The project was strongly supported by WA’s Irish community, as well as by the City of Subiaco – in which it is located – with the latter contributing $25,000 to the project.
The monument has two key symbolic features, a Celtic Double Spiral motif, and a sculpture of a ‘keening woman’ at its centre. The first can be said to represent the winding and unwinding of birth and death; visitors may follow the spiral as a kind of ‘walked labyrinth’, which takes them on a journey of grief and remembrance to the heart of the design, while reading the Famine prayer which has been carved into the monument’s granite. At the centre, they encounter a bronze, stylised woman in a crouching and anguished pose. This grieving mother image has been used to convey the enormous loss caused to the Irish people by the Famine: she crouches in desolation in the wake of not only the countless dead children of Ireland, but also the millions of those torn from the land of their birth and scattered around the world. This grieving ‘Mother’ is a personification of “Uaigneas”, an eternal expression, in the Irish language, of loneliness and loss. She ‘keens’…in anguish; her image reflected in the eternal black depths of a polished slab of granite underneath.
Charles Smith and Joan Walsh-Smith are an award winning husband-and-wife team with 45 years’ experience in creating large-scale public, commemorative and corporate artworks both in Australia and overseas.
Before immigrating to Australia from Ireland in 1984, they were responsible for the ‘City People’ concrete relief wall in Derry (Northern Ireland), the ‘St Oliver Plunkett’ bronze head in Waterford, and the ‘Trinity Fountain’ at Doo Lough in County Clare. In Australia, their work has included the ‘National Memorial to the Australian Army’ in Canberra (for which they were the winners of a national competition in 1988), and memorial to the HMAS Sydney II in Geraldton (dedicated in 2001). The Smith Sculptors won the Centenary Medal – also in 2001 – for Outstanding Achievement in the field of ‘Large Scale Public Art’, and in 2024, Joan Walsh-Smith received the Medal of the Order of Australia in the 2024 Australia Day Honours for ‘service to the visual arts as a sculptor’.
