Pemberton (1849), 2026

Pemberton (1849) forms part of The Earl Grey Girls, my ongoing response to the young Irish women sent to Australia under the Earl Grey Scheme between 1848 and 1850. I came to these histories through my own interest in ancestry and the fragmented ways women survive in family and historical records. What unsettles me about the Earl Grey girls is how easily their journey can be folded into a familiar migration story: leaving one country, arriving in another, beginning again. For girls selected from Irish workhouses during and after the Great Famine, the reality was far less romantic. Their choices existed within poverty, institutionalisation, displacement and loss. In this work, three blindfolded figures move through an Australian landscape, connected only by touch. They cannot see where they are being taken. I wanted the image to hold the uneasy space between rescue and removal, opportunity and coercion: contradictions that resist a simple historical narrative. Pemberton takes its title from the ship that carried Earl Grey girls to Port Phillip in 1849. I have used the ship’s name as an archival marker rather than an illustration of the voyage: a factual fragment attached to an imagined interior world. The records tell us who boarded, where they came from and where they were sent. They cannot tell us what it meant to be a young woman whose future was being decided within forces far larger than herself.

Lauren Starr is an Australian photo-media artist based in Bendigo, Victoria. Her practice explores women’s lived and inherited histories through constructed photography, mixed media and storytelling. Drawing on archival fragments, mythology, literature and ancestry, she creates richly staged images that move between history and imagination.

Her work has been recognised in major Australian art and photography awards, including the Waterhouse Natural Science Art Prize, Ravenswood Australian Women’s Art Prize, Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Olive Cotton Award and Head On Photo Awards. She was the overall winner of the Bluethumb Art Prize in 2022, and her work is held in public collections including Bendigo Art Gallery, Parliament House Melbourne and Treasury Place, Victoria.