Item HT 56387 Email - Lindsay & Sylvia Motherwell, Trevor and David, 7 May 2001

Summary

Email from Trevor and David to Sylvia and Lindsay Motherwell, dated 7 May 2001. It discusses the Sydney Mardi Gras and visiting Australia. He also mentions Easter and Trevor's singing career, as well as a few lines about crime in South Africa. Lindsay and Sylvia Motherwell always stayed in contact with their old friends from South Africa after they moved to Australia in 1970.

The writer thanks Lindsay and Sylvia for sending a tape of the Sydney Mardi Gras parade, and talks about a friend of theirs who was in the parade. The couple is planning a trip to Australia, which they reference, and also give an update on their current life in South Africa, with illness, Easter, performing, and crime levels.

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

Printed email

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.