We took Cambridge Primary School Grades Five and Six on a Louisa’s Walk primary performance today.
They were such great kids – really engaged with our play and afterwards, they asked such insightful questions!
Then it was our turn – I asked them what they thought was the worst punishment the women had to endure? A boy of around eleven put up his hand and he answered “When the mothers had to be parted from their babies”.
One of the most poignant lines in our play Her Story performed at the Cascades Female Factory at 11 each morning:
” I’ll never forget the day when they tore him out of my arms and said it was time – time for him to be weaned and time for me to take my punishment. I walked away just trying to remember what his soft little head felt like as I cradled it…………………………………..”
Our western history is strewn with this most inhumane of acts; forcibly parting a mother from her child. How incredibly sensitive and empathetic of this young man to identify that as the worst of punishments.
Will puberty and peer pressure change him?
