HISTORY
Fleeced
Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw
Bloomsbury, $45
What happens when an Australian documentary filmmaker meets an American textile curator? A blending of social fabrics, the first threads of a friendship and a book project that has taken over a decade from inception to delivery.
In the middle of last century, before the first of several mining booms, this country’s economy was so dependent on wool’s fortunes that it was commonly said, “Australia rides on the sheep’s back”. But the impact of the “golden fleece” on everyone who has inhabited the continent since 1788 has never been properly assessed. Until now.
This book focuses on how intertwined the product, and improvements in manufacturing and transportation, were over a century of “cold-climate wars” from Crimea to Korea.
At the beginning of its long heyday, spinning and weaving advances in Bradford, Yorkshire linked with the rise of the British Empire to create a global supply chain enabling a lawyer in colonial India or Africa, if he so chose, to impress a judge as much by his Savile Row tailoring as the persuasiveness of his arguments.
That global market was dominated by Australian and New Zealand breeds, principally the Spanish-sourced merino, on grounds of excellence, for nearly a century until, around World War II, synthetic substitutes toppled King Wool from his comfortable throne.
The economy was once so dependent on wool that it was said “Australia rides on the sheep’s back”.Credit: Bloomberg
Not only do FitzSimons and Shaw study how soldiers in the foxholes on Western and Eastern fronts demanded extra layers of protection – cue the socks patriotic women hand-knitted for their men at Gallipoli – but they acknowledge that the clearance of land for grazing provoked wars with Indigenous landholders from the Antipodes to North America.
For such a trailblazer of a book, the authors sometimes cloak themselves in questionable historical garb. Uncritical acceptance is occasionally afforded a story that strains credulity. They would have you believe that in 1870 a callow teen, Cecil Rhodes, was “cornering the wool market in Sydney, Australia”, yet no standard history from Oliver & Fage’s A Short History … to Pakenham’s The Scramble for Africa ever mentions Rhodes visiting Australia. The truth? Mark Twain, master of the homespun yarn, met Rhodes in Africa on a world tour after visiting Australia. (Read all about it in Following the Equator.)