Summary

Envelope addressed to Mr and Mrs L. Motherwell at their home in St Kilda, 1992. Sylvia Motherwell never lost contact with her friends in Cape Town whom she left when she moved to Australia in 1970 with her new husband, Australian musician Lindsay Motherwell.

Sylvia Boyes (a South African-born orphan) and Lindsay Motherwell (a Melbourne-born drummer) met in Cape Town, South Africa in 1967 through their theatre connections. They fell in love but due to apartheid laws were forced to leave South Africa to marry in London. They subsequently relocated permanently to Melbourne in 1970.

Physical Description

White envelope addressed to Mr & Mrs L. Motherwell at 42 Vale Street St Kilda, Melbourne. It has 3 philatelic stamps on it, an airmail sticker and an ink stamp with the date 26 Jun 1992 on it. On the back is the return address for T Pretorius at 10 Shaftesbury Transway Road Sea Point, Rep of South Africa.

Significance

Statement of Historical Significance:
This collection provides a significant opportunity to represent political and personal freedom as a motivation for migrating to Australia within the international context of both apartheid in South Africa and the end of the White Australia policy in Australia. The personal narrative is well documented and the objects provide a material way to follow the lives of both Lindsay and Sylvia, both separately and where they coincide in South Africa and onwards together to Melbourne. While this is ultimately a love story, it plays out through the collection against the backdrop of apartheid South Africa, sixties London and an increasingly multicultural Australia.

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