Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea is a powerful reckoning with the state archives that illuminates and vividly remembers the harrowing experiences of Aboriginal women and girls in domestic servitude in South Australia. The intergenerational effects on families and communities are deeply conveyed, and Harkin’s woven truth-telling is a potent response to whitewashed narratives and brutal systems of control and capture. No longer invisible or ignored, the labour histories of Aboriginal women are important in the greater context of a nation still denying its past. The inclusion of oral history, poetry, memory stories, photographs and collaborative artwork alongside letters, reports and newspaper articles shapes this work as a communal gathering and a moving tribute to Aboriginal women’s strength and resilience. Balanced skilfully and purposely as both history examination and multi-modal creative testimony, Apron-Sorrow / Sovereign-Tea models what a relational transformative text can do.