Conversations The ordinary and extraordinary lives of women, artists and mothers
Mar 16, 2026
Drusilla Modjeska, writer and critic who explores lives of women artists and writers. She recounts leaving postwar England, discovering Pacific visual culture, and researching pioneering interwar women. Conversations range from surrealist photographers and radical self-portraiture to her investigation of her mother’s institutionalisation and the ways art and history reveal gendered constraint and resistance.
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Mother's Wartime Independence Shaped Family Life
- Drusilla Modjeska describes her parents' wartime romance and how her mother joined the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry at 16, working with Polish airmen in coded operations.
- Those wartime roles gave her mother a brief independence that clashed with postwar conservative expectations and shaped family dynamics decades later.
Childhood Trauma From Mother's Institutionalisation
- At 12 Drusilla's mother had a 'nervous breakdown' and was institutionalised, and Drusilla was sent to boarding school, an experience she calls foundational trauma.
- The psychiatric care aimed to restore her mother to 'wife and mother' roles rather than address her needs, informing Drusilla's later investigation.
Papua New Guinea Reoriented Her Colonial Perspective
- As a young bride Drusilla moved to Port Moresby at 21 and enrolled in university, which overturned her imperial assumptions and exposed her to anti-colonial students and Papua New Guinea's visual cultures.
- She later realised her early anti-colonial attitudes were still Eurocentric after reflecting on incidents like taking food from a village beach.
