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The City Made of Sheep: Wool Exhibition at the National Wool Museum

Arthur Hamilton

Geelong recognizes its deep connection to wool. As Australia became the world’s largest exporter of wool in the late nineteenth century, sheep raised in the western districts of Victoria were sent to Geelong for shearing and eventual export. The publicly owned National Wool Museum chose ten artifacts from its archives for the Wool Exhibition in an effort to document Geelong’s history with wool.

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Six of the items are artifacts of wool production, either tools, such as a 1910 Axminster Loom, or raw materials. The oldest artifact in the exhibition is a “woolen textile fragment” from the Wreck of Sydney Cove, a shipwreck from 1797. This fragment, along with a merino wool clipping exported to England in 1816, provide material evidence of the early wool industry in Geelong. The exported clipping serves to demonstrate how Australia grew as a commodity exporting country on the periphery providing raw materials for a European metropole, most Australian wool was sewn into cloth in Britain. However, a portion of Geelong’s wool was refined in Australia for domestic use, using tools such as the exhibit’s Axminster Loom from 1910. The loom, along with a nineteenth century spinning wheel in the exhibit, grant insight into the early industrial production of wool while demonstrating the artisan skill required of wool house workers. The Axminster Loom in the National Wool Museum is the only still operational loom of its kind and the demonstrations of its use held by the museum

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The National Wool Museum's Axminster Loom from 1910.

reveal the sowing of wool to be an involved and complex form of art.

 

Other items in the exhibition, such as a photography collection of wool workers in the 1920s, serve to contextualize the wool industry in Australian life. The “Inter House Athletics Day for Girls” holds a collection of team photos and images of athletic games held by the Geelong Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) from the 1920s to 1950s. The exhibit states that “woollen mills, business firms and church clubs” would form teams of seven women, many of whom worked in the wool industry, to represent their organization in games of “bowls, basketball, hockey, cricket and soccer.” The YWCA games create an image of Geelong’s community outside of the wool house while also showing how the wool industry injected itself into the civil society of the city. The curators’ choice to include these athletic games credits the wool industry with the creation of a white civil society in Geelong, tying the settlement and culture of the city to wool. As all of the artifacts in this exhibition may be considered positive in their portrayal of the wool industry, there are no mentions of labor strife or expropriation in the exhibit, the athletic team pictures seem to be a culmination of the exhibition’s story of the creation of twentieth century Geelong. Pictures of cricket teams are at peace with white Australia’s self-image.

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Inter House Athletic Days for Girls. Geelong Heritage Collections, 1927-1950

Workers at Federal Woolen Mills. Murgatroyd Photography Collection, 1918-1920

 

The latest of the exhibition's artifacts is “Ceremonial Hunting Grounds,” a painting in the indigenous tradition by Stanley Couzens, a Gunditijmara artist from Geelong, dated to 1993. It is difficult to view the inclusion of this artifact as anything more than a token nod to the existence of indigenous people in Geelong before and after European settlement. The artifact feels distant from the other artifacts as it is not clearly connected to the overarching themes of the exhibit. The painting is not a textile although the image was printed onto a jacket which was given to the Prime Minister. The inclusion of an artifact with a more meaningful representation of the indigenous experience’s relation to the wool industry, such as something pertaining to indigenous life in Geelong or indigenous reaction to the colonization of Victoria by sheep farmers, would have been a more fitting component of the exhibition.

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Inter House Athletic Days for Girls. Geelong Heritage Collections, 1927-1950

 

The curators of the Wool Exhibition chose to create an artifact-driven exhibition, meaning that many modes of expression, writing, maps, charts, etc, were not used in the exhibit. This simple approach grants the museum an opportunity to display items from its vast collection while also offering an interpretive and succinct experience to the reader. The exhibition does not create a didactic tone which is appropriate for a non-academic institution such as the National Wool Museum. However, one could argue the curators fail to contextualize their own artifacts. The exhibit requires prior knowledge for the viewer to understand the narrative created by the exhibition. A short narrative on the history of wool production in Geelong or a timeline could make the exhibition a more meaningful experience for the viewer who is unfamiliar with the relevant history.

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