A range of textile practices including weaving flourished in the handcraft revivals of the early and mid twentieth century in Australia, but while handloom and tapestry weaving became popular craft practices in 1960’s and 1970’s taught in art schools and by the guilds, interest in loom weaving in South Australia had declined by the 1980’s.  That woven tapestry flourished, was largely due to its development as a community art practice.

Figure 6

In South Australia a tradition of community tapestry weaving developed in the 1970s and 1980s led by professional tapestry weavers like myself and community art workers, who worked with community groups in the country and city to enable them to create collaborative tapestries exploring issues of local concern.  This movement culminated in 1994 with the creation of the Womens Suffrage Centenary Community Tapestries for the South Australian Parliament celebrating the centenary of granting the vote to South Australian Women in 1894.  The strength of tapestry weaving in South Australia is largely due to its ceremonial function as a signifier of community identity in works made for public spaces.

It was from these Indigenous and non-Indigenous textile traditions that the artists of the Weaving the Murray project drew their skills in sewing, patchwork, tapestry weaving, coiled and netted basketry and string making. These skills were complemented by the expertise in photography, ceramics and Indigenous languages that they also brought to the project. Stories about the meaning of the river came alive through objects made by the Indigenous and Settler communities who lived along its banks.

Figures 7 and 8

During 2001, the artists accompanied by a sound recordist, made two trips along the great length of the river, visiting river towns to meet with community groups and listen to their stories, and to search museums, archives and opportunity shops for information and artefacts that told the official and unofficial histories of the river.  The groups ranged from the Country Women’s Association to paddle steamer captains, Indigenous women in Health Centres and Education Centres to museum curators and regional arts officers, and from craft groups to Indigenous elders. It was not just these meetings but the experience of being on the river, walking along its banks and wetlands and through the vast Nyah forest in north-western Victoria that informed the design and making of the final work, an installation in four parts.

THE INSTALLATION

Figure 9

The completed work uses waterworn wood collected from the Hume Dam near the source of the river, words and sound recordings as well as textile objects and processes to

‘re-present to the river communities, their stories, their daily experiences, their hope and concerns for the health of the river.  Textile processes provide the means to speak the unspoken, to tell previously disregarded stories.  The artwork acknowledges difference while symbolising the connections between communities’ Weaving the Murray, 2002 p9)

Figures 10 and 11

The oral story of the creation of the river for Indigenous communities is told through the form of Pondi the giant Murray cod whose journey across the land formed the river channel and whose death created all the fish in the River.  The grid of hanging, salt-ringed sticks and branches surrounded by a sound-scape of voices from Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities describing how the river has changed, tells a different story, one of environmental degradation rather than creation.