamp keeps vigil along with you who read this in silent meditation.”
The text was not installed until 2011, because of some community objections to the use of confronting words such as ‘rape’ and ‘lesbian’, which led to concerns by the Beresford Hotel owners, who also own the pathway along the side of the lane and also provides electricity for the lamp. The Hotel was eventually convinced to support the installation of the text after a community campaign.
Interestingly , although the current memorial simply states that Mary “happened to be lesbian”, the original memorial was very much a project of the Lesbian and Gay community and included important GLBT symbols such as rainbows. The Mary’s Place film also makes clear that Mary was attacked because she was identified as a lesbian, and was subjected to many homophobic insults throughout the attack.
Questions:
- Do you know about the history of the Mary’s Place memorial?
- Why do you think this particular attack motivated the creation of a memorial, when women are subjected to violent attack and rape every day?
- If you have visited the Mary’s Place memorial, how did it make you feel? Did it make you want to find out more, or take some kind of action?
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