Maker: Kaz Bartsch
Panel number: 535
Petition sheet number: Did not sign 1893 petition
Person honouring: Pearl Chaly
Relationship to maker: Pearl Chaly was my mother.
Pearl was born in 1928 in Woking just outside London, where her parents ran a grocer’s shop.
She was a teenager during World War 2 and recalled wearing gumboots in air raid shelter classrooms and dances for soldiers on leave every weekend. She was born with a shortened right hand but nevertheless trained as a shorthand typist.
Around age 20, Pearl immigrated to Australia as a Ten Pound Pom where she found work as the secretary to the British High Commissioner in Canberra. Later, after travelling extensively, Pearl came to New Zealand and became Judge Pritchard’s Legal Secretary, and later the secretary to the Dean of Law at Auckland University. Pearl’s daughter remembers her as adventurous, brave, stunningly intelligent and very kind, and she carried out a vast correspondence with many people around the world. Despite Pearl’s beloved brother Terry being shot down over Korea in the Korean War, Pearl’s daughter remembers knitting peggy squares for blankets for Korean orphanages and packaging up toys and coloured pencils for the children.
Pearl always worked tirelessly to help others and bring people together, teaching English as a second language to new immigrants into her eighties. In the central piece of the panel there is a beautiful stitched tribute to her. Pearl’s daughter says “My mother was not a traditional mother, she was always her own person and I admire her tremendously for the integrity and wit by which she lived her life. She is an inspirational woman to me.”
Panel materials: I used the cotton sheet provided and embroidery threads from the sewing box. I also incorporated the beautifully stitched central panel from a piece that I inherited from Mum, that was made by a friend of hers as a gift for her. The blue is from a failed cyanotype but it stands in for the blue aerogrammes she sent flying around the world on an almost daily basis.