Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (and planned memorial)

The Parramatta Female Factory Precinct Memory Project (PFFPMP) is an arts-based memory project based in an area of the Sydney suburb of Parramatta which has been used since early colonial days to house women and children in institutional settings. The project is driven by artist and memory activist Bonney Djuric, herself a former inmate at Parramatta and founder of the Parra Girls group.   

While there is as yet no formal memorial on site, Bonney and other artists have used art and community creative events to make the history of the site more visible. PFFPMP works out of a single room in the precinct grounds, but has managed to turn the two storey building into a gallery space, hosting exhibitions and allowing artists to interpret the now-empty spaces on the second floor.

"The Forgotten Ones" installation by Bonney Djuric

 

 As well as this, the site has been used for gathering of ex-inmates (known as Parragirls), a conference and various community days. There are plans underway to develop a children's garden, to transform a site that was once a place of pain into a place of joy.
PFFPMP is the only Australian site connected to the international Site of Conscience movement, which is aimed at using places where past human rights abuses have occurred to educate people for a better future. However, the future use of the site is still uncertain. The Female Factory Precinct is still being assessed for national heritage status.  As an outcome of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, a consultation process has started to develop a government-funded memorial, although this project will not formally involved either Parra Girls or PFFPMP. Informal artistic responses to the history of the site are already in place.  

Mary's Place Rape Memorial

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?