Never shall be forgotten - a mother's story

'Never shall be forgotten - a mother's story' is a hand-drawn animation that tells the story, some thirty years later, of John Pat, an Indigenous teenager whose death at the hands of police officers at Roebourne, WA on 28 September 1983, led to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987-1991).

Richard Lewer visited Roebouren in 2016 to meet John Pat’s mother Mavis, and other members of his family. He recorded the meeting with drawings, expressing the family’s grief and anger, from the perspective of Mavis.

Drawing is central to Lewer’s practice. He uses drawing as an aesthetic language but also as a sort of personal therapy and catharsis; he extends this cathartic role to the telling of John Pat’s tragic story.