ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a set of three wall hangings, known as the Odyssey Quilts, that are held in the Power-House Museum in Sydney, Australia.1 They present creative visual narratives—made up of appliqued quilting pieces—portraying their creators' recollections of their experiences of childhood, wartime, and migration. The quilts are the work of ten Dutch women who immigrated to Australia after the Second World War: Gerada Baremans, Johanna Binkhorst, Yvonne Chapman, Ann Diecker, Anna Dijkman-Tetteroo, Ineke McIntosh Eichholtz, Frances Larder, Vera Rado, Francis Widitz, and Vicky van der Ley. Five of them came from the Netherlands (NL) and five from the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), now Indonesia.2 Drawing upon their family histories, as well as their personal memories and mementos, the women produced artists' biographies as a resource for their collective endeavour. These written narratives, along with photographs and other records that were aggregated into visual diaries, provide personal insights and stories that serve as a valuable contextual framework for interpreting the visual images embedded in the quilts. While the quilting pieces draw upon memories that are individual and personal, they communicate a larger story of post-Second World War migration to Australia, releasing, in condensed visual form, histories and contexts that the artists' biographies present more expansively in words. In this chapter the visual diaries and supporting autobiographical material are used as an aid to the interpretation of the quilts as personal expressions whose relevance extends far beyond the individual stories they tell (Figures 1-3).
