Our Mums and Us, made by Ponch Hawkes in 1976 in the subjects’ family homes, portrays a selection of Hawkes’s friends with their mothers. Within Melbourne's feminist milieu, consciousness-raising discussions about family, alternatives to the nuclear family, and communities of friends redirected her attention toward domestic life. Recognizing that her mother, Ida, had an identity beyond motherhood supplied the series' premise. Hawkes also included herself among the daughters, appearing with Ida in Ponch and Ida. By pairing generations without dissolving their relationship, the project examines women's personhood, mother-daughter bonds, and the ways family can accommodate intimacy, difference, misunderstanding, and compassion.
That intergenerational inquiry is carried by straightforward, full-figure social-documentary portraits. Each mother and daughter appears within a domestic setting, where clothing, carpets, furnishings, plants, paintings, and other household objects share the frame with body language and facial expression. These details register shifts in fashion and decor across generations while keeping the sitters embedded in spaces shaped by daily life.
The project was realized as gelatin-silver photographs, with prints varying in size across collections; QAGOMA’s Mimi and Danny, for example, measures 25.4 × 20.3 cm. At the 1976 Brummels exhibition, the small, vertically oriented black-and-white photographs were arranged in a single horizontal row, reinforcing the series’ repeated two-person structure while retaining the relaxed character of the domestic portraits.
The series was Hawkes’s first exhibited body of work, presented at Brummels’ Gallery of Photography in Melbourne in 1976 as part of a two-person exhibition with Ann Noon. Works from the series entered the National Gallery of Australia through the Philip Morris Arts Grant in 1982 and were subsequently included in major surveys of Australian photography, as well as Know My Name in 2020–22. QAGOMA acquired four prints in 1995, while MAPh received thirteen vintage prints in 2012 and later featured the series in exhibitions devoted to Hawkes and to Australian feminist photography. These later presentations have reinforced the work’s significance as an exploration of women’s experience, intergenerational relationships, and domestic life as a subject of feminist inquiry.
