MEMORIAL INTERPRETATION

The West Australian Irish Famine Memorial
INTERPRETATION

This Memorial Commemorates the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1852, and the impact that this ‘outpouring’ of desperate people from Ireland had upon Australia, although the experience in Western Australia was that of emigration rather than starvation.

The Memorial takes the form of a Celtic double spiral motif representing the winding and unwinding of birth and death, expressed as a spiritual ‘walked labyrinth’ cut in red granite symbolic of Australia and green granite symbolic of Ireland.

This draws the visitor inexorably on a journey of grief, remembrance and ultimately discovery into the heart of the design, while meditating on The Famine Prayer inlaid into the paving.

The spiral leads to the bronze sculpture of the keening ‘Childless Mother’, which is a personification of “Uaigneas” the eternal expression of loneliness in the Irish language, voicing the enormous sense of inconsolable loss and emptiness of parents left behind.

The green granite base is encased in a Celtic knotwork band, symbolic of the intertwining of both Cultures.
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Artists: Joan Walsh-Smith & Charles Smith

Visit Smith Sculptors Website: HERE​