ABSTRACT
This chapter explicates a care-full practice-led art investigation into ‘genealogical ghostscapes’, a term given to describe a settler colonial haunting which lingers across Australia. Home-making and care-based labours, predominantly performed by women, are analysed for their imported rhythms and the passing along of colonising traditions from one generation to the next. Reckoning with such inherited behaviours and interrogating one’s ancestry through activist practice-led research requires key methods. These are identified as truth-telling as a necessity for reconciliation in Australia, and observing an ethics of care during the research and making processes. Repetitive crafting methods, linked to the domestic histories of textiles and home-craft, are highlighted as a means of conjuring a care-full embodied way of scrutinising and redirecting colonial ancestral inheritances. Such feminist and activist art practice can repurpose unearthed archival evidence and materiality to counter colonial denials and re-member intergenerational settler colonial traditions into recognition-based and truthful trajectories.
