Remember The Women/Dresses of Sorrow

Inspired by the REDress Project by artist Jaime Black, which focused on the issue of missing or murdered Aboriginal women across Canada. Lisa Ronneberg, from the Newcastle feminist activist group AWE, proposed creating a dress for each women who had been murdered in Australia in 2016. Although the women who had been killed were not known personally to the makers, the dresses were made as a tribute designed to ensure that each woman was remembered and honoured as an individual, rather than as a statistic. Women from AWE, Newcastle community and services, Maitland, and across Australia, made a dress. Lisa collated the dresses, and with other members of AWE coordinated the display of the dresses at multiple events throughout 16 Days of Activism - The Lockup Gallery, Walk a Mile Koori Style, a Women of Words poetry event, in the trees on Hunter St Newcastle East, and the White Ribbon Breakfast.

Remember the Women was coordinated by Lisa and Emma from AWE, who supervised students at Hunter TAFE to organise an exhibition of the dresses at TAFE. The dresses were presented with the statement: “These women mattered. These women were loved. These women will not be forgotten.”

The project was led by Warlga Ngurra Women’s and Children’s Refuge, and the dresses were again displayed at Walk A Mile Koori Style. The decision was made to stop making new dresses and organisers began a conversation about how to store them.

Several dresses from previous years were displayed at Walk a Mile Koori Style. At the “Remember the Women” public vigil, the dresses were hung in the trees in Civic Park, and the names of each woman killed by violence that year was read aloud, followed by a minute’s silence. In 2019 the Gender Research Network at the University of Newcastle collaborated with Newcastle Libraries to display one of the dresses in each of the 9 local library branches.

At the suggestion of Warlga Ngurra, it was decided to take the by then over 150 remaining dresses to Canberra to present to the Federal Government and make Parliament responsible for their future. The aim was to publicly remind the Federal Government that the future of all women and children in Australia who are living with domestic or family violence or are at risk of being killed due to domestic or family violence, is Federal Government’s responsibility.

Dresses made over the previous 5 years were displayed at the Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month candlelight vigil at the Newcastle Foreshore. A smoking ceremony was held at the vigil prior to sending the dresses on their journey to Canberra.

On a frosty Canberra morning, activists and advocates from Newcastle gathered to display the Dresses on the lawns of Parliament House.

The Dresses are displayed in the online Women’s Safety Summit. Newcastle receives no invitations to the Summit until the Friday preceding the Summit on Monday.