Ponch Hawkes took up photography in 1972 while working as a journalist for the counter-cultural magazines Digger and Rolling Stone. In this regard, her approach to photography was from the start informed by a broader interest in consciousness-raising.

Hawkes’s best-known series Our mums and us documents a selection of Hawkes’s female contemporaries standing with their mothers. The subjects have each been photographed at their family home during the mid-seventies. The photographs record generational shifts in personal style and domestic decor. This series was originally shown at Brummels Gallery of Photography in 1976, which was Hawkes’s first solo exhibition.

Accompanying Our mums and us, Hawkes’s 1982 series, These women have just run twenty-six miles is a series of photographs taken by Hawkes at the finishing line of the 1982 Big M Marathon in Melbourne. The subjects of these portraits have just been sponged down after completing a 42.2 kilometre run. 

This exhibition of Ponch Hawkes’s early-career work acknowledges the generosity of Ian Bracegirdle, who recently donated vintage prints of Our mums and us to the Monash Gallery of Art, City of Monash Collection.