Water, Weaving, Grasses, Wool (2018 - 2019)

WATER, WEAVING, GRASSES, WOOL (2018 - 2019)

 

How can we walk water flows to listen to histories and stories of care and disturbance?

Invited as artists in residence to the Goulburn Valley, we walked water flows across Yorta Yorta and Taungurung country.  We walked the surface flow of tributaries and backwaters. We walked the dry floodplains of ephemeral billabongs and wetlands. We followed the paths of subterranean rivers and creeks.

Sometimes, we walked alone, as we learned to listen to country. Sometimes, we walked with others, and listened together.  

We listened as Belinda Briggs spoke Yorta Yorta names for the rivers and creeks.

We walked in rain.

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On the invitation of Uncle Paul Briggs, on the day of the annual Unity match, we joined a river of women walking the length of the Rumbalara Football ground. We flowed through river banks formed from the applause of men and boys acknowledging their grandmothers, aunties, mothers, sisters, daughters, nieces, granddaughters, and women unknown to them, like us.

We walked the boardwalks around the constructed wetlands of Victoria Park Lake, near a building site that will soon be a new home for Kaiela Arts and the Shepparton Art Museum.

A rakali greeted us on the path.  

Ash Gabler, the Farm Manager of Dookie campus, drove us to the reach of the Goulburn river that winds through the campus, then past the historic winery up to the summit of Mount Major. He gestured to the Winton Wetlands, and the paths of the Goulburn and Broken rivers. He described how he used to be a dairy farmer, but when Lake Mokoan was drained to create the Winton Wetlands, dairy farmers lost irrigation rights, and livelihoods.

We drove overland from the summit of Mount Major, avoiding erratic herds of sheep, and stopped near a natural spring. We learned that Yorta Yorta custodians were about to open a walking trail they had created from the base of the mountain to the spring. Ash shared his dream of connecting to their walk with a trail, from the summit to the spring.

We visited the state library archive to view a photograph of a timber and bark shearing shed that had once stood on on the banks of the Goulburn at Wyuna Station. In the foreground of the image, two women sit in a field together, wrapped in cloaks.

With the Shepparton Weaver and Spinners, gathered in the kitchen of a meeting hall, Marion Stewart demonstrated how to felt wool, using her hands and the rippled metal of the sink to agitate and fuse fibres.

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We heard the story of Eliza Forlonge, credited with bringing the first Merino sheep to Victoria. After hearing of the prices being paid for fine merino wool, Eliza studied sheep rearing and wool preparation in Germany, and then walked Saxony buying sheep. The sheep were shipped to Van Diemen’s land, and when Eliza moved with her son to Victoria, some of the flock came too.

One evening, we gathered in the Dookie Artists Tree, amidst seed paintings that lined the walls. We learned about the qualities of different types of wool, the micron best for felting, spinning by hand, and wool so fine that only specialised machinery can spin.

We tried methods of washing wool, massaging wool in bowls of water, or placing the wool in jars of water and agitating by hand.

We walked a hill opposite the Dookie campus, following a trail created by the Tallis winery. We sat on a rocky outcrop, and from our high perch, watched sheep darting to and fro below us, spooked by the noise of cars and crows. The slope was almost bare of vegetation, crisscrossed with lines of erosion, carved by the hooves of grazing livestock. We noticed lomandra growing in the crevices of the rocks around us.

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We walked the trail that weaves around the wetlands of Tahbilk Winery, near Nagambie. We learned of the restoration and care of the wetlands, tracking catfish, building nesting boxes, and collecting seeds for the Goulburn Broken Seedbank on Dookie Campus.

We walked with Lance Lloyd, Restoration Scientist for the Winton Wetlands, as he talked of waves of dispossession. 7,000 Ha of Yorta Yorta country had been flooded in 1971 to create Lake Mokoan, a shallow storage of water for irrigation. 150,000 river red gums were drowned, including many scar trees.

The new lake was popular with recreational boaters and fishers, but beset by problems, with blue-green algae outbreaks. In 2010, Lake Mokoan was decommissioned. Water that would have been stored in the lake was diverted to sustain ecological flows in the Snowy and other low-flow rivers.

We walked amidst the trees that had re-emerged when the lake was drained, still holding their scarring and stories. We listened to Aunty Faye Lyneham describe campsites and walking trails that have been created to share Yorta Yorta stories of the cultural significance of the ephemeral wetlands.

At Kaiela Arts, we listened to Aunty Eva Ponting and Aunty Suzanne Atkinson. We heard you can stand on top of a mountain and see the ancestral path of the Goulburn, and the old riverbanks. They shared a story carried for 30,000 years of an earthquake that had dammed the ancestral Goulburn at the Cadel tilt, and how the people dug through sandbanks to release the flow, forming the present path of the river.

Aunty Eva and Aunty Suzanne talked about regaining weaving knowledge, testing methods of harvesting and handling grasses and preparing fibres. Aunty Eva spoke of 51 different kinds of lomandra that need to be handled in different ways.

We listened to the difficulties the women faced in locating places to harvest weaving grasses.

We learned that a demonstration garden for weaving grasses had been installed at the Kaiela Botanic Gardens. The Broken River winds through the Gardens, but the grasses were not growing along the river course. Instead, they were contained within sculptural beds, which prevented harvesting, and were too small in scale to support significant weaving projects.

We imagined planting a fabric of weaving grasses across country, connecting women and waterways, the making of fishing nets, and the restoration of habitat.

We were gifted chocolate lilies and yam daisies by the Euroa Arboretum. We walked around their plantings, around their dams. They invited the women of Kaiela to harvest the abundant grasses growing along the creek.

We dreamed of gardens of weaving grasses of scale at Dookie campus, teaching and learning about the histories of agriculture in that place, the braided flows of dispossession and regeneration, through tending to grasses.

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We were offered a place to begin planting by Serana Hunt-Hughes, around the dam of her home in Violet Town. We had visited during one of our first visits to the Goulburn Valley, when we had shared food around a campfire. In the glow of the firelight, we had held in our hands a giant mussel shell found earlier in the day, as Serana walked the banks of the dam.

A year later, we gathered and planted.

 
 
 

 
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Walking Mt Major

Score:
Gather at the summit, orient to the movement of water flows across country.
From the summit to the spring, walk silently, alone or in small groups, listening.

 

Images: Claire Denby & Darren Hocking

 
 

Wool washing & felting in Dookie

 
 

The old water ways

Rinse fibres of paddocked earth 

and work with the heat

We carry water

Sensing her weight and motion

Our hands share a task

Flows, muscle and tools

Work in the shade and story

Front yard, quarry, pub

Untangling kin

the stamina to fuse threads

and let old flows be

 
 
 

Images: Serana Hunt-Hughes

Stills from a film work-in-progress that explores weaving as a method of composing, contemplating, and handling layered histories. Film by Katie West and Fayen d’Evie, weaving documentation images by Serana Hunt-Hughes.

 
 

Planting weaving grasses in Violet Town

 

Score for watching:
Observe movement of plants and people and water.
Recall your own experiences of planting and tending to country.

 
 
 
 
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Lomandra grows

Between gathered stones

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Returning the wool in Muckleford

 
 

Dear Katie,

There are bagfuls of raw sheep and alpaca wool still in my studio, wool we gathered from our friends across the Goulburn valley for our wool washing and felting encounter. I have been thinking about how we might return the wool to the landscape. It is almost time for the birds to begin searching for soft threads for their nests. Would you write a score for Zeno and I to scatter a river of wool here in Muckleford? Of course, this is Jaara country, not within the Goulburn valley. But when you and I first proposed to walk water flows, we talked of understanding how flows connect across country, so perhaps this performance of return allows an opening out, moving from the headwaters and surface flows, to contemplate vast aquifers and underground streams that braid across the continent.

Love,

Fayen

 

Dear Katie,

Zeno and I laid the handfuls of wool in grasses below the dam, where an ephemeral river forms every few years when heavy rains overflow the dam. A wedgetail eagle circled overhead as we enacted the score. After we had left, he landed to investigate. I have not noticed other birds taking the wool, but there have been other curious visitors. Kangaroos and wallabies. Foxes and rabbits. Those of this country, and uninvited guests too.

Love,

Fayen

 
 

 
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