From the Archive to Our Lives

As international students, researchers, and daughters and sons of women whose labour was never formally recognised, we do not approach this project from a distance. The silences in the data are not just historical—they echo through our own families, our own lives.

We know what it means for labour to go unseen. The meals prepared, the rooms cleaned, the emotional scaffolding that holds households together—none of it was ever counted. As Federici (2004) reminds us, reproductive labour is the foundation of society, yet remains structurally invisible under capitalism. We saw this invisibility in the Quarry Hill archives, but we’ve also seen it in the women who raised us.

Many of us grew up with the unquestioned assumption of the male as “head of household”—an administrative category thatMany of us grew up with the unquestioned assumption of the male as “head of household”—an administrative category that,encodes patriarchy into data(D’Ignazio and Klein,2020). The state does not ask if a woman holds a household together emotionally or practically—it asks only whose name is on the lease. And that answer has almost always been a man’s.

These aren’t just issues of “representation.” They shape policy, identity, and whose reality gets to be recorded. Systems of power do not affect everyone equally(Crenshaw, 1989). For working-class and migrant women, the overlapping forces of gender, race, and class amplify erasure. What we discovered in Quarry Hill is not just a local or historical story—it is a structural story, and a personal one. And it demands not just analysis, but intervention.