Ponch Hawkes was born in Melbourne in 1946 and is a self-taught photographer. Her professional activities began with the alternative newspaper The Digger in 1972. She learned to take pictures to accompany articles about women's issues. Her work has focused on the domestic and unrecorded aspects of women's achievements, relationships and place in the world.

She joined the Melbourne Pram Factory's Australian Performing Group where she became the first administrator of its Women's Theatre Group in 1976. She was a founding member of Circus Oz, touring with the company as lighting technician and photographer, 1977-86. Hawkes has worked for trade unions, educational groups, theatre companies, newspapers and magazines. Her photography has been shown in various individual and group exhibitions since 1976 (the date of the 'Our mums and us' project) and is in the collection of the NGA. Along with Carol Jerrems, Ruth Maddison, Micky Allan and Sue Ford, Ponch Hawkes has achieved a number of photo-documentary projects from the early seventies onwards which are part of the feminist enterprise of that time. She has been concerned with constructing positive images of people, especially women, to counter the stereotypical and chauvinistic representations of them in the media — promoting instead a humanistic and candid interpretation.

In her 1990 book Field of vision, Janine Burke wrote: 

Ponch Hawkes has taken photographs of herself photographing herself and of her friends with their mothers in 'Our Mums and us' (1976). This last series reveals an emphasis common to women photographers: to follow the rhythms and patterns of intimacy in one's family or chosen social group. Such resonant images of women are important to document now, as they are occurring. Hawke's photographs are not glimpses of some fabled new Woman but perceptively assess the changes women are encountering between themselves and their mothers, with its web of misunderstanding, need and compassion.¹

Across this series, Ponch and mother refers to the artist herself; Margaret and Micky to the photographer and painter Micky Allan; Ethel and Margot to the film-maker Margot Nash and her mother; and Mimi and Danny to an amateur painter, Mimi, and her daughter Danny, a journalist with the television channel SBS.

Endnote

1. Janine Burke, Field of Vision: A Decade of Change: Women's Art in the Seventies, Viking, London, 1990, p.68.