Dear Prime Minister – Voices from Across the Nation

What happens when thousands of young Australians write directly to the Prime Minister, and those letters are brought together in one physical space?

As Australia’s Youth Representative to the United Nations, Satara Uthayakumaran travelled across the continent with a simple purpose: to listen to what young Australians, particularly those whose experiences are too often overlooked, were needing, thinking and asking of their country.

She travelled from Tasmania to the red dust of the Tiwi Islands, into schools, remote town camps, refugee communities, disability forums and the concrete cells of Australia’s youth detention centres. She returned with thousands of handwritten letters, sketches, scribbles and notes addressed to the Prime Minister.

These letters are the foundation of Dear Prime Minister.

They contain the raw language of a generation: their hopes, frustrations, fears, ideas and demands. They range from a young person writing from a detention centre, to a child on Christmas Island watching the shoreline change, to young girls in Central Australian town camps, refugees finding their voice in a new language, and children with disabilities communicating through drawing, gesture and other forms of expression.

The letters take many forms. Some are carefully written. Others are drawings, fragments, scribbles or a few simple sentences. In their varied levels of English and expression, they declare: this is Australia. Here is the Australia that exists in the margins.

One experience sits at the heart of this project: at Ashley Youth Detention Centre in Tasmania, the young people inside who had shared their letters with Satara were so excited to see their voices represented that they plastered them across the walls of the centre for parents, youth workers, ministers and prison staff to see. This is a larger extension of that act of hope.

The proposed McCusker Institute student project asks what happens when that same archive is transformed into a public, spatial experience.

Rather than treating the letters as objects to be placed behind glass, students will explore how space itself can become a form of storytelling. How can the vast geography represented by these voices be brought into a gallery? How can audiences encounter the distance between policy and lived experience? How might a visitor move from the red dust of Central Australia to a detention cell, from a remote island community to a classroom, and encounter the words of young Australians along the way?

The project will involve the conceptualisation, curation and prototyping of an immersive exhibition that collapses Australia’s vast geography into a shared physical environment. Students may work with spatial mapping, architectural installation, sound, video, projection, archival display, interactive elements and other multimedia techniques.

The exhibition should create moments that interrupt passive observation and require audiences to stop, listen, read, move, reflect and encounter the experiences of people whose lives may otherwise remain geographically or socially distant.

The project sits strongly within the McCusker Institute’s themes of Connected Communities and Active Citizenship, bringing together youth voice, human rights, design, storytelling and civic participation. It also offers students the opportunity to contribute to a project with an established national network of community, advocacy, cultural and media partners.

An exciting opportunity to elevate the voices of young people by:

• Transforming thousands of raw, personal voices from across Australia into a compelling public experience, developing advanced curatorial, spatial and exhibition design skills in the process.
• Experimenting with the power of space to make people listen by exploring how architecture, scale, movement, sound, sequencing and interaction can shape an audience’s emotional and intellectual encounter with lived experience.
• Developing an exhibition from idea to prototype, gaining practical experience in research, concept development, design, curation, stakeholder engagement, communications and public programming.
• Exploring how design can become a form of civic participation, creating spaces that bring experiences often kept at the margins into public view and provoke meaningful conversation about the Australia we share.
• Working across disciplines to turn youth testimony into something audiences can see, hear, feel and remember, developing the ability to communicate complex social issues to the public, cultural institutions and decision-makers.

• Advocacy and campaign development
• Learn to work ethically with sensitive, culturally diverse and deeply personal material, including experiences of disability, displacement, poverty and incarceration.
• Explore how design can strengthen civic participation, create public dialogue and make marginalised experiences more visible.
• Develop curatorial, spatial and exhibition design skills by transforming a large archive of personal testimony into a coherent public experience.
• Investigate how architecture, spatial sequencing, scale, sound, movement and interaction can influence how audiences encounter social issues and lived experience.
• Develop practical experience in research, prototyping, stakeholder engagement, communications and public programming.
• Work across disciplines to translate youth testimony into a form that can engage audiences, institutions and decision-makers.

The project will involve:

• Coordination of associated public programs and events, potentially including gallery talks and associated events.
• A practical exhibition implementation plan, considering accessibility, audience experience, spatial requirements and technical feasibility.
• A curatorial framework and exhibition narrative exploring themes emerging from the archive, including geography, belonging, inequality, identity, place, hope and civic participation.
• An interactive and immersive exhibition conceptintegrating the original letters, drawings and other archival materials as core spatial elements.

The scope and extent of deliverables will be negotiated with the selected learner(s) based on the hours available through their AATD pathway.

The project involves deeply sensitive lived experiences, including perspectives from young people with disability, refugees and young people who have experienced incarceration. Students will therefore be expected to approach the archive with a trauma-informed, culturally responsive and ethically grounded methodology, with careful consideration of representation, consent, accessibility and the potential impact of displaying personal testimony.

The project may also provide students with the opportunity to work within an established engagement pipeline involving organisations and institutions including Amnesty International Australia, the Australian Human Rights Commission and the United Nations Association of Australia, subject to availability and project requirements.

The project has further potential for public engagement through established media, advocacy and cultural networks, including an associated ABC Compass documentary,

There is potential for the student team to assist with high-profile public programming and exhibition launch activities, including invitations to senior public figures and national institutions.

The broader project is framed around a question of democratic accountability: what happens when the people whose lives are shaped by public decisions are given the opportunity to speak directly, in their own words, and those words are placed at the centre of a public space?