Knitting in Australia: Artefact & Exegesis

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Knitting in Australia: artefact & exegesis

Sue Green

Approved for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Swinburne University of Technology August, 2018 2

Abstract

This project, undertaken by artefact and exegesis, draws together a book about knitting in Australia intended for a general readership, with a scholarly framework. The exegesis arises from issues identified in producing the artefact, an interview-based, non-fiction publication, Disruptive knitting: how knitters are changing the world. Its nine themed chapters are created through autoethnographic, Practice-Led Research based on reporting and interpreting 87 interviewers with knitters and related interviewees. This includes their knittings’ relevance to key social issues such gender, women’s role and social inequality. It enriches the discussion of how, for many, knitting has become a tool for rebellion, art making and activism on feminist and political issues. It examines and demonstrate knitting’s ability not only to reflect the wider Australian society, but to influence that society through both individual and collective acts of knitting in the context of the gendered nature of the craft.

Central to this artefact production and its exegetical framework are two complementary questions: How has the traditional craft of knitting, stereotypically a woman’s hobby for the purpose of producing utilitarian items including garments, evolved to become a tool for numerous other purposes including political protest, reinforcement of and rebellion against traditional gender roles, and the creation of fine art? What does the practice of knitting reveal about Australian society and how has it influenced events in that society since World War II?

This project brings together insights into creative work that has largely been isolated as women’s craft, created by labour regarded as having no calculable value. The exegesis aims to provide a context and scholarly framework for the artefact, illuminating the gendered practice of knitting through the prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST). It addresses a gap in the publication of works about the social and cultural impact of knitting and brings creativity as knowledge into the Academy. Continuing a trend to identifying knitting as a suitable topic for research and scholarship, it illuminates the practitioner scholarship of the artefact, thus bringing new scholarship to the topic of knitting. This project is fully engaged with contemporary developments, in particular the repositioning of the traditional gendered nature of knitting and the influence of contemporary political developments, the Internet and social media on it and its influence on and ability to disrupt them. 4

Acknowledgements

Without the knitters this book would not exist. I’m indebted to you for opening yourselves to my scrutiny, not only telling me about your knitting, but about your lives. You shared with me stories of discrimination, of fighting for social change, struggles with physical and mental illness, personal trauma and grief, homophobia and bravely challenging the way society says a man should live.

Thank you so very much to (in order of appearance) knitters Julia Billings, Lynn Berry, Jane ‘Queen Babs’ Balke Andersen, Rhiannon Owens, Ruth Oakden, Candace Gibson, Helen Lovitt, Linda Cooper, Bluey Little, Stephen Lawton, Susan Campbell-Wright, Peter Jobson, Luke Shilson- Hughes, Meg Gadsbey, Jac Fink, Loani Prior, Alison Ayers, Marilyn Healy, Karen Corrie, Lizzy Emery, Anna Barton, Nonna Reckless, Annette Fitton, Clare Twomey, The Stitch, Sofia Cai, Mary- Helen Ward, Barbara Schembri, Liz Saltwell, Win Bucknall, Lurline Stuart, Nancy Sheppard, Isabel Foster, Flora Westley, Deb Rhodes, Meredith Atilemile, Marg Knight, Kath Schroder, Adrienne Morton, Robyne Conway, Shay Zhang, Ruth Power, Cynthia Mulholland, Lise Chambers, Valerie Elliott, Kirrin Lill, Fiona Wright, Ros Rogers OAM, Dawn Toomey, David Reidy, Kevin Richards, Peter Muir and Wolf Graf. Poppy knitters Hazel Flay and Lisette Dillon kindly gave permission for their dedications to be included.

My 87 interviewees from all states and territories are the backbone of this book. Most were knitters, but my grateful thanks also to artists (and, mostly, knitters) Roisin O’Dwyer, Elizabeth Barnett, Casey Jenkins, Lars Stenberg, Ruth Marshall, Makeda Duong, Jim Pavlidis, Lex Randolph, Jude Skeers, darcy t gunk, Brett Alexander, Kate Just, Kate Riley, Ruth Halbert and Vishna Collins, artists and textile designers Kaffe Fassett MBE and Jenny Kee, and photographer (and knitter) Marilyn Healy.

Thank you for valuable information and insights to yarn store owner (and knitter) Tash Barneveld, curators Karina Devine, Corinne Ball and Paola Di Trocchio, Royal Melbourne Show arts, craft and cookery curator Annette Shiell, craftivist and academic Tal Fitzpatrick, sustainable lifestyle advocate Tracy Bourne, social and political researcher and leading feminist Eva Cox AO, Professor of History Joy Damousi, former Premier of Victoria and chair of the Victorian Anzac Centenary Committee Ted Baillieu, psychologist Meredith Fuller, nurse donation specialist Joanna Forteath, Knitted Knockers Australia president Cheryl Webster, craft curator and 5

commentator Dr Kevin Murray, art critic John McDonald and textile arts pioneer Janet De Boer OAM.

This book was written as part of a PhD project at Swinburne University of Technology and my principal supervisor, Professor of Writing Josie Arnold, not only offered invaluable suggestions and advice, she was my chief cheerleader, encouraging me and supporting me every step of the way from an idea and a blank screen to the final fullstop. Thank you too for very helpful suggestions and feedback to my supervisors Dr Nanette Carter, senior lecturer in design, and Associate Professor Andrew Dodd, then-head of Swinburne’s journalism program.

The Handknitters Guild library was a treasure trove and volunteer librarians Barbara Bugg and Susan McDougall provided many useful books, with Susan taking enormous trouble to research wartime knitting patterns and magazines. Swinburne University’s interlibrary loans librarian Mez Wilkinson saved me a fortune by summoning books from around the world.

Thank you, too, to the knitters of Victoria’s Handknitters Guild for 22 years of encouragement, support and good times. A PhD is a long, rather lonely journey and few things are more companionable than a Sunday afternoon cuppa and a knit at the guild. Abby, the assistant editor who has her own chair at my desk, provided furry, purry company when it all seemed too hard. 6

Disruptive Knitting: How knitters are changing the world 7

Declaration

I declare that the examinable outcome:

1. contains no material which has been accepted for the award to the candidate of any other degree, or diploma except where due reference is made in the text of the examinable outcome; 2. to the best of my knowledge contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made in the text of the examinable outcome.

The in-text references and reference list of this exegesis have been professionally copy edited by Dr Rachel Le Rossignol, according to the Australian Standards for Editing Practice. The standards applied relate to appropriate academic editing, including ensuring the document meets the examining university’s formatting requirements.

The full document, excluding the reference list of this exegesis, has been read for typographical errors because, due to arthritis/RSI in her hands, the candidate uses Dragon voice activated software of necessity and speech recognition errors occur. It has been proofread by professional editor and publisher Annie Hall, of independent publisher Threekookaburras, a member of the Institute of Professional Editors. She has proofread in accordance with ASEP standards, using the Australian Style Manual for reference.

Susan Jennifer Green Melbourne 25 May 2018 8

Contents: Artefact

Preface 9

Introduction 11

Chapter 1: Global Threads 15 Chapter 2: Bombs Away 59 Chapter 3: Designing Change 95 Chapter 4: Women on Top 127 Chapter 5: Thanks Girls and Goodbye 161 Chapter 6: Connecting with the Past 197 Chapter 7: Knitting in Mind 227 Chapter 8: Blurring the Boundaries 268 Chapter 9: I Know I Like it – But is it Art? 305

Reference List 350

Preface

Knitting has been part of my life since just hours after I was born and lovingly dressed in a white, lacy layette of matching garments handknitted by my mum. Never mind that each of those tiny pieces – dress, jacket, bonnet, booties and even mittens – and all the others I wore during the cold New Zealand winter would have to be hand washed. Never mind that my mother was also a schoolteacher, Sunday school teacher and worked on the farm. Knitting was what women did in the evenings – whether they liked it or not.

Knitting was a necessity: No knitting, no winter jumpers and cardigans, no hats and gloves, no school or football scarves. Many men back then could also knit, having learned during World War II, but most didn’t. That had been an exception for an exceptional time, not one to be carried over into ‘normal’ life.

This story of knitting and its power to change lives is, in essence, my story. Born into post-war austerity, I was taught to knit at age six by my mother and grandmothers, all of whom, luckily, loved knitting and were expert at it. Ever since, it has been an integral part of my life. I have lived through the social changes to which knitting responded in New Zealand, where I was born and raised, and Australia, where I have lived for most of my adult life. As I document here, I have seen knitting influence the way women are pressured to conform to society’s stereotypes as wives, mothers and crafters, their skills denigrated or simply ignored. But I have also seen it alter the way their lives are lived as women discover themselves and their voices with their knitting as an agent of change.

While not a memoir nor a first person story, this book is influenced by my personal experiences and my use of personal contacts to find interviewees, record knitters’ experiences and historical perspectives. Those knitters across Australia made this book possible. Some were friends and long-time knitting companions in Victoria’s Handknitters Guild; others were strangers who opened their lives to my scrutiny.

A lifelong and increasingly creative knitter, in the mid-1990s I undertook a textile design degree in handknitting as a mature age student at Melbourne’s RMIT University. The other students, most of them much younger than me, laboured tearfully over the temperamental knitting machines while I happily churned out vast numbers of samples and garments on my two 12

needles, my sample knitting completed on time with the help of the ever-supportive women of the Handknitters Guild. Studying while a full-time journalist then designing part-time when I graduated, I began to achieve my goal of developing a handknitting design sideline with commissions from yarn companies and magazines and my own portfolio.

Then while editing a newspaper’s weekend magazines in 2009 I was struck by incapacitating repetitive strain injury (RSI) in my arms and hands. That triggered latent arthritis in my thumbs – common in knitters apparently, particularly among those working on computers. This overuse injury also triggered a chronic pain condition. This was life-changing. I turned to voice activated software, which ruled out work in a noisy newsroom, and relaxation-based pain relief methods that did not rely on mind-numbing quantities of opiates. So I became a home-based freelance writer and a tutor at Swinburne University, where I am now a lecturer.

But software can’t knit for you. Suddenly, my knitting design and my lifetime of constant knitting were over, aside from occasional small projects such as mittens and socks, worked in tiny stages. I was no longer part of this shared activity – online and local knitting groups, knitting-related travel, knitting activism, writing for knitting and craft publications.

Psychologists, now with evidence about the health and well-being benefits of knitting to support what knitters have known for decades, often tell clients such as me to find other interests. But not me. I’ve remained keenly interested in and involved with knitting, cheering its resurgence and its transformation from a means of saving money and making essential clothes into a tool for self-expression, protest, creativity and greater well-being. Knitting has become truly disruptive, a means not only of saying things about our world, but of actually changing it. Researching and writing this book has been an education and an adventure, but also a rewarding way of reconnecting with an important part of my life and its people.

Sue Green Melbourne, 2018 13

Introduction

It’s not difficult to think of analogies between handknitting and our social networks, even the fabric our lives. Using needles and yarn, a single powerful thread, to create a textile of interconnecting loops can be readily compared with the connections we make with others – connections known to have important well-being and mental health benefits, even influencing our longevity. The threads of these connections stretch between us and across the globe as social networking erases the obstacles of distance which once separated us.

As has happened in so many spheres of life, knitting has gone global. Whether pursuing it for relaxation and wellbeing, using it to challenge gender stereotypes, as an artist’s medium or harnessing it as a tool for political activism, knitters are connected across national boundaries and even language barriers.

Knitting’s origins are unclear but it’s not thought to derive from any one time and place. Knitting historian Richard Rutt believed the earliest pieces of true handknitting dated from 12th century Islamic Egypt. While three pieces of a type of knitting found in the ancient Syrian city of Dura have been dated to 256 AD and are considered the earliest surviving examples, these were most likely made by a technique known as nalbinding, Rutt said. The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a pair of knitted socks from Egypt dated to the 3rd to 5th century AD and explains they, too, were most likely nalbinding, which is rather like sewing. The museum’s earliest example of double needle knitting is believed to be North African, made in about 1100 to 1300.

The knitting created over this long history was mostly made to be worn, used around the home or for utilitarian purposes such as carrying supplies. Employing knitting in ways that serve no ‘useful’ purpose – yarn bombing, feminist activism, pursuing a political goal such as opposition to coal seam gas exploration or raising awareness of endangered species – is recent. So, too, is the emphasis on the process of knitting itself and its healing, meditative qualities, its ability to build communities and to spark the sheer pleasure of making, rather than the product. They are changes enabled by technology-driven freedoms, more leisure time, affluence and social change.

Knitting’s power not just to reflect and respond to social and political developments but to actively shape them, particularly in women’s lives, precedes the Internet. Nowhere is this more 14

evident than during and after World War II. Women were at first expected to keep the home fires burning and knit for the soldiers. Then, as labour shortages bit, they were urged to join the workforce and knitting patterns reflected their need for comfortable workwear and the militaristic climate. Fast forward to the servicemen’s return and women were pressured out of the workforce and into the home. Knitting and women’s magazines reinforced this regressive message, priming resistant women to accept it. Designs complemented Dior’s impractical and overtly feminine New Look.

More recently women knitters have turned the tables. Knitting’s disruptive capacities are evident as they are harnessing the craft of knitting and its gender stereotypes for their own purposes. Social media has knit connections between large numbers of women – and sometimes men – across Australia and around the world as a force for change.

These connections transformed a small, two-woman knitting art installation project into the 5000 Poppies project, a war commemoration bringing together women from Australia and worldwide, including some from wartime enemy nations, to knit hundreds of thousands of poppies. While there was disquiet around this sentimentalising of war commemoration and failure to engage with issues such as national identity, the project drew such a powerful response because it became about our collective stories, says co-founder Lynn Berry. Its true strength: the supportive and enduring communities of women formed in the making. Lynn affirms: “What it has become, and for me what it’s all about now… is community and connection.”

Community, actual or virtual, also underlies knitting’s therapeutic benefits, just as so many crafts and shared activities can promote wellbeing, enhance creativity and boost self-esteem. Clare Twomey, Knitting Nannas against Gas coordinator, laughingly calls knitting a “benign and harmless” hobby. But its life-affirming qualities belie its power. The Nannas, an international movement and probably the biggest knitting-based protest in Australian history, use knitting to serve their convictions. “We were very conscious from the start of subverting the stereotype,” notes Clare who, some of the men suggested, should be typing and making cakes.

Yarn bombers also subvert stereotypes, juxtaposing knitting’s perceived softness and serious political messages. Many begin by wanting to spread colour and happiness, then find their voices. Beautifying ugly urban landscapes, protesting against inappropriate development, 15

boosting creativity, raising the profile of knitting and personal empowerment are among the motivations.

Boys just want to have fun too, but for some male knitters that’s not so easy. Their numbers are increasing, or perhaps social media provides greater visibility. With that can come the opprobrium of gender stereotyping – assumed to be gay because you knit – and the risk of homophobic aggression. Even quiet knitting draws unwanted overpraising from women knitters; deciding whether or not to knit in public is fraught.

Newcastle-based knitter and artist Brett Alexander places gender-based contradictions at the heart of his art practice. “For me doing it as a man and being open about it is sort of a disruptive act and that is how I see my practice – as part of the disruption of tradition …It’s art, but steeped in craft.”

For feminist artist Kate Just this craft process is integral. With art training and an academic background, her knitted artwork was acknowledged as fine art from the outset. In her important and critically acclaimed work the gendered associations are inseparable from the messages: “From the very beginning, I guess because knitting has been inherently gendered female, I was interested to see how knitting could be subverted.” But some in the fine art elite view artwork grounded in textiles and craft as inferior. Artists working with knitting struggle with this; recognition may be elusive despite the quality of their work. “If you are thinking about art- generated income, to be an artist who uses knitting makes it difficult,” laments Western Australian artist Ruth Halbert.

Some knitters see their craft as inextricably linked with their feminism. In some cases this is through brave and unyielding statements such as Casey Jenkins’s use of knitting yarn stained with her menstrual blood. For some it is simply a matter of being proud to be a knitter. There are young knitters who believe knitting itself is a feminist act – they experience a freedom in making that choice.

Feminism is not only about equal rights and economic independence for women but about valuing women’s experience. For too many years, women’s experience as knitters has not been valued. It has been demeaned and derided – as have they. Feminists are standing up to this derision and saying clearly: knitting has value. Craft has value. Women’s work has value.

Yes, this is a book about knitters and knitting. But it is also a book about social change. It’s about subverting expectations and stereotypes, disrupting traditional expectations of women and craft – disrupting society itself. It’s about using connections forged in person and through social media to overcome loneliness, illness and trauma. Ultimately, it’s about the creation of community and the power of those communities, virtual and actual, local and global to change our world. 17

Chapter 1 Global Threads

“So many of us are so connected in some ways and so lonely in others. For me it’s finding people who are warm and kind and share their own work, as well as that of the community, as a way of building community and learning rather than just producing stuff.” Julia Billings, @woollenflower, knitting designer and yarn dyer

It’s a popular breakfast ritual: scanning a newspaper or, more likely these days, a news site on a tablet with a cup of tea. It’s a ritual artist and magazine editor Roisin O’Dwyer enjoys. But she’s not checking out the latest political scandal or international atrocities on the ageing iPad she commandeered from her teenage son Flynn who used it in primary school. She starts her day with a relaxing scroll through the latest knitting designs.

Roisin calls herself a social media observer. In a nod to old technology, she admits: “I keep a notebook with the iPad and take note of things that might be interesting.” But it’s her keen eye for social media trends and interesting blogs that ensures the almost-200 members of the Handknitters Guild Victoria keep up to date. Roisin is volunteer editor of the guild’s online newsletter and a moderator of its group on Ravelry.com, the knitters’ social networking site.

This is also a way of keeping her finger on the contemporary pulse. Roisin, who makes work at her studio in an artist-run space and edits Museums Australia (Victoria)’s INSITE magazine, notes a topical example: the Laine magazine photograph controversy. It arose over a knitting pattern photographed on an unsmiling model in the edgy Nordic lifestyle and knitting magazine’s third issue in November 2017.

The discussion unfolded on Twitter and Instagram, with bloggers joining in. While some Instagram posters said the model’s androgynous and “nasty” look put them off making the sweater, others enjoyed this subversion of the smiling model stereotype: “So disappointing to see other women insisting a woman should always smile and look pretty” and “The best pattern release photo ever! Killing It!!”.

“There were anti-comments, then pro-comments, a discussion about body image and what is appropriate to post. It’s a really interesting dialogue on a contemporary topic that came through in a discussion about knitting,” observes Roisin.

Just as the Internet and social media have revolutionised the way we live, work and relate to each other, they have revolutionised knitting. The way knitters communicate, how they learn and showcase new skills, access designs and support, organise activism, challenge traditional gender stereotypes and even develop audiences for knitting-based art – all have been transformed by virtual connections spanning the globe.

Knitters respond to and influence what is happening in the world around them, with opportunities for empowerment and creative expression undreamt of in the pre-digital age. It is the Internet, combined with the willingness of knitters to break down barriers and take their craft into new dimensions, which has driven knitting’s capacity for disruption.

Italian yarn bombing researchers (yes, there is such a job) Manuela Farinosi and Leopoldina Fortunati put it like this: “The Internet constitutes a focal point which facilitates contact between crafters worldwide and contributes to the international spread of the phenomenon. But … it can also play an important role in real-world activities… Furthermore, through the continued use of the Internet for organizing and coordinating future collective actions, knitters have attracted more activists and grew in number, spreading their peaceful protest and complex subculture all over the world.”

Lynn Berry is persuaded of the power of the Internet to inform, connect – even to heal. She credits it, especially social media, with transforming a two-woman knitting project she dreamt up with her friend Marg Knight into an international phenomenon which literally changed the lives of many of those taking part. “My whole view about social media in terms of people’s connection to the world at large has changed completely because of this project,” she admits.

Lynn and Marg planned a tribute to their dads, Wal Beasley and Stan Knight. They would knit and “plant” 120 poppies around the tree dedicated to Lynn’s father’s 14/32nd battalion in the Avenue of Honour at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance. Enthusiasm for the idea caught on among friends and friends of friends.

“We decided to make it public, a community project. We set the task of collecting 5000 poppies – we thought that would be a challenging but achievable number.” In July 2013 she set up a Facebook group and by late 2017 membership of the 5000 Poppies project group topped 12,500 as knitters embraced plans for the project’s finale on Remembrance Day, 11 November, the following year.

A former marketing coordinator, Lynn understands the promotional power of a blog. Her emotional and inclusive writing took readers on the poppies’ journey from the outset through her 5000 Poppies WordPress blog. In London, promoting the poppies’ installation at the 2016 Chelsea Flower Show, she talked with live bloggers, mindful of their following, and credits this with the huge numbers who learned about it. By the time of the spectacular installation, the project’s UK public relations advisers estimated 60 million people worldwide had seen the media coverage.

“Much of our success is because of social media,” says Lynn, previously sceptical of its merits. She believes the project’s greatest strength is its community, mostly women, many of whom have never met.

David Gauntlett, author of Making Is Connecting, sees it this way: “For centuries people have liked to make things, and share them with others, in order to communicate, to be part of a conversation, and to receive support or recognition; but the Internet has given us a forum where people can do this without gatekeepers, without geographical restrictions, and in an organized way that means we can find like-minded people easily – so that we can share ideas and enthusiasms with people who actually care about the things that we care about, and are likely to have meaningful, informed responses.”

Posting to Fill the Void Such sharing and connections may, on the surface, be about a mutual interest, yet have a far deeper significance. Artist Elizabeth Barnett found an online community offered her the connectedness she was missing so much at a time when she was supposedly fulfilling a dream but felt socially isolated. In 2015 Elizabeth and her husband Blake moved to almost 5 hectares of land in the picturesque Macedon Ranges, north-west of Melbourne, fulfilling a long-held ambition – relocating to the country to lead a more sustainable life. Blake, a photographer and videographer, took leave to work in permaculture and organic farming.

But Elizabeth’s life in the country with toddler son Archer and month-old baby Beatrice was a long way – literally and figuratively – from London’s Camberwell College of Art where she had studied for her Master’s degree. She also felt removed from the studios she co-founded and shared with 120 other artists in Abbotsford, Melbourne. Gradually, she made friends in her new community through the local kindergarten and yoga classes. However, she also relied on social media, particularly Instagram, for companionship as she had done since Archer, now five, was born.

It was a lifeline which helped her cope with those feelings of isolation and struggles with postnatal depression. “A lot of my friends had not had kids yet and did not really understand having a baby that would not sleep,” Elizabeth recalls. “I did not really talk about it that much (on Instagram) but rather than dwelling on the negative part of that I would put up a photo and it was such a life affirming thing when someone says, ‘that’s so beautiful‘.”

Instagram became a sanctuary, as were knitting and her art. “I just kind of painted my way better, and knitted too.”

Artist Elizabeth Barnett showcases her knitting, her paintings and their inspirations on her Instagram feed. Photograph: Archer, age five.

Elizabeth had taken up knitting with a vengeance when pregnant with Archer, delighted by the tiny knits she could make for him. She taught herself lace and complex cables from YouTube and 21

her eyes were further opened to knitting’s possibilities when, in September 2013, she attended Craft Sessions, a Melbourne residential craft workshop series.

A painter and printmaker, she has a website created by her graphic designer brother to showcase and sell her art. Her main outlets are stockists and galleries. She searches Ravelry for patterns, but her Instagram feed @elizabethbarnett is the centre of her shared creative life. “Instagram has become like a tool of my artwork and life, almost like a journal. I like it as a personal thing. It’s never calculating.”

As many social media users question Facebook’s privacy policies and analytics which mean some friends’ posts are not seen until days later, increasing numbers are, like Elizabeth, turning to Instagram. Her feed is a hub of gorgeousness for those who appreciate colour and creativity – and many people do. In early 2018 her following topped 20,000.

Elizabeth Barnett watercolours: Lemons and Medicinal Herbs (left) and Garden Herbs and Handknits from her 2017 Herbal Medicine series. Photographs: Elizabeth Barnett.

Posts, accompanied by her comments and subsequent conversations, include her beautiful still life and landscape watercolours. There are flowers and vegetables, carefully curated small montages, studio shots, baking, a handmade quilt, luscious scenery and scenes of family life including their dog, Poppy. Shots of handmade yarns and sketches as she plans future knitting projects and artworks illustrate common inspirations.

A focus is her much-admired knitting. Elizabeth credits the patterns she’s making and says she prefers to follow others’ designs rather than devising her own. “It’s an escape. If I wasn’t a painter, maybe I would be a knitwear designer,” she laughs. “I had made up my own patterns before. But I knit after the kids are in bed and I want it to be an escape for me.”

Seeking knitting patterns for Archer first drew Elizabeth to Instagram: “You go down the rabbit hole of Instagram and I found this comfortable sensation. A friend put me onto it and I started posting photographs of my work but it was more just a photo journal of my days at that point, being at home with a new baby and stuff,” she recalls. “Instagram is such a community. People write comments. You meet these people and chat, you’re all across Australia.”

Ever-cheerful yarn bomber Jane Balke Andersen (‘Queen Babs’) in action. Photograph: Martin Andersen @JAM_project.

Yarn bomber Jane Balke Andersen, known as Queen Babs, has also built an online community – from her bed. Despite serious health problems, she’s a smiling, brightly-clad presence, even when posting from her wheelchair or lying down. With a positive outlook and loving cheerful colours, Jane has grown her Instagram network to more than 45,000 followers. “I could now go 23

to many cities in the world and people would be more than happy to catch up with me and have a chat,” she says with satisfaction.

Elizabeth and Jane’s use of social media to ease isolation and build connections is not uncommon. In 2016 UK researcher Alison Mayne published a study of knitters and crocheters who posted their work and comments to a Facebook group. “This case study finds women assuaging their feelings of isolation and loneliness through sharing tactile making online, seeking or offering pride in accomplishment and a sense of agency and empowerment in personal activism,” she wrote.

Yarn dyer and designer Julia Billings, too, would face many more lonely days but for Instagram. “I think digital friends for me have been my lifeline,” she says of moving from Melbourne to Glasgow in 2014 without knowing anyone except her husband Scott. While she now has a handful of friends in the city, in an increasingly common reflection of contemporary social connections she says: “Most of my friends in the UK are digital friends and periodically we get to meet up.

“As I became more involved in the knitting community here, I kind of conserved my energy. I interact mostly with people via Instagram these days and there is only so many people you can follow or keep in touch with.”

When the couple shifted across the world seeking fresh challenges, Julia had been posting news and thoughts about knitting, dyeing and life in general on her woollenflower.com blog for three years. She had built a following for her lovely photographs and gentle writing style, but it was a few weeks of Instagram posts when she hit Scotland which eased her into the local community.

“I signed up to do the Edinburgh Yarn Festival in March, six weeks after arriving,” recalls Julia, who specialises in natural plant yarn dyeing. “I had been making project bags and machine knitting accessories. I thought it would be a way of meeting the knitting community and maybe meeting some people I could teach for.

“I really got embraced, quite a few people reached out and made an effort to get involved and offered me work or to make friends. Quite a few people – not from my blog, but the Edinburgh Yarn Festival digital presence through their website and Instagram. People can look at who was coming (to the festival) and would have gone from that website and looked at my blog.” 24

An interview the previous November with popular American podcast Woolful (now the Making podcast) also made her name familiar to some of those she met.

Julia has an online shop selling her yarns, knitted accessories and project pouches. She is also building relationships with independent designers to create designs for her yarns and in January 2018 released the delicate Pippu Shawl by Australian Ambah O’Brien. But like Elizabeth, it’s her Instagram feed @woollenflower with more than 11,000 followers, charming styling and a feelgood mix of her yarns, moody Scottish landscapes, dyeing shots and festival scenes, which is now the centre of her virtual life.

“I use Instagram mostly. It’s very quick and easy and people see it because it is a centralised place where everybody is posting, rather than tapping into people’s blogs to read them. Because knitting and design is a very visual thing Instagram is very rewarding for people who are visual people.

“I tend to write with my posts because I still want some kind of explanation and want to say why I’m posting it. Some people just post pretty pictures but I am more interested in saying something with my photographs.”

Julia finds it easy to develop a community feel on Instagram around her own feed and by following others. At a recent London weekend get together all present were “Internet friends involved in each other’s knitting lives. They were all Instagram friends. Some have their own businesses and others are supporters of that and community members who knit our patterns or our yarn or whatever.”

Challenges remain. Self-promotion is the life-blood of social media success, yet that can be an ordeal for the self-effacing. Julia takes no note of her analytics nor search engine optimisation, and struggles with the contradiction between needing to attract views and her shy personality. “It is still something I am trying to resolve because if you don’t put yourself out there enough then people don’t find you and you won’t be seen. I try to do it in a quiet, gentle way.”

Blogging Share Plates Julia’s preference for the quick, visual Instagram hit rather than pouring heart and soul into her blog is a trend extending well beyond the knitting community. In April 2018 a Google Trends 25

search showed a consistent decline in the popularity of blogging as a search term over the previous five years. “I think the fact that Instagram is so popular says something about our attention span. Most people just want a quick post,” notes Julia.

The blog’s decline is much-discussed – particularly among bloggers. In late 2017 Forbes reported on Millennials, a generation told that “having a blog was a most effective way to promote their brands and expand their communities”, opting for podcasts over blogs. Andrew Arnold wrote of short attention spans, impatience with long chunks of text and multitasking while listening to a podcast.

Yet blogging’s personal rewards remain as important for some as for what it offers their readers. Internet-savvy Rhiannon Owens, based in Hastings, south-east of Melbourne, had blogged for 12 years before beginning knitting, initially to record her own thoughts and interests.

“I have had so many blogs over the years; I love to write and I love to do it digitally. I am not a sentimental person, if I have physical journals I will chuck them out but with the Internet I can go back to it,” she explains. “Blogs for me have always been a way of recording things, it has never been for other people. My information is there for people who find it but my main goal is to document it for me and I like looking back on it. I go back to my own blogs for recipes, planting information or modifications that I made to a pattern.”

Rhiannon was taught to knit at age four by her mother but began in earnest only when she became unwell after the birth of daughter Amelia, now seven. Eventually Rhiannon was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s disease, a thyroid-related immune system condition, after almost three years of exhaustion. “I was very fatigued and often could not get out of bed in the morning. I had always been the sort of person who has to be busy. At that point in my life I really needed to sit still. I started knitting.”

It was natural to incorporate knitting in her blogging. Her latest venture is forageandmake, inspired by her interest in sustainability and the source of her materials. Rhiannon provides directories of ethical and sustainable products for knitters and sewers. “I started getting interested in the environmental aspect of the yarn that I was using and the fabric. I did so much work just looking things up and I just had so many resources I thought, I have to get this out there.”

For Julia, too, blogging was about more than her knitting. “For me it was about knitting but also about other things. It was documenting a whole lot of things and to keep track of where I was at and what I was doing, setting resolutions and some goals, having a diary… a great way to do that and it is better to do it publicly. I also felt that if I liked something other people might like it. I think wanting to share is a really important reason behind why people have blogs.”

Finnish researcher Minna Haveri agrees: “I see craft blogs as self-expression, but also as an aesthetic way to seek better life management. These blogs combine a sense of community and individualistic aesthetic experience.” As well there is status in analytics and visitor numbers, Minna believes. “It is a way to make one’s life and one’s self more ‘visible’.”

Julia learned to knit in 2005 as a counterpoint to her tough, physical work in horticulture at the time. Later, she wrote about her work in yarn stores and teaching knitting at woollenflower.com. Realising how many knitting blogs there were, she also shared her life as a dyer and wrote about 27

knitting with her yarns, their soft colours derived from sources ranging from berries to avocado pips. Her following was mostly Australian, something she didn’t think much about until relocating. “Since I moved here it has changed readership, probably.”

Community and Connections In knitting, as in other activities and organisations, online has taken over traditional ways of doing things. For Victoria’s Handknitters Guild, its blog, a straightforward repository of information about its activities, has replaced paper forms as an avenue for many knitters to join. Membership is increasing and its Ravelry group has more than 200 members. Online connections enable staying in touch between monthly get-togethers.

Nonetheless, eyebrows were raised when Roisin suggested taking the newsletter online. “When I first suggested that the guild’s newsletter be digital people were horrified. I can understand it, things have been done a certain way for a long time,” says Roisin, its editor since 2013. To placate the doubters, it was agreed hardcopies would be posted to those not online. “At the time when I started doing it there were about 35 we had to post out; now there are 11.”

Technology is also filling the gap left by the loss of a long-time tradition for Ruth Oakden. Knitting had been a community affair for her English grandmother, with women in her village knitting together. “When my gran spoke of knitting it was a social activity in her village,” Ruth remembers.

She continued this communal tradition as a child, with her mother and grandmother. A family of makers with no television habit to fill the evenings, they sat at home in Lara, Victoria, carding wool, spinning, and knitting that homespun yarn, as well as reusing old jumpers. “That was a social knitting experience.”

Then Ruth left home and life intervened. “The only social knitting I did in those years was on the train to and from work and then for years my knitting was just by myself. Most of my adult knitting life until my mid-forties was solo knitting rather than social.” That changed in about 2008 when she joined about 30 knitters meeting in the Geelong yarn store Twisted Threads. Several years of sociable knitting followed, but then a meeting night change clashed with her work.

“I still keep in touch with the Twisted Threads knitters but I sought an online alternative because I felt the lack of that group knitting experience,” she explains. That gap has been filled through social media. For the past two years Ruth, who discovered the online knitting community in 2003 while pattern searching, has been an administrator of Facebook group Addicted to Knitting, with 63,000 members worldwide. While most are from the US and aged 55 or older, 93 countries are represented and ages range from teenagers to elderly. She moderates her group’s questions and comments and says: “It just constantly brings me to the fact that there is so much more that unites us than divides.”

Responsible for employee support and engagement at work, including wellbeing and chaplaincy, Ruth knows how knitting enhances her own wellbeing. Technology has made possible a global version of her grandmother’s knitting village. “Being part of Facebook knitting groups feels almost like the socially inclusive, supportive and wisdom-strong village knitting experience my Gran enjoyed.”

Minna Haveri agrees: “Global Internet networks, sharing the same interests, have replaced locality, typical for earlier folk crafts,” she writes.

That’s a view reinforced by the research of Robert Kraut and Paul Resnick. In Building Successful Online Communities they write: “Online communities serve the same range of purposes that off- line groups, networks, and communities serve. They provide their members with opportunities for information sharing and learning, for companionship and social support, and for entertainment … The promise of online communities is that they break the barriers of time, space, and scale that limit off-line interactions.”

Candace Gibson knows the truth of this. She is state president of the Handweaver’s, Spinner’s and Dyer’s Guild (sic) of Western Australia, which includes knitters. Candace says online connections are a great way to keep in touch with member groups – in Busselton, more than 200 kilometres from Perth, or Albany and Geraldton, both more than 400 kilometres away, for example. The guild has a website, Ravelry group and Facebook page.

Some older members still prefer the guild’s print publications. “They are more traditional in their interaction, they will pick up the phone whereas the younger ones and some of the older ones tend to use the Internet. Members are becoming more active and using the Internet as more of 29

a communication tool, whereas they never would have previously. They use it as an information tool,” says Candace.

Back in 2004 Catherine Ridings and David Gefen researched “why people hang out online”, finding the then-recent shift to highly interactive pages had led to the growth of virtual communities. Virtual online communities had existed for almost 25 years, during which membership of face-to-face communities such as neighbourhood and church groups had fallen. “The results suggest that virtual communities may be filling in the social void in conventional communities,” they wrote.

This was forward-looking research. “A main reason why people join a specific virtual community is for information exchange — arguably one of the primary reasons people go online and the original reason for which the Internet was created. However, people also sought friendship and social support in virtual communities.” That was changing, they noted, tentatively suggesting people were “turning the Internet into a social entity, beyond its original informational purposes”.

Revelling in Ravelry With Facebook now claiming more than 1 billion active members and more than 100 million using Instagram every month, those researchers were prophetic. Social media has become a powerful life tool, but it is the social network Ravelry that is the centre of the knitting universe, with 7 million members in mid-2018 and rising.

It was launched in 2007 by Massachusetts-based Jessica ‘Mama Rav’ Forbes, a knitter and blogger, and her husband Casey ‘Code Monkey’ Forbes, a computer programmer who created the site. User-driven and responsive to suggestions, its business is based on numerous small advertisers, donations and low commission pattern sales – a model attractive to many users. Here’s how it describes itself: “Ravelry is a place for knitters, crocheters, designers, spinners, weavers and dyers to keep track of their yarn, tools, project and pattern information, and look to others for ideas and inspiration. The content here is all user-driven; we as a community make the site what it is.”

This bland description understates its impact on knitters’ lives. An information resource, database, and storage facility, it’s also a showcase for creations and a source of inspiration as well as a pattern and yarn sales platform. There is also the opportunity to air opinions on forums 30

and form worldwide social networks. Undoubtedly “membership itself is a valued asset”, as researchers Linda Polin and Sheila Pisa claim. By early 2018 Ravelry’s information for advertisers boasted: “Ravelry’s traffic currently reaches 5-6 million page views per day, or over 2 billion page views per year.”

By early 2018 it had almost 850 groups, the largest with 30,000 members. They’re not only about connecting with those with shared knitting interests – lace knitting, a designer, yarn type, a love of sock knitting, for instance. There are those with a shared purpose – a pool of pattern test knitters; wanting to swap or sell books and patterns – a shared geographic locality, or both as with Aussie Journalers or Knitters of the Australian Breastfeeding Association. As well, there are shared circumstances, including Russian-speaking Australian knitters, fans of particular television programs, those with health issues such as cancer or fibromyalgia, recovering perfectionists and young adults wanting to discuss mental health issues.

Many members belong to a handful of groups; others such as retired Perth hospital pharmacist Helen Lovitt have much bigger networks. An early Ravelry adopter, she signed up as FurrywithRuffles (it’s a cat thing) in early 2008 when it was in beta mode with about 300,000 members. Helen belongs to 123 groups. Some are specifically for Australians, others more niche such as My Knitting Has Cat Hair In It; Bling, for knitters who like yarn with sparkly bits, and two for Doctor Who fans. Helen posted more than 26,000 times in the decade after joining. She moderates WA, the more than 750-member Western Australian group; occasional interlopers from Washington (WA), USA, are sent on their way.

Helen, who migrated to Australia from England and is from a family of crafters, learned about Ravelry from her local knitting group. “I joined the WA group because that’s where all my friends at that time were.” After meeting the group’s moderator at a Perth knitting event and offering help, Helen had the job. From there, her online involvement snowballed – although apart from occasional ventures onto Google Plus, she prefers Ravelry and is not on Facebook or Twitter. The two hours a week on average she spends online with her knitting clubs and friends have brought mates worldwide and, like Julia Billings, she enjoys mixing the virtual with a dose of real- life. Some she has met, even stayed with on interstate and overseas trips.

Despite retirement providing more knitting time, along with cycling with husband Perry, Helen’s knitting yarn stash verges on needing its own postcode. It’s confined (more or less) to Le Cabine Du Craft, a backyard studio, while she uploads each item to Ravelry – 1500 so far and counting. 31

She has joined several ‘de-stashing’ groups, but it doesn’t look promising: Her stash has its own Ravelry ID and belongs to three groups including The Stash Clash.

Roisin also joined Ravelry in 2008. She loved it then and still does. “Obviously there is a strong observational element associated with knitting. I use the search feature a lot.” She even suggested a new feature – specifying exclusions; not lace, for example. That idea has been introduced.

“I love Ravelry, it’s great. You can look at a pattern, look at the yarn people have used and find out whether it is a good choice. There are all these details that you can search for. I save favourite patterns and keep track of things in case I want to knit them, and I put some of my projects up. Last year I participated in knitalongs for the first time. I love reading patterns and working out, how will that fit together? Why did you do it that way? It is not necessarily about making things myself.”

Helen credits Ravelry with introducing her to new designers, competitions and virtual knitting get-togethers. “Through Ravelry I have got into (online craft market) Etsy and places like that that do handmade one-offs and you get into all these other sort of niche things.”

Her enthusiasm for Ravelry-based events meant the 2018 Winter Olympics were a busy time. Not that she was off to South Korea. Instead, Helen and almost 6000 other knitters signed up to Ravelry’s Ravellenic Winter Games 2018, committing to finishing one or more projects between the Games’ official starting time and closing day. It’s a Ravelry tradition, beginning as the Ravelympics with the 2008 Beijing Olympics (a 2012 US Olympic Committee cease and desist letter over the name caused an outcry, but led to the name change). The project can be as small as a pair of mittens – surely not too challenging for a competent knitter such as Helen, who says plenty of knitting a day keeps the arthritis away.

But wait. She also joined Scottish designer Ysolda Teague’s shawl club (yarn and an often challenging pattern for a shawl every three months) and a mystery knitalong with designer Stephen West. She signed up for the speed knitting lunacy of Sock Madness, an international sock knitting competition inspired by a basketball competition. With Ravelry support and survivor groups, it’s “like musical chairs for sock knitters”. Pausing to savour the moment, a gleeful Helen adds that she had also beaten the global waiting list for one of the limited number of memberships in Strickmich! 2018, run by popular German designer Martina Behm (four 32

packages of designs and limited edition yarn a year). Is that all? “I haven’t counted,” says Helen dismissively. “If you enjoy doing it, go for it.”

Getting Noticed As those who use social media to grow their business discover, this can be done outside the constraints – and costs – of the traditional business model. So it’s little surprise that Ravelry can make or break reputations, just as can Facebook or Instagram.

“The ability to build a reputation through a site such as this, without having to rely on being picked up by one of the big knitting publishers is offering many designers the scope to move out of the non-commercial and into the commercial economy,” asserts Queensland researcher Sal Humphreys, who has written extensively about Ravelry. “Patterns are tested by an ever increasing network of users, and the best will float to the top of the lists and create the reputation a designer needs to build up a business.”

Emerging designer Rhiannon has turned to Ravelry to get noticed, despite her enthusiasm for her blog. For her, as for Sydney designer Meg Gadsbey (see page 43), it has opened up opportunities undreamt of in pre-Internet times. “It has made it possible to share designs and they (Ravelry) have changed the way that people can get their patterns out into the world.”

It has also put power into the designers’ hands: “Before Ravelry the only way you could release designs publicly was to submit to a magazine or to a publisher, you could never create your own independent pattern. It was always to impress a publisher, to fulfil someone else’s wants,” says Rhiannon.

“The patterns now are much more wearable because there is guaranteed to be a designer out there doing something that is your style. It is tuned in so much more to style and flexibility.” She also likes the ease of Ravelry. “Anyone can use it, you don’t have to be a whiz at technical things, it is very user-friendly.”

Rhiannon uploaded the first design in her Ravelry shop, Aures Minikins a cap-sleeved child’s T- shirt with lace yoke, back in February 2015. So is a sale still a thrill? “Yes, even now when I get an email notification that I have sold another one.”

Ravelry enables emerging designer Rhiannon Owens to sell her work. Photograph: Bowie Owens.

She also hopes to gain an edge by countering a common shortcoming of buying online. Rhiannon prides herself on after-sales customer service not offered by designers through printed pattern books nor by some online. “I do get a lot of questions from beginner knitters who are stuck and I do try to help them as much as I can. I think a lot of designers put their patterns up and have a, ‘now you are on your own’ attitude.”

The lack of pattern checking is a downside of Ravelry’s open availability, she says. “Ravelry cannot pattern edit, no one is checking the reliability of these patterns. It really has to be on the knitwear designer to provide the customer support and I think that is the thing with Ravelry, I can buy a pattern and there may be a lot of errors in it and it may not be a viable pattern.”

Roisin sees other Ravelry users as a kind of quality control filter, with purchasers able to access errata and make comments warning of mistakes. Also, it’s fair to assume that designers selling many patterns do so partly because they are well written, she believes.

Social media feeds designers’ popularity, she says, making classes with those who teach more sought-after. Class participants are, in turn, likely to become their social media followers. “They become celebrities and then they become drawcards.”

Such networks offer a fantastic market for women, including those at home raising children and running small craft businesses, Roisin believes. “You don’t need to have an actual shop or get the kids dropped off, it’s a good economic outcome that supports people who would find it difficult to make an income in other circumstances.”

Although not a young mum, lifelong knitter Linda Cooper is also tapping these opportunities. It’s difficult to find knitters with a bad word to say about Ravelry, but Linda is one of them. “I am not a big fan of Ravelry. I dislike the fact that there are so many scarves, shawls, mittens – all this stuff that in some ways you don’t need to think about (when knitting it). I read a designer saying, the problem with Ravelry is that everybody is expecting it to be free and if you are adopting a business model for what you are doing, it is an antithesis,” she explains.

Linda Cooper will put her designs on Ravelry despite reservations. Photograph: Peter Cooper.

Not that she is a technophobe. Linda, who’s 63, is a long-time reader of blogs, enjoys joining the conversation and an avid social media user – that’s how she met husband Peter, an IT consultant, in early 2000.

In 2007 they moved from Sydney to bayside Ormiston, 45 minutes’ drive from Brisbane, when Peter’s elderly father became ill. For Linda, a Kiwi who migrated to Australia 20 years ago after a divorce, the move was a wrench. Family and friends are back in Hamilton, New Zealand, where she was a librarian, then owned a children’s bookshop. There are friends in Sydney from her years in publishing and the book trade, including managing the journal Australian Literary Studies. As well, her three children are spread across the globe: son Glenn in Northern Ireland, daughter Abby in New Zealand and daughter Zoe closer to home on the Gold Coast. “I am torn between Australia and New Zealand,” she says.

Like the flightless bird, Linda is now grounded. But the Internet has given her wings. Her virtual community focuses on three closed Facebook groups. There’s the 1200-member Australian knitting community, Good Knitting is US-based with more than 45,000 members and Entwined in Yarn, started in Spain, has about 1000 members which she finds “more cosy, it’s almost a family thing”.

“I do feel isolated and I have to reach out to people. I have Facebook friends from all over the world, we talk on a personal basis on Messenger three to four times a week, there are 13 or 14 like that. It’s good because of being this isolated person living in a 5000-person community in real life, and none of my friends round here are into knitting.”

Recently Linda ditched her work as a freelance editor and, inspired by the “amazing” blog of Scottish knitting designer Kate Davies and with Peter’s help, set up her website lindacooper.com.au Kate began combining her textiles skills and knowledge of history to create online patterns after a stroke at age 36 ended her academic career. “I can relate to her,” says Linda who in November 2017 faced her own life-changing health crisis: a cerebral aneurysm leading to almost five hours on the operating table. After hospital, she opted for a less stressful lifestyle and focusing on what she wanted to do.

In her first post, 6 January 2018, Linda wrote of her longing for the New Zealand landscape and the immigrant’s struggle to belong. Within days she had supportive comments and promises to follow her posts. “It is going to take me a long time to get a following on the website,” she concedes. But that’s her goal – building the kind of supportive community which has helped her and to which she contributes.

The website is a forum for Linda’s writing and love of history (she has a history degree), but also showcases knitted cardigan designs she hopes to sell under her label Mainly Cardigans, along with Peter’s photography. “I have always adapted patterns, done my own patterns, I started reading other knitting designers’ patterns and knitting blogs. I thought, if they can do it so can I. We’re well enough off to be able to do this.”

Yes, she hopes to make money, but admits: “I am a realist. I can make money from it, whether it is going to be a liveable wage I am not sure. It is also about doing what I want to do.”

In their study of virtual crafting communities researchers Theresa Winge and Marybeth Stalp wrote of Ravelry: “The website serves as more than a social media platform for handcrafts as it provides members with a means of commerce, such as selling yarns and patterns.” For Linda 37

that means bowing to the inevitable to fulfil her design ambitions: setting up a Ravelry designer page.

Seeking Virtual Anonymity The online world is about joining in and for those building a business, such as knitting designers, it is about getting noticed. For others however, it’s the opposite. For some such as Sydney-based international IT consultant Bluey Little, uncomfortable knitting in public, the stigma of being a male knitter makes the anonymity of the virtual world hugely attractive.

Bluey enthusiastically “went down the Ravelry rabbit hole” when an American colleague introduced him to it in 2013. “It is Facebook for knitters but it has content as well, really useful patterns and help and an index of support.” More important though, was the anonymity it offered.

It may seem contradictory that Bluey’s profile features a photograph of himself, husband Daniel and seven-year-old daughter Alexandra (conceived by a friend with IVF and they share custody). There are personal revelations, including his childhood secret knitting using string and broken needles rescued from the rubbish because boys weren’t supposed to knit. But telling online friends is very different to face-to-face communication, he explains.

It offers “anonymous knitting in the anonymous closet that is the Internet. You are invisible to the real world. The Internet world is a virtual world. You are in that club, whereas when you are in the real world knitting on your own on a bus or in a cafe you are a peculiar person.”

The too-comfortable lure of that virtual world prompted Bluey to seek out other knitters face- to-face at Knitters’ Guild NSW. “As a non-flamboyant male and as somebody who did not want to be perceived as a sissy because I grew up in a macho farming environment, it was easy to stay invisible in that club online.”

Canberra knitter Stephen Lawton also turned to the virtual world. Keen to connect with other male knitters, in December 2014 he founded the Ravelry group Australian Men Who Knit and Crochet. “I created that Ravelry group just as a way of reaching out to other men knitters. I did not know any. I had occasionally run into a knitting group outside a yarn store so had gone there a few times. It was very female dominated, lots of talk of husbands or babies and I stuck out like a sore thumb.” 38

Stephen, who had learned crochet as well as knitting from his mum, found a Canberra crochet group on Facebook so he went to a couple of meetings. “But every time people posted they always said, ‘hello ladies’. As a white middle-class male you experience all this privilege in the rest of my life, and here I was protesting about this.”

The response to his Ravelry group, with only about 40 members by early 2018 and no recent posts, was disappointing. Stephen turned again to social media, this time looking to Facebook, inspired by the US 1500-member group Men Who Knit. By early 2018 his closed group Australian Men Who Knit and Crochet had an active membership of more than 170, regularly posting photographs of completed and in-progress garments and charity projects such as cute toys for children in Syria, as well as requests for help. The group is for “Australian men & their supporters who knit & crochet” but most members and posters are male, with profile photographs and apparently posting under their real names. There is plenty of encouragement.

“Once I got it into my head that it is not just pictures of cats or people falling over and hurting themselves, then I had to change my thinking about Facebook. It was not just posting pictures of you having a fab time or the meal you were eating, but a way of connecting with people who knit,” says Stephen.

His Ravelry group is the only one for Australian male knitters, but there are more than 100 for or about men, a supportive global community, regardless of location. The largest, Knitting for Boys, had almost 10,000 members in early 2018 but most posts were by women, while in the 3500-member Men Who Knit for “fellows who love the fibers”, it’s all about male knitters. Discussion threads include a fundraiser for a Men’s Knitting Retreat scholarship and postings about the vexed issue of knitting in public.

Seventeen groups are specifically for gay men. They range from the craft-focused, such as Gay Men Stitch, Too! and LA Crochet and Knit Club for Men, to those with an extra agenda. Knitting Singles is for “men seeking men who knit”. Nekkid Knitters knit in the nude and discussion threads include a knitted jockstrap swap.

Some women also relish virtual anonymity. Susan Campbell-Wright posts frequently on Facebook, Instagram and occasionally Twitter as Phyllis Dare. A solitary person, particularly when working on a creative project, she enjoys the communal aspect, seeing others’ creations. 39

However: “I use a pseudonym because my siblings would be saying, ‘Oh my God what is Susan doing now?’. They think I should be doing sensible things.”

The Internet’s early years brought Alice Springs-based Peter Jobson international connections with whom he remains close. Taught to knit by his mother in the early 1970s when he was aged about eight, he still has his first project, a stocking stitch square to cover his hot water bottle. He’s using it to beat the chill on cold Alice Springs nights, cat on one side of the bed, hot water bottle on the other. It was when the Internet began making inroads into our daily lives, that his knitting went global.

“It took off about 1990, I found university exams very stressful, this was a break for me and I really got into it,” he recalls. “I made friends, have given talks, designed my own patterns. It’s a big difference from when I first started.”

Although not anonymous, Peter was in a small minority and seeking connection with those sharing his interest. Back then, the number of knitters using the Internet was small, the number of male knitters even smaller. He was the only man in most of his groups. “It used to (appear to) be that I was the only man knitting for the entire continent and that obviously wasn’t true; there were plenty of guys that had been knitting for centuries and just did their own thing.”

Peter became involved in international e-groups, Yahoo! groups and early online knitting collectives such as The Knit List. “That’s how I got to meet a lot of famous knitting people who are now my Facebook friends.” He still visits friends from his Yahoo! group in their home countries. He recalls with pleasure and amazement coming home one evening after the death of his beloved mother to find a bouquet from knitting friends in the US on his Uralla doorstep. Even when Ravelry emerged that group remained. “It never morphed into a Ravelry group because you cannot control who becomes a member (on Ravelry). We are still friends, with regular meet ups at such venues as the annual Madrona Fibre Festival outside of Seattle.

“There have been amazing things in the knitting community that I have been a part of, people’s houses burning down and overnight they have a stash because people just donate; blankets for someone who has been diagnosed with cancer.”

Logging on to Learn The Internet is, of course, about more than selling and support. The growth in its use for educational and self-improvement purposes is staggering. In 2017 the total number of MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) students was estimated at 81 million with 23 million new students signing up that year. TED talks proclaimed their billionth video view in 2012 and by 2015 Head of TED, Chris Anderson, put views at 1.2 billion a year. So it’s little surprise knitters are going to online sites, particularly Ravelry and YouTube, for tuition and inspiration.

A 2010 survey of Ravelry by US researchers found more than 51 per cent learned more about their craft from it than from real life – just 22.5 per cent said real life. And 75.4 per cent said they turned first to Ravelry when they had a project problem. The next most popular answer, face-to-face with other crafters, scored 12.3 per cent.

“You can share ideas and patterns with people all over the world,” says Blue Mountains knitter Luke Shilson-Hughes. “The project functionality allows you to see how a pattern looks with different yarns, or if you have a yarn in your stash you can see what other people have done with it. You find so much inspiration in what other people are doing.”

The mutual knitting support of Ruth Oakden’s Facebook group reminds her of help she received as a teenager from the two sisters who owned her local wool shop. “At high school I knitted and sold baby clothes and dolls clothes, and benefited from the advice and support provided by the shop owners and other customers. I sold some of my work in the shop.”

There is extensive research into knitters and crafters online which bears this out. Minna Haveri believes the Internet has revolutionised learning of inherited handicraft skills traditionally passed down through the generations in the home. “Instructions and patterns can be found on the Internet, and cultural influences do not follow national borders. Partly caused by the new communication strategies of the social media on the Internet, the status of hobbyist handicrafts has changed.”

Unlike some groups such as Australasian Ravelry group Over the Fence, for members “to gather to chit, to chat and to blather on without disturbing the serious knitters”, Ruth’s group is serious about its knitting mission. “We are very strict in our group that it is a knitting group, it is not a place where you come to talk about your personal life – but obviously there is some talk like that,” she says. 41

The group has a strict no politics rule, she emphasises. So, for example, when conversations about pink pussyhats took a turn away from the technicalities of knitting to the anti-US president Donald Trump views behind their rationale, the admin team “pulled the pin on it”.

“That does not appeal to some people who object to what they consider to be censorship of their free speech,” Ruth concedes.

YouTube is a valuable source of lessons for many knitters, both beginners and those wanting advanced tutorials. Designer Meg Gadsbey (see page 43) turned to it when returning to the craft she learned from her mother and grandmothers as a child. “I learned from online, Ravelry for patterns and YouTube for videos on techniques.”

Stephen Lawton’s mum taught him to knit while he was at primary school. But almost four decades later it was the Internet that was his real teacher. Fed up with the quality of woollen socks he was buying, he picked up a pair of knitting needles and turned to YouTube to learn how to make them, two at a time, on two needles. “They worked out fine.” Buoyed by that success he began mastering other sock-related techniques with the aid of YouTube.

Much of this online tuition is driven by women. They create tutorials, upload pictures of their work and help others through forums. It’s empowering, their craft skills gaining visibility and recognition. Feminist researcher Beth Pentney, who has written about redeploying knitting for feminist goals, says it’s fair to assume “that most knitting-related Internet resources are written by and for women”.

Copying, but is it Right? Ownership of those resources can, however, be problematic. The Internet makes coming to grips with copyright law more important for the layperson yet more complex. There is a consistent theme to research: copyright law complexities make it difficult even for those keen to do ‘the right thing’ to know what that is.

Knitters have long shared patterns, writing them out, photocopying and later scanning, with many demonstrating little understanding of the laws of copyright. Even on Ravelry, where free downloads are clearly marked and prices and payment facilities are provided, there are 42

confusions. If a pattern is free is it okay to knit it for charity or for commercial purposes? Is it okay for a talented knitter to reproduce a design from photographs?

Sal Humphreys notes: “Interestingly charity knitting raises questions on the intellectual property front, as pattern designers wrestle with creating licenses that are flexible enough to restrain people from mass production commercial use of their patterns but allow them to be used for charity production and small-scale (craft market), commercial production.”

For many young Internet users the boundaries are blurred. File sharing sites such as Pirate Bay and its offshoots offer a platform for the anti-copyright movement. Despite a crackdown, numerous Australians do not pay for movies, music and television shows, with Australia having one of the world’s highest rates of illegal downloading. For knitting designers this is complicated by some knitters’ expectations that patterns should be free. Sal Humphreys notes that many designers on Ravelry do offer some free – “a marketing ploy to enhance their reputation”.

However, encouraging knitters to follow a designer by offering freebies doesn’t necessarily work that way, Meg believes. “From a knitter’s perspective – and this is coming from me as a knitter before I got into designing – the perception of free knitting patterns is very interesting. But I have noticed, I put out a pattern for free when I first released it, the people interested in it are not necessarily the people who then follow your work later on.

“A lot of people think that putting out free content that will convert to your happy customer later on. For me, I have not seen this and I have not seen it with other designers – it does not work for them. If you have shown that you are happy to work for free then that’s how people will take you.

“You have to be very careful and considered about when and why you put content out for free,” says Meg. “A lot of designers work for a yarn company, the yarn company pays and then distributes their work for free.” Knitters see that free pattern and think the designer has worked for no pay.

Rhiannon makes her simplest patterns free on her blog. But her life is busy, including with unpaid work: she home-schools Amelia and volunteers with her Jehovah’s Witness church. Understandably she wants to be paid for her more complex designs, yet she knows some knitters and crocheters expect not to. “In my experience knitters are the happiest to pay for a pattern, 43

crocheters expect a pattern to be free,” she says. Discussions about this focus on crochet being quicker to design than knitting, and she believes many knitters have less confidence about trying out a design for themselves. “But I’ve never had anyone ask for patterns for free.”

Roisin has bought patterns from Ravelry and does not resent paying: “I think it’s excellent and I’m happy to support that. I think designing patterns is really hard.”

Casey Fiesler has written about copyright law in online creative communities and says the Internet means anyone can be a publisher in seconds. “The way we engage with copyrighted material has completely changed thanks to the Internet and digital technology”. Many people break the law without realising it.

She notes remixing – “using the pre-existing content to make something new” – is common. This is so for knitters who modify patterns or reproduce them from photographs.

New approaches to intellectual property may be needed, Sal Humphreys has suggested. She has warned copyright and intellectual property are still relevant as regulation mechanisms, but there is a problem if most people don’t understand them. The Internet, Ravelry in particular, offers designers opportunities to make a living from their work, but the possibilities for doing so are undermined by expectations online content is free for the taking.

Upside Downside The Internet and social media have other downsides too and knitters, as with all users, can also fall victim to these: trolls, bullying and unrealistic expectations. Businesses from tiny home- based start-ups to global corporates harness social media’s power as a marketing tool, with knitting-related businesses no exception. Dealing with the negative aspects go with the territory.

Jac Fink arrived on Instagram just two years after it began, launching her business in April 2012. She hired a marketing company to create professional branding for what would become her extreme knitting business, Little Dandelion. “I asked them to tell me what to do and I will do it.” When they recommended social media she began teaching herself. Friends took professional images of her work. “I started putting them out to the world.”

While it took a couple of years to kick in, Jac now has 72,000 Instagram followers at #Jacquifink and 12,000 Facebook followers, her Instagram posts automatically forwarding to Facebook. “Social media has been very important to me,” she says.

“I have really had to learn as I go along. I have had to sit back and see how other people link with their followers, how my followers interact with me.” This has helped build her business’s online profile, but has not necessarily translated into sales. “What I have noticed about my feed is that they are not really my customers. They use my feed as inspiration in their own work.”

Boundaries have been a key lesson. “You will never see my family on the feed, they (followers) will just turn off; they just want the knitting.” Even a hint of politics is off-limits. She was taken aback at the negative comments after posting pictures of pink pussy hats knitted by a young New York friend with Jac’s yarn in the lead-up to the anti-Trump women’s marches in January 2017. Queensland designer Loani Prior faces the same negative response (see page 32).

Jac Fink manipulates the giant needles at one of her Sydney extreme knitting workshops. Photograph: Aimee Thompson.

“I got a comment from someone that said, ‘What a shame you had to go and make your page political. Goodbye.’ A different woman wrote: ‘I come to pages like this to escape the nonsense 45

in the outside world. I don’t want to be confronted with it here.’ That was one of the more constructive comments,” says Jac with a grimace.

Julia Billings also knows the potential downsides of revealing too much online and of the importance of face-to-face contact. “I feel relieved when people who have read my blog say, ‘Oh you are just like you are in real life’. People have said to me that they have met people who have blogs and present an image online and then you feel there is a real disconnect.”

Image-based social media such as Instagram can create a kind of celebrity and Julia admits to being “completely star-struck” by some of the well-known people she follows when she meets them. “And that washes away and they become friends and just like a real person.”

There is a risk that some users want to portray the image of a perfect life. “It conveys this schism, by not sharing what you are but only what you want to be, and there is huge potential for that on Instagram.”

Separate feeds are one solution. “Some people decide to have one Instagram feed that is only business. Other people combine business and self and I try to do that; though sometimes I post a bit too much personal stuff like travel, and some people unfollow me if they are only interested in the business,” says Julia.

Jac limits self-promotion and personal photos on her feed. It’s a compilation of professional shots of her work – garments and throws in beautifully styled settings, contextual shots such as a merino ram, knitting close-ups and swatches, her workshops and her art installations, including videos of her creating them.

“I put pictures of myself doing workshops. But it’s not about me, it’s about the work. I think social media allows people to make all sorts of assumptions about what type of person you are. I have noticed a lot of comments like, ‘You are not like I thought you were’.

“The problem with social media is that everything just looks tickety-boo from the outside. People probably think I’m extremely successful, they don’t see the hard work that goes on.” She compares herself to a duck on a pond, legs paddling madly beneath the surface. But in the online world, only the image of that serene, gliding duck is visible.

Further Reading Fiesler, C 2013, ‘The chilling tale of copyright law in online creative communities’, XRDS, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 26-29. Gauntlett, D 2011, Making Is connecting, Polity Press, Cambridge, UK. https://www.ravelry.com Kraut, RE & Resnick, P (eds) 2012, Building successful online communities, The MIT Press, Cambridge.

Chapter ends. Sidebars to be inserted throughout chapter at design stage follow. 47

Designs on Global Success

Sydney designer Meg Gadsbey wears the elegant Hitchhiker shawl designed by Martina Behm of Germany. Photograph supplied by Meg Gadsbey.

Sydney-based Meg Gadsbey operates her design business from the one-bedroom flat she shares with husband Robbie in the Sydney suburb of Darlinghurst. “We have high ceilings – you can stack things vertically,” she laughs. Yet her small-scale business, made possible by the Internet, has attracted knitters from around the world who love her designs.

“Without Ravelry I would not be doing what I am doing right now,” she says emphatically. “It just would not have been possible to have enough people in an area that would like my patterns and want to buy my patterns.” Ravelry means she can sell her patterns to a global market – something that pre-Internet would have required publishing a hardcopy book or leaflets, or magazine commissions.”

Meg also dyes yarn at home and selling it through Etsy online craft market was her first venture into online sales. “I did a lot of drawing and pastel work but I was hitting a bit of a brick wall with producing anything that way, so I moved into yarn dying as a way of playing with nice colours. 48

Someone said, ‘Why don’t you make up something for your own yarn’. That’s how I moved into designing.”

Australian-born Meg has solid knitting credentials; her parents, who moved to Australia before she was born, are Scottish and the family moved back to Scotland when she was 13. She lived there until she was in her 30s, but only in 2011, when eyelash yarn scarves were having their fashion moment, did she resume the craft she learned as a child.

Discovering the innovative designs of the flamboyant Stephen West – “so fun to knit” – ended her bewilderment over why so many knitters were knitting so many shawls. Now she gets it: all 30 designs in her pattern store are either shawls, scarves or neck cowls and her most popular, Sailing and Midnight in Sydney, are both shawls. Each is accompanied by more than 150 pictures of members’ versions, so presumably hundreds more have knitted them without posting the results.

Most buyers are from the US: “If I was just trying to sell patterns from within Australia the income would be tiny. Because it is global my income from pattern sales is a lot larger.” Enough to live on one day? “I would hope so, but I am quite realistic and I am not sure if that would ever happen to me.”

Meg opened her Meg Gadsbey Designs Ravelry pattern store in 2014 and drives traffic to it with social media, particularly her 2000-follower Instagram account. She doesn’t tweet, but her Instagram posts are reposted on Facebook. Her Instagram homepage is a sweet mix of her yarns and designs, moody Sydney shots, flowers and gardens and scene setters such as knitting books and a koala on a Christmas tree. A notable absentee: Meg herself. “I am kind of introverted,” she admits.

Meg knows some designers, particularly high-profile US designers and some leading UK figures such as Kaffe Fassett have become the rock stars of the knitting world. But for her the anonymity of the online world is attractive: “I’m not very keen on having myself out there, I am much more comfortable putting my work out there to be viewed and assessed on its own merit.”

She has fun with Instagram though, enjoying posting pictures for her followers. “I use it as a kind of inspirational place where I look for new things and put up my own little photos as well.” She occasionally uses Pinterest for design inspiration and stitch patterns. 49

Meg also has a 300-member Ravelry group, including her design followers and test knitters. She introduces new designs to the group and offers knitalongs and giveaways. She’s considering a newsletter – a time-consuming promotion tool used by many designers but which, thanks to the Internet, is straightforward and free.

Free is also what some knitters expect of online patterns. Meg’s are priced at US $4-$6 each but she offers a discount, usually 20 per cent, for three to five days after a new release to build interest. She has not faced pressure to give her designs away.

“I think I have been pretty lucky with the people that follow me and are interested in what I am putting out. They seem to be quite happy and supportive to pay $US6 for a knitting pattern. I have never had any contact with someone who has said, ‘you are charging too much’ or ‘this should be free’. I have been kind of waiting for it and looking out for it, but I have not had anything negative that way. I have read a lot of Ravelry forums where there has been that issue raised time and time again about the world of knitting patterns.

“I think what it is, is that I priced it in the middle of the worth of a pattern on Ravelry. The temptation as a new designer is to put a low price on it because you are new and you think, I haven’t got the skills, but I think (the best decision is) if you go in at a price that the market is okay with.”

With no formal art background Meg began designing as a sideline. Her growing success enabled a 50:50 time split between accounts and administration work and her designing and dyeing. “But now it is definitely more a design focus with the other job a means to an end. It’s great because it is exciting and I can work on design, but it is also scary because it is the unknown, you never know what is going to happen in six months’ time.” 50

Tea and Company

Tea cosy queen Loani Prior relaxes with a few of her colourful, favourite things. Photograph: Mark Crocker.

Social media rewards those with the time and patience to feed its voracious appetite, but it can bite the hand that feeds. Loani Prior learned this the hard way. When politics made an appearance on her Facebook page her 4500 Facebook friends and followers weren’t happy. Sharing US First Lady Michelle Obama’s October 2016 headline-grabbing speech following allegations of sexual harassment by President Donald Trump hardly seemed subversive. So the response took Loani by surprise. “The heat began. And the venom. And the ‘unfriending’. It was a reminder about a very considered decision I had made in the early days not to express my opinions on anything.”

The Sunshine Coast-based knitting designer and teacher renowned for her quirky tea cosy designs quickly realised her online friends and followers knew what they wanted from her and 51

she had failed to deliver. “My page is about funny tea cosies and knitting and cats. It’s why people sign up. I want to honour that.”

Since then she has respected those invisible boundaries. Featuring prominently along with Loani, who often sports cat’s-eye spectacles, are “the Naughties” (cats Bruce and Purl) and “the Bloke”, her marine scientist husband Julian Pepperell. Says Loani: “We need places to go we know will make us smile, a respite from the horrors of the big bad world. I love that I can provide that.”

Facebook stars “the Naughties”: Purl (left, with knitted flowers) and Bruce, keeping cosy. Photographs: Loani Prior.

This social media etiquette was news to the self-described Queen of the Tea Cosies when, in 2008, she was about to convert her quirky hobby into what would become a bestselling book – first in a series of four. Back then she had only a blog with fewer than 100 followers and social media was a foreign country.

North Queensland-born Loani trained as a classical musician at Brisbane’s Conservatorium of Music, then taught viola and violin before moving to arts administration and event management. She had knitted on and off since being taught by a neighbour in Papua New Guinea where she grew up (Loani is a Papuan name which her mum told her means beautiful flower). But it fell victim to her busy working life until 2001 when Julian, then the new bloke, was taking her to Sydney to meet his family en masse for Christmas.

She wanted to make a good impression. “I had been used to making silly crafty things for everyone at family events, gifted all at once around the dining table,” Loani recalls. Those had included themed, covered coat hangers and garish cushion covers. “Tea cosies seemed a natural progression.” So she made one for everyone – a dozen, each different, complete with teapots and matching egg cosies on Bunnikin egg cups. 52

“There was an urge to keep making them. Tea cosies are funny even when they are not meant to be funny. It was a natural comedic act that sated my need to make stuff and to show it off. So I wrung it dry.”

By 2007 Loani had eight tea cosy designs and told sceptical Julian she was phoning a publisher. “My luckiest stars all lined up at once. I made four phone calls to publishers of illustrated books here in Australia and on the fourth phone call there was the friendly voice of a managing editor and she was a knitter. It sounded like a fun idea to her and within a month I had signed on the dotted line.”

Then came the less fun part – the need to “get technical … she said she wanted twenty-four tea cosies and I said, ‘sure’. Then I got off the phone and thought, twenty-four!”

Loani knew nothing of what she calls “the knitting world”, nor the online knitting community. “I had been operating in isolation. I didn’t know about Ravelry or knitting associations or beautiful brands of yarn or independent wool stores or knitting celebrities or … well I didn’t know anything about anything. Which is probably just as well. I might not have dipped my toe with all that talent already out there.”

Covering the subject – three of Loani Prior’s four bestselling tea cosy pattern books. Photographs: Jared Fowler (left and centre) and Mark Crocker.

Wild Tea Cosies sold 5000 copies in three months, then another 5000 “really quickly” and 30,000 in total. By the second book (Really Wild Tea Cosies, translations of which include Estonian, Finnish and Dutch) Loani was being searched for online, thanks to her publisher’s marketing and her appearances at craft fairs across Australia. So she arrived on Facebook. She’s a natural.

“For my purposes social media needs to be just that – social, engaging, a conversation,” she says. “As much as I share my own nutty knitting I devour all it has to offer to feed my own arty, crafty interests. Facebook, the blog and more recently Instagram have been great for me.”

Ideas bred ideas and two more tea cosy books followed. It wasn’t planned. “I’m not an artist. I’m a funny knitter. But I will own a penchant for good design. I was bound by the shape of the teapot when it occurred to me that I might leave that shape – a lightbulb came on and there was a great leap forward in ideas.” Creating her sculptural ideas meant a great deal of trial and error and she generously shares the results at her Australia-wide workshops.

Wild and wilder – colourful tea cosies on display at a Loani Prior workshop. Photograph: Loani Prior.

Loani uses social media to promote these workshops, run from her home and through yarn stores since that first book, teaching others to tap into their wild side through tea cosy design. More recently she expanded to teaching double knitting (her gorgeous double knit baby blankets are regular stars of her Facebook page) and, since she reached tea cosy overload in 2015, flower designs.

A Loani Prior floral feast – knitted of course. Photograph: Mark Crocker.

Thanks to Facebook the workshops sell out, often to repeat attenders. Participants’ ages belie the myth that older women are not Internet savvy. “Here’s my demographic: sometimes people have to cancel because their hip replacement came up,” Loani laughs. “The youngest has been about forty.”

There’s excitement on her Facebook page when a new workshop is announced. Previous participants generate a buzz and keep book sales ticking over. In mid-May 2017, for example, Loani’s announcement of a double knitting tea cosy workshop in Melbourne the following month – two for the price of one – led to a Facebook count down as places were snapped up.

So well-known did Loani’s crazy tea cosies and her social media profile make her that when her husband’s book was shortlisted for a Queensland Premier’s Literary Award in 2010, the Premier recognised her at an awards event. “(Then-Premier) Anna Bligh said she knew my books and she knitted in the back of the Premier’s car.”

With strong book sales, a website directing people to her Facebook pages and eager Facebook and Instagram followers, Loani is a social media success story. She also uses the Internet to sell her work: “I sell some patterns on (online craft market) Etsy. But 4500 friends and followers on Facebook is not enough. You need 400,000 to make a living.” The Internet is a mixed blessing, she realises. “Social media is really good on one hand, but also so much is available online for free.” 56

Virtual Crossing

Holland Road Yarn Company owner Tash Barneveld in her Wellington store. Photograph: Sue Green.

Sail across the 2000 km Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand – crossing The Ditch, as it’s known – and spend several days on the ocean. Fly and it’s almost four hours in the air. But for Tash Barneveld’s customers The Ditch is irrelevant. The Internet has enabled small businesses in isolated countries such as New Zealand to flourish, thanks to an international customer base.

Tash’s small, colourful yarn store in Wellington, New Zealand, has none of the hallmarks of a global enterprise. Welcoming and buzzing with creativity, Holland Road Yarn Company’s shelves are packed with New Zealand yarns, including by talented independent dyers, plus on-trend overseas brands. Its stock, knowledgeable staff, classes and knitting couch with free Wi-Fi make it a mecca for Wellington knitters, visitors from around New Zealand and for crafty tourists.

But they are only part of its mainstay; Tash estimates up to 25 per cent of her business is done online with about half of that – some weeks much more – from Australia. “I don’t think I would have a business if it was not for social media. Particularly Ravelry to start with – I just don’t know how I would have reached people, particularly as a bootstrap start-up with no money.”

Many are regular customers, made to feel part of the store community by the friendly customer service, active social media presence and events such as online knit and crochetalongs. In Wellington, Sydney, Outer Mongolia? Doesn’t matter. Knitters can join in, posting their progress, supporting each other and summoning staff help with the click of a mouse.

“I think even our Australian customers feel like our local regulars. That’s the thing I like about our online presence is that my Auckland customers and my Christchurch customers and my Australian customers all feel like regulars,” says Tash. “They are usually people who will interact with us on social media as well, so we hold conversations with them.”

Tash is descended from knitting royalty. Her grandmother, internationally renowned lace knitter Margaret Stove, has her own yarn line, taught workshops around the world and published numerous lace knitting texts and pattern books. But royal lineage doesn’t keep a business afloat. For that she has social media and her user-friendly website.

Social media not only drives customers to the online store and creates a sense of community. “It makes us sustainable because we can advertise for very little,” Tash explains. “It’s a time cost rather than a financial cost. I think, to use a terrible jargony word, the pipeline for using social media to advertise is much more streamlined than using print advertising. With print advertising you are relying on customers to look you up and come to the shop whereas (on) Facebook and Twitter, you click on something and it is there in front of you.”

This is the result of hard work and a strategy which began well before the store, named for Tash’s Dutch parentage, opened in February 2011. “I started the online shop about a year before when I first started dying yarn,” recalls Tash, who has her own popular yarn line, Knitsch.

“I had Australian customers for Knitsch. Some stumbled on it, but from the beginning it was probably most thanks to Ravelry because that was where I first got into the wider knitting community, and once you go on Ravelry people start finding new things. Ravelry was really the centre of the knitting world.” 58

Tash no longer works on the shop floor but does her own social media. She was on Twitter during her year as a home-based yarn dyer. “I have always found that, working mostly on my own, it was a nice way of feeling like I was part of a community.” On Facebook with 3000 followers, she feels the momentum shifting to Instagram (1700 and growing). “Facebook is getting too busy and too full. Instagram is going the same way but (on Facebook) there is so little control over what you can see on your feed. It’s still important but I think the visual, clean nature of Instagram is much more appealing to people.”

Tash, beating the Wellington chill in Sherilyn, a Ysolda Teague-designed scarf in rich burgundy Blue Sky alpaca, returned there from London in late 2009 intent on opening a yarn store. “There were not any good yarn shops in Wellington. I worked at Socktopus in London. It was this revelation of colour and yarn. Socktopus had this amazing community and beautiful yarn and I thought, this is what I could go home and do.”

She began dyeing almost immediately, helped by her aunt Kristine Sullivan from whom she took over the Margaret Stove range, and developing Knitsch. Selling at local craft markets built her customer base and in 2011 she opened her first store in trendy, villagey Petone, across the harbour from Wellington. “Half the stock was Knitsch when I opened; I opened with hardly any money.”

Tash is also interested in web design, helping out at Wellington’s annual Webstock web design conference. So the online store was crucial. “I believe very strongly in good usability on our website. It is simple and easy to use, and generates as few questions as possible.” In early 2017 she upgraded, with features including remaining stock levels for each yarn and a free yet labour- intensive ball winding service for yarns sold in skeins.

The Wellington store opened in early 2014 and in October 2015 Tash closed in Petone to focus on it and her online business. Growth meant she could stock sought-after international yarns – Brooklyn Tweed, Quince & Co, Wollmeise – drawing both bricks and mortar and online customers “They have such a great social media presence. There is definitely an element of people wanting the yarn of the names that they see on Instagram and Facebook all the time.”

There’s a lively Holland Road Ravelry group packed with free and to-purchase pattern recommendations and many in-store sample garments are made from Ravelry patterns. “There 59

is definitely a thing where people will look through a pattern book and go, ‘I only like two patterns so I will go and buy them on Ravelry’.”

Tash also stocks the new breed of on-trend knitting magazines – Pom Pom, Laine, Making – which sell out fast. Yes, despite the ubiquity of Ravelry and its free pattern resources customers still want hard copy. “It’s much more than just a pattern book,” Tash emphasises. “When you look through it (you think), I want to live in it. I know my life is never going to be like that. It’s a different kind of calm and meditation than making something.”

She notes that enthusiasm deriving from their “beautiful and aspirational” social media presence. “It’s a great example of social media creating a culture around a product.”

Thinking about that influence brings Tash to its “other side; that kind of competitive, comparative side of it which can be kind of tricky to navigate sometimes. I don’t get a lot of negative feedback online but it is quite difficult. I would not want people to look at what we’re doing and feel inferior – for example, not being able to get things online.”

She cites her indie shelf as an example. It features yarn by a New Zealand dyer, changing monthly and sold on commission so problematic to sell online. Also her stockist agreement for Wollmeise yarns covers only the bricks and mortar store. “There is an element of desperation when you put stuff up online that they cannot access easily.”

For some international customers buying from far-away New Zealand comes with novelty value and bragging rights. Tash wants to foster attachment to her store, but that also raises concerns about supplying too much personal information. “I have a real conflict about whether I put photos of (toddler son) Elliott up. I am like the builder whose house is never finished; he is rarely wearing anything handknitted because he is growing out of everything and they get stuck in the laundry basket.

“I don’t have this calm, collected, beautiful life at home. We have this messy, disorganised life. I think that would be a disservice to people to say that we had this beautiful life, shop, baby,” says Tash, aware issues can arise when a customer perceives a disconnect between the virtual and the real. “It’s amazing how vested people are in the personality they idolise and what happens when they don’t always meet their expectations.” 60

Chapter 2 Bombs Away

“The bottom line is that yarn bombing is a covert adrenaline rush that’s tremendous fun. Although it’s against the law, we never do any permanent damage and our creative and quirky endeavours are almost always met with amusement and delight.” Investigative journalist Scout Davies in Mad Men, Bad Girls and the Guerilla Knitters Institute

The fictional Scout Davies is clear on why she is out, incognito, stitching pieces of knitting on to public property at midnight. But Melbourne knitter Susan Campbell-Wright isn’t entirely sure about the point of yarn bombing – and she’s doing it too. She isn’t the only one wondering why. As they stitch their colourful knitted and crocheted covers over tree trunks and bike racks, street poles and handrails, yarn bombers – especially those operating in daylight – inevitably face questions and criticism from some passers-by appalled at what they see as a waste of yarn, time and energy.

“I don’t know what the point of it is,” hesitates Susan, for whom yarn bombing is decorative rather than political. Pressed on this, she adds: “I think when I first started the point of it was, you were putting it out there, which I would never do. To put something out there and stand back and say, ‘I did that’.”

“You always get people who say, ‘you have wasted that yarn, all that time, you should be volunteering and making things for homeless people’. We say, ‘we do, and this is our personal expression’. People think it’s a sinful waste putting that yarn on that tree. But you might get 100 smiles for everyone who says that is a waste of resources.”

In their ground-breaking 2009 book Yarn Bombing Mandy Moore and Leanne Prain wrote: “Yarn bombing can be political, it can be heart-warming, it can be funny. Most of all, yarn graffiti is unexpected, and it resonates with almost everyone who encounters it, crafters and non-crafters alike.”

Fun, making others happy and brightening urban streetscapes are an important motivation for many. Hobart’s unpopular $35,000 metal Christmas tree was yarn bombed in December 2016; 62

in 2013 a bus stop in Albany, Western Australia, was bedecked by “the Purley Queens”; in 2014 HMAS Otway in Holbrook, New South Wales, was transformed into a yellow submarine with 2500 squares sourced from around the world. To welcome the Year of the Dog and celebrate Melbourne’s 24-hour White Night festival in February 2018 knitted and crocheted dogs appeared for just a day on downtown anti-terrorism bollards.

These Australian projects are part of a worldwide movement driven by social media. Simply not feasible in the days of snail mail and faxes, yarn bombing has now reached even the New Mexico desert, a jacaranda tree outside an AIDS centre trust in Durban, South Africa, the Great Wall of China, and Kolkata rickshaws (to bring attention to the significance of India’s weavers, the two men involved told journalists). After Mandy and Leanne published their book, Leanne told The New York Times she was receiving emails from yarn bombers as far away as Russia, Morocco and Iran.

Yarn bombing found its way into Australian crime fiction, with Scout Davies unleashed by Byron Bay novelist Maggie Groff in her debut crime novel, Mad Men, Bad Girls and the Guerilla Knitters Institute in 2012. Like many in real life, Scout and the four other members of her “intrepid band” began by attaching knitted flowers to bushes and public benches. They then moved on to riskier and more purposeful ventures, with black-clad group members popping colourful windscreen wiper covers onto local police cars at midnight. Says group member Bodkin: “This is about creating fun, biting our thumbs at the establishment, having an adrenaline rush.”

Susan gave up playing in an orchestra while a student in the late 1970s because she found the performer’s life so stressful. Yet she doesn’t flinch from standing up a ladder stitching knitted covers onto tree trunks, despite occasional heckling by an unsympathetic audience. Having “bombed” a tree in Melbourne’s annual City Square yarn bombing since 2013, she has discovered “it is really fun. The first few times that was the thrill of knowing it’s mine and people are out there looking at it. Now, not so much that, but it is still interesting and fun.”

Susan Campbell-Wright’s Werribee yarn bombing, left; City Square 2015 by Susan Campbell-Wright with Karen Denney. Photographs: Susan Campbell-Wright.

Sydney yarn bomber Alison Ayers also fields such criticisms and smart remarks about cold trees. For her, too, smiles were an initial motivator. But as with many yarn bombers, that has since changed. “A lot of people say yarn bombing is a response to urban ugliness but it just made me smile. It is fun, cheerful. Originally, for me, it was just happy colours and stripes.” Her first project, yarn bombing a tree outside her then-home opposite a pub in Sydney’s Rozelle, drew such a positive response – watched by Alison and husband Phillip from their balcony – that she was encouraged to continue. “Local kids would insist on walking the long way to school, past the ‘rainbow-tree house’.” Even her 90-year-old mother joined in – like Alison, she has her own Instagram hashtag #motherofallknitters.

Even knitters who usually make more traditional products or attempt difficult projects only in the privacy of their own home occasionally fall prey to the lure of yarn bombing. White haired Melbourne retiree and Handknitters Guild member Marilyn Healy, an expert knitter, made a series of innovative hats. She then could not resist trying them on the bronze heads of the sculpture Three Businessmen Who Brought Their Own Lunch at the corner of downtown Swanston Street and photographing them – in broad daylight. “Just for fun,” she says. “It was quite a lot of fun taking those photos!”

Men in hats – just for fun – on the popular bronze sculpture in Melbourne’s Swanston Street. Photographs (and knitting): Marilyn Healy.

Do Girls Just Want to Have Fun? Ballarat-based psychologist Karen Corrie is another who joined the City Square yarn bombing for fun, having seen pictures on Facebook and the real thing in the streets. “It’s about beautifying the environment and cheering myself up and cheering up other people,” she explains. As well as collaborating on large projects such as a City Square tree, she finds her own ways of spreading the smiles. For instance, she plans giant knitted leaves to turn the traffic lights at the top of her Ballarat street into a flower. “I just think that would be so fun to see a giant flower at the end of the street. But I think the council would cut it down.”

Karen Corrie dressing her City Square tree, 2015. Photograph supplied by Karen Corrie. 65

As Mandy and Leanne pointed out, enjoyment and bringing smiles are not the only impetus for bombing. It challenges social conventions and preconceptions about what the craft can do, requires little planning, is a fun way to experiment, is portable, provides opportunities for self- expression, allows “taking back the knit” – that is, using it for other than domestic purposes – and inspires joy and surprise.

“The juxtaposition of yarn and graffiti is humorous to some artists, while others see it as a more serious act that builds on a long-standing practice of renegade street art,” they wrote. “Others do it to escape the boredom of tedious day jobs. Some want to liberate the needle arts from their long-held association with utilitarian purposes.”

Whether it’s about making a political point, beautifying a sterile urban landscape and protesting ugly development, personal creativity, growing community or taking knitting into the public arena to raise its profile, pondering their reasons leads to a rethink for some yarn bombers. Some who initially describe their activities as decorative then reveal other, perhaps unconscious, activist, feminist and political motivations.

Researcher Minna Haveri writes that knit graffiti (often used interchangeably with yarn bombing, although it more directly references male-dominated painted graffiti and street art) is seen by some as political and by others as simply humorous. “Knit graffiti challenges us to ask what our rights are in public spaces and who should decide for us what we see in the city. It can be seen as a soft way to make a silent protest against the masculine culture and city environment which is mostly covered with visual messages sponsored by commercial entities.”

So why is Alison Ayers, an educated, well-travelled professional woman sitting in her Paddington living room knitting “soft graffiti” covers for trees and woolly birds for bike racks? Like many other girls – and occasionally boys – just wanting to have fun, she discovered that as well as being colourful and enjoyable, yarn bombing can have a serious purpose. It can even be life changing.

“Then I realised you can draw in other things you want to say. It is using skills that are womanly – perhaps seen as ‘women’s work’ – and challenging those perceptions. These skills are sometimes dismissed as ‘only’ craft,” explains Alison.

She believes women have always used their talents selflessly in caring for their families, yet that was expected and possibly unappreciated. “That women craftivists now use the ‘gentle’ arts to voice their social and political concerns is a delicious and very considered turnaround. I feel proud of the young women who are coming up, taking these traditional skills and then subverting them. I like that they can see that traditional skills can be used in a modern feminist manner.”

Susan, a volunteer steward at the Royal Melbourne Show for 15 years, joined Melbourne yarn bombing group Yarn Corner in 2013 when the show commissioned it to create A Life in Yarn. With almost 1000 local members plus international contributors who mail in their knitting, it produced a fantastically detailed installation featuring a home (think crocheted food and even a yarn bombed toilet and hand basin with soap and rubber ducky) plus a backyard with car and caravan.

“I had seen them online and thought they were young and cool, they were not going to want me,” Susan says of Yarn Corner, which bills itself as the world’s biggest yarn bombing group. But the group did want her and when, the following year, they covered a car for the show – her 1947 Daimler – she completed a big chunk of the work.

Growing up in the Blue Mountains Susan was taught to knit by her father. He learned at school during World War II but could not follow a pattern. She recalls pestering him, so he taught her the only garment he knew – a sock. Although she suspects her mother binned the result, that early lesson – knitting doesn’t need pages of detailed instructions – stuck. Her grandmother, too, encouraged her to take on complicated projects. “In the 1970s I decided I would crochet a sleeveless cardigan and she showed me how to draw on a piece of brown paper the shape I wanted. I never had any of that, ‘you must buy a pattern and use the yarn it says‘. My grandmother was very adventurous with colours. That was a great influence, to think you did not have to make just a nice beige cardi.”

Susan Campbell-Wright knitting at the Royal Melbourne show; her yarn bombed bike with a lacy spoke guard, 2015. Photographs supplied by Susan Campbell-Wright.

Usually sporting an Akubra and a colourful knitted brooch, Susan is not the beige cardigan type. She now manages 40 Royal Melbourne Show craft volunteers and, after a recent paste up workshop, even glued up her work in the outer suburbs late at night. She believes that self- confidence and sense of adventure have developed, in part at least, thanks to her knitting and the creative freedom that came with joining Yarn Corner. She calls herself “a planner and plotter”, someone who will make however many tension and pattern squares it takes to get a project right, but has embraced taking her knitting into new and uncharted territory.

“I am adventurous. I like to try different stuff all the time … There are opportunities there to try stuff. The people I meet in Yarn Corner, a lot of the ones my age and older are adventurous.”

For many yarn bombers there is a satisfying sense of community – a community of women. “It is a lovely community, a remote community for those of us out of Melbourne,” says Karen. Some are in other states, even other countries, but are united by their love of the craft and lively Facebook pages.

Melbourne feminist and craft activist Casey Jenkins has reservations about some yarn bombing, but says building these communities and engaging people is an upside. “It could sometimes be a stepping stone for people who would never do a political protest or dream of doing something not by the book and often that is women; even with council approval it is still a daring thing for them. It’s confidence building.”

But while community building is positive, “La La La, everything is lovely” can be insidious, argues Casey. “There is still a lot of conservatism in craft and a lot of women involved who reject feminism.” Many knitters think bringing politics into knitting is a terrible idea. “They don’t like conflict or questioning the status quo which is just what I like doing.”

Adelaide-based artist and scholar Lizzy Emery also has reservations. Her thesis on craftivism, feminism and gender and class in contemporary textiles included the lively, edgy Adelaide yarn bombing scene – “a little bit dangerous and truly subversive”. But when councils commission yarn bombers to do decorative projects, she questions whether they should be called “bombing”.

“When things do become ‘respectable’ some of the original heart of yarn bombing has kind of got diluted, but at least people are talking about women’s culture. There is the issue of generations of women’s labour being exploited.”

Anna Barden, a 35-year-old New Zealand-born market research manager, is one of Yarn Corner’s five person administrative team. Despite being “utterly baffled” by yarn bombing when she joined in 2013 to get involved in a blanket-making charity project, she is now in the thick of it. When she participated in the Melbourne City Square annual tree projects, she realised just how much work some of the ambitious projects are.

“I finally got it from that point, doing it and going through the process made me understand why people do it,” Anna explains. “For some it is very artistic, being able to make something that does not have a formula to it and do things that are a bit crazy with colour. For some it is about the space, brightening the space and drawing attention to some of the areas of Melbourne that are a bit grey. I have a suspicion that for some people it is about the process of making something as part of a group.”

City Square, Melbourne, yarn bombing by Yarn Corner, 2016. Photographs: Sue Green.

Manuela Farinosi and Leopoldina Fortunati have written about “dressing up the cities”, using the terms yarn bombing and urban knitting interchangeably. They write: “The urban knitting movement represents a worldwide social phenomenon that tries to combine a domestic activity, street and folk art, the shaping of do-it-yourself (DIY) culture, and peaceful forms of urban guerrilla protest”. As well, because yarn bombers are mostly women, they see it as a kind of maternalising of the urban landscape – “a maternal gesture, like wrapping someone in a warm cover”.

Yarn bombers’ reasons are, however, as individual as their own circumstances. As previously discussed, Sydney’s Jane Balke Andersen uses it as pain therapy. Known as Queen Babs (she’s named for her much-loved rescue bunny who died in 2016), Jane has been plagued by chronic illnesses, including depression and pain disorder fibromyalgia, for 25 years. She is nonetheless cheerful and inspiring, her focus on promoting creativity, spreading kindness and building communities across the globe via social media, rather than on her ailments.

“I’ve not been able to work full-time in that time. I’ve come from being completely bedridden to trying more and more to build my fibre art girl gang to make interesting and amazing things.”

She began yarn bombing her local Redfern area in September 2013, after teaching herself to crochet from a YouTube video. It’s also a thank you to that community, which she joined in 2010 70

after more than 40 years in Queensland. “It’s a way to give back to my community without expectation of money or thanks, a way of saying thank you for accepting me, I really love it here.

“When you are isolated and housebound 90 per cent of the time you have to find a way to communicate and get support from other people. Yarn bombers tend to be supportive of each other, sharing, they don’t hide how you do something. When I ask people to do projects with me I get crocheted and handknitted pieces from all round the world to put into a project. That makes it super special. They’re mostly women, but not exclusively.”

Selling the Message or Selling Out? In 2005 Houston, Texas, clothing shop owner Magda Sayeg decided to brighten up the store by knitting a door handle cosy – a blue and pink acrylic strip which she and her anonymous friend sewed on. The response was so enthusiastic they took it out onto the street graffiti-style. So the pair – who became known as PolyCotN and AKrylik – became the inaugural members of Knitta, credited with being the first yarn graffiti crew.

Mandy and Leanne write that the work of Knitta and other knit-graffiti artists “has inspired a global revolution”. They quote Magda as saying: “This simple, silly idea of making something pretty in my own world has taken me international and given me more than anything else in my life has.”

From there, yarn bombing not only went global, it became somewhat subversive – knitters, some in balaclavas, creeping out under cover of darkness to thwart council bylaws, landowners and lawmakers, to surprise the owners of cars and doors, bicycles and letterboxes, to spread the love and their messages without getting caught. Some yarn bombers still enjoy that subversive element – Alison Ayers, for instance, though she has no intention of creeping out in a balaclava in the dark. “When I first started I used to sneak around in the middle of the night. But now I install in daylight.” And no, she does not apply for council permits.

“It can be quite anonymous as some people would rather die than admit they see you. Then there’s the other kind of person who runs up and says, ‘this is great, this is fun, thank you for doing it’. People who are walking their dogs, they stop and tell me how much they love it.”

Alison, a frequent visitor to Paris with husband Philip for his business, decided to brighten up the City of Lights. Picture the river Seine flowing grey and rather muddily through central Paris, 71

ancient, rusty mooring rings lining its concrete walls. What it needed was humour and some colour – knitted colour, she decided. Her plan: to convert those rusty rings into “life preservers”, each with panels of her trademark black and white garter stitch stripes. Sadly, they perished in the 2016 Paris floods. Undeterred, she created a whole wall of them along the Seine during her visit later that year and more in subsequent years, including “warming up” some naked rings along the Seine during the March 2018 snows.

Alison Ayers – aka Kitty Knitter – yarn bombing “life preserver” mooring rings along the Seine river in Paris. Photographs: Alison Ayers (left), Phillip Ayers (right).

“I did another piece in Paris, bollards in the Marais. The gendarmes came up in their little toy car and laughed themselves silly, they didn’t care.” But she warns, “I learned not to say ‘yarn bombing’ in Paris. ‘Bomb’ is totally inappropriate given the terrorist activities; they don’t like the word bomb. It’s tricot de rue.”

In February-March 2018, Alison, who doesn’t ski, delighted her 1500 Instagram followers with a photo series featuring yarn bombed ski poles on the slopes of Mont Blanc.

She has also happily collaborated on group projects, from decorating trees in Chippendale and bike racks in Sydney’s Redfern Park with friend Queen Babs to knitting birds for an ambitious South African project – 100 yarn bombings to mark a school’s 100th anniversary. But she still works mostly alone, with creative advice and installation help from Phillip. “I assist with other 72

people’s projects when invited, but I don’t ask anyone to work on mine. You end up diluting your own vision.”

Alison Ayers brightening up Sydney streets, 2015. One of her birds for the Creatures in My Garden 2016 Redfern Park installation. Photographs: Phillip Ayers (left); Martin Andersen @JAM_Project (right).

Around the world yarn bombing has mutated into a commercial operation. Take Yarn Corner, formed in 2011 by fibre artist Bali Portman. Involved with a small group called Twilight Taggers, she wanted a collective of yarn bombers which could take on large-scale projects. She has described the excitement of creating the pieces then rushing out secretly to install them without getting caught.

Scout Davies elaborates on this in Good News, Bad News: “Sometimes our artwork carries a meaningful message, and other times we just had to satisfy our quirky sense of the ridiculous,” she says as her team are about to creep out after pizzas and cocktails to yarn bomb ATMs. “Our activities are secretive because they are a form of illegal graffiti and frowned upon by the authorities. And that’s a big part of what makes it such fun and so addictive – the adrenaline- fuelled thrill of the risk of being caught.”

Yarn Corner has, however, become something very different – a not-for-profit obtaining council permits and taking on commercial commissions. The fees cover expenses and support a community centre and community projects. Projects are commissioned by everything from city 73

councils to cafes and shopping centres. They are posted on a closed Facebook group and members volunteer to make what they want – a bicycle rack, street bollards, part of a tree cover, for example. Those it does not take on, sometimes because of short deadlines, are posted for others to take up. There are classes, retreats, knitting get-togethers and support for charities including KOGO (Knit One Give One) and St Kilda Mums. Large-scale pieces, taken down from trees after six weeks to avoid environmental damage, are donated to animal shelters for bedding.

This way of operating draws some criticism, but Anna says: “Yarn Corner is not craftivist. We tend to stay away from political messages. Within the Facebook group we try to stay away from controversial discussion.” She recalls a media photographer who wanted the group to “look like ninjas in the middle of the night. Us talking on the phone to councils is much less exciting.”

For some, that avoidance of politics is a denial of yarn bombing’s activist roots. Some members have left, believing it should serve a political or social justice purpose. Adelaide yarn bomber Nonna Reckless initially a Yarn Corner “satellite member”, rejected its mission “to make people smile” as anodyne. “I was like, ‘you have got to say something’.”

Others are with Lizzy in questioning whether commissioned, commercial knitting should even be described as yarn bombing. Casey, who uses knitting to convey political and feminist messages, is uncomfortable with that, especially with some knitters doing it for free to be part of the fun, but subcontracted by others who are being paid. She believes most Australian yarn bombers see their activities as benign, a way of “making everything pretty”.

Anna’s personal view is that yarn bombing has gone in many different directions since its US origins. “For some it is very much about the message and for some it is the art of it. Some people are members of several groups.”

Karen has no qualms about taking part in Yarn Corner’s somewhat mainstream City Square yarn bomb – in daylight, complete with high visibility vests and council permits – even though its website acknowledges sponsors including yarn stores and companies. She concedes it is hardly subversive, with permits specifying locations, time periods and restrictions to ensure public health and safety. But for her yarn bombing is not about protest and she believes large-scale projects are impossible without official approvals.

“Originally it was at night wearing balaclavas; now Yarn Corner have taken it to a new level, negotiating with the council to do large-scale projects…to ignore official channels for large projects in public areas there is a much higher probability the item will be removed and you won’t enjoy seeing it around. Public spaces are often subject to restrictions to accommodate health and safety.

“On big projects Yarn Corner negotiate with the relevant people,” Karen notes, citing the 2013 yarn bombing of the former Australia on Collins shopping centre as an example of what can be achieved. “Yarn Corner decorated it and every single shopper got to see it.”

Colourful faces ready to wrap up a Ballarat power pole. Photograph: Karen Corrie

She is, however, willing to take a few risks. After scrapping a tentative plan to knit hats for the busts along the Prime Ministers Avenue in Ballarat’s Botanical Gardens – “my idea was leaving tags saying, ‘if you are cold and need one take it’” – she decided to yarn bomb a power pole outside her local cafe. The council told her it was power company property so she just went for it with her own design, a brightly-coloured piece featuring knitted faces. “There is still the guerilla kind of, ‘sew it up while no one is watching‘ element for different projects such as the power pole outside my local café.”

While committed to activist yarn bombing, Queen Babs, too, sometimes takes commissions. Her projects range from local parks to Sydney’s Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, International Women’s 75

Day and Indigenous rights events, including yarn bombing the trees at Qantas headquarters for NAIDOC (previously National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) Week. She is a pragmatist: “If you don’t have money and you want to do street art or yarn bombing the money has to come from somewhere. First I asked for donations of yarn, then I asked for donations of money and I have a job here and there. If I do one it lets me do the other. Some people love the subversive part of it but I have never snuck out at night and done it. I live in Redfern, I just do it.”

That “just do it” ethos is in contrast to groups such as Yarn Corner Melbourne spin-off the GLAD Rappers, begun by Yarn Corner member Annette Fitton in 2014 when she began taking commissions it rejected . “I thought some looked like they could be fun but you would need a few people to deal with them or (you) could introduce a commercial angle.” Then came a chance meeting with Brunswick-based indie textile company Otto and Spike at a market; Did they fancy using their rare old knitting machines to make fabric for large-scale yarn bombing? They did.

“Our first job was to jolly up the staircases and handrails in a derelict South Melbourne office building that InDesign Media was going to have a two-day seminar in. They wanted the staircases yarn bombed so I had to cover all the stair risers and about 26 metres of handrails. So I approached Otto and Spike and posted on Yarn Corner (Facebook pages) and asked who was interested. The GLAD Rappers came from that.”

Since then they have been unstoppable: Trees clad in Otto and Spike fabric in Mornington Main Street and Brunswick’s Sydney Road at Christmas; two trees in downtown Melbourne’s Swanston Street outside the annual Craft Victoria pop-up shop; Federation Square bike racks (recycling those stair riser covers). Road Safety Victoria included the group’s bike in its Australian Open display and taking part in Melbourne decorative arts museum the Johnston Collection’s 2016 Christmas exhibition Return to the City meant figuring out how antiques could be covered yet still seen. In a delightful and over-the-top homage to yarn bombing they covered everything from tennis rackets and plant pots to a telephone, even an ensuite bathroom. It was so popular they were invited back the following year.

Both Yarn Corner and the GLAD Rappers have worked with the Royal Melbourne Show. The show, now on Instagram and Facebook and making over its traditional image, has become a yarn bombing patron. Keen to remain relevant and attractive to young people, the show’s art, craft and cookery curator Dr Annette Shiell has, since 2012, presided over an overhaul of its 76

competitions. She wanted to modernise the look, attract young crafters and dispel the myth that anyone whose knitting isn’t perfect should not enter. “It was a total shakeup – to retain what we had and push it out in new directions.” This included commissioning Yarn Corner to knit and crochet wraps for everything from a tractor (2012) to fibreglass farm animals (Yarn Farm, 2014 and 2016), some of which had clothes made by schoolchildren and went “on agistment” to schools post-show.

In 2015 the show’s advance marketing extended beyond its showgrounds by yarn bombing a central Melbourne tram stop. The original plan conceived by the GLAD Rappers was to cover a Melbourne tram, photograph it, and turn the photograph into vinyl wrap. But Yarra Tram’s safety worries – fire and vandals, for instance – led it to suggest targeting a high profile tram stop instead. Annette (Shiell) was happy with that: “We wanted some sort of installation in the city to say, the show is on.”

Otto and Spike was commissioned to create hundreds of metres of jersey knit in the show’s lime, orange, blue and black colours. The aim: cover not only the handrails the length of the Elizabeth and Bourke streets tram stop platforms, but for Bourke Street flagpoles to carry matching show banners.

Showtime: tram stop at Melbourne’s Elizabeth and Bourke streets corner. Photograph: Sue Green.

A paid commission, machine knitting, a commercial knitting company, matching banners – it’s a long way from yarn bombing’s disruptive origins. But Annette Fitton, who loves making things 77

but also enjoys designing the machine-made projects and devising solutions, says: “There is a limit to how much knitting you can do and the scope is enormous. I think it reflects the fact that people are accepting it more and demanding it.

“I am hoping that other people will take up knitting and crochet because of it. Sometimes community groups ask if we could yarn bomb their school and I say: ‘No, but I can teach your kids to knit so they can do it themselves’.”

It’s yarn but is it bombing? The Royal Melbourne Show’s installation in Melbourne’s Bourke Street, 2015. Photographs: Sue Green.

So are commercial commissions such as the tram stop project actually yarn bombing, or simply a yarn-based marketing strategy which blunts yarn bombing’s edge? Annette Shiell doubts whether that still exists. “I think it is yarn bombing,” she says of the show project. “But I think that whole subversive thing has dropped out and I think yarn bombing is getting a bit passe. The bar has been raised so high it’s, ‘yes, we will stop and look at something amazing but not just because there is knitting on a tree’. People are using it to draw attention to their shop, stop or whatever. Machine knitting takes it to different lengths. We wanted to explore it in another direction.”

There is an irony in this use of machine knitting and a move away from handknitting by an organisation dedicated to promoting craft: many young people among the 250,000 a year visiting the show’s crafts cannot hand knit, but want to learn. Classes and beginner competitions 78

have been introduced. “During the show we had whole families come and ask us, could you please teach us to knit,” says Annette. “The CWA run them and we have crowds – (there is) a whole generation where the skill has not been passed down.”

Is Yarn Bombing “Over”? Within two years of creating her doorknob cosy, Magda Sayeg had so much work she had turned her hobby into a full-time job – with five assistants, knitting mostly on machines rather than by hand, The New York Times reported in 2009. Fortune 500 companies have paid her to wrap their wares in yarn. Toyota hired her to knit a Prius a Christmas sweater for a video, the Smart Car makers flew her to Rome to wrap a car. Other projects included knitting 69 Brooklyn parking meter covers and wrapping the heating ducts at the Brooklyn offices of Etsy.com.

When the Times reported further on the trend and on celebrity yarn bomber London Kaye’s projects in December 2016, yarn bombing had become so entrenched some were saying it was “over”. Certainly Kaye’s commissions, ranging from 18 window displays for Valentino to the facade of a school bus for Gap, illustrate just how mainstream it has become.

In Australia, too, yarn bombing has become ubiquitous. In recent years there have been hundreds of projects, probably thousands. Yarn Corner has a vast portfolio of completed work, from an indoor garden party at Melbourne’s Eastland Shopping Centre, an installation at a Sydney art gallery, another at the Royal Melbourne Zoo, to its annual Melbourne City Square project and the square’s Santa Wonderland. In Perth, yarn bomber Lex Randolph (aka Captain Plaknit) works on personal projects and political messages with Perth Craftivists, but also with private organisations and local governments on projects such as Freo Street Doctor Bus and Knit the Beach for the City of Stirling’s Summerset Arts Festival. In 2013 Adelaide yarn bomber Iolanthe Kalloniatis even published a book, The Art of Yarn Bombing: No Pattern Required, about yarn bombing Adelaide’s streets. She followed up with a second which include tips on yarn bombing your house and garden.

Some experts warn the mainstreaming of yarn bombing threatens its very existence. Canadians Andrea Black, a researcher, and curator and critic Nicole Burisch have examined the potential dangers of craftivist projects, including yarn bombing, becoming so popularised that they are taken out of context and incorporated in gallery exhibitions. The risk is that this appropriation into museums and other institutions erases the issues the creators seek to address.

In December 2014 Joanna Mann of Bristol University, who learned to knit and crochet for her research, wrote about the role of whimsy in yarn bombing – “calling the body to action through the joyous and unexpected event”. She wrote: “Whimsy describes the capricious, playful and fanciful, and designates something irrational or without an immediately obvious reason to exist.” This can “play an important political role in reclaiming and reconfiguring urban space through methods more subtle than placards and marches”.

She argues yarn bombing is no longer niche or alternative; it’s more “a fashionable trend”, hijacked for corporate purposes. “In working to create new and memorable encounters, many activists have imbued yarn bombing with a politics it was never intended to have. Yet even this remnant of yarn bombing’s radical edge has been stripped by major corporations such as Axa, Mini Cooper and Le Lait who have incorporated yarn bombing into their advertising campaigns, illustrating how craft can quickly be taken up and exploited by capitalist industries. Suddenly surfaces everywhere appear to be adorned with more of the same, knitting here, crochet there; all start to become part of our normal urban environment again.”

Her conclusion is rather bleak: “Ultimately then, yarn bombing has moved from embodying whimsy, through activist politics, to finally sit – frayed, faded and forgotten – back within the very systems it was trying to critique.”

While yarn bombing may seem, on the face of it, unlikely to cause offence, others have critiqued not just its future, but its very existence. In 2014, US academics Lesley Hahner and Scott Varda described it as “deploying the aesthetics of suburban whiteness” – sometimes innocuous, but frequently representing a kind of “hipster racism”. They argue that as paint graffiti, struggling for legitimacy and often treated as vandalism, is the province of black and brown people – an American analysis not necessarily true in Australia – extolling yarn bombing at the expense of paint graffiti is therefore “necessarily raced”.

They see it as a safe, white person’s means of self-expression, occasionally criticised for its environmental impact or wastefulness, but mostly praised: “Yarn bombing is affirmed as a public good only in as much as it is the exceptional expression of the revolutionary potential of graffiti safeguarded through the provincial sensibilities of Western, middle-class whiteness.”

It is true most of Australia’s yarn bombers are white women, including many who are home- based with leisure time and resources. But not all. Queen Babs, for example, has the income 80

pressures those with her health problems commonly face and relies on gifts of yarn, cheap yarn and her yarn bombing commissions. Some in more comfortable circumstances appear sensitive to the yarn wasting argument and emphasise that they also knit for charity, use cheap and recycled yarn and that the acrylic yarn which endures best outdoors is the cheapest. There is a strong sense that this activity is acceptable only if money is not being ‘wasted’ on it.

Yarn Corner’s members, mostly aged 25 to 40, include jobseekers, stay-at-home mums and professionals, Anna says. “People have two ideas: there is the subversive granny and the (inner- city) Brunswick hipster. But the demographics of Yarn Corner are so broad.”

Some yarn bombers stand up for the rights of street artists. Annette Fitton, for example, created an installation of knitted nipples in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane as a response to the painting out of nipples on two large female nudes in the lane mid-2016 – timed for the April launch of Street Art International by Lou Chamberlain. Nonna Reckless began her street art as a paint graffiti artist until deciding she was too old to walk down railway lines in the dark. She uses knitting and crochet to comment on social issues and admires the young street artists with whom she got her start.

Lesley Hahner and Scott Varda believe that yarn bombing shores up the status quo, entrenching ideas about domesticity. Certainly, although it may no longer be the whimsical and unexpected surprise it was when it first appeared on our streets, it retains its ability to attract smiles and attention. But its impact goes much further. Yarn bombers such as Annette, a former stay-at- home mum now organising numerous projects for the GLAD Rappers and an internationally renowned yarn bomber, tell of its life changing potential. Through it Susan has developed her creativity and moved into paste up workshops. Alison is no longer just having fun, but making political statements on issues such as women’s rights and gay marriage equality through her knitting.

But even Yarn Corner’s Anna Barden concedes that, although her group’s home city of Melbourne seems to be the world’s yarn bombing capital with an endless appetite for it, yarn bombing’s days may be numbered: “I am dubious about how much more yarn bombing can go. I am not sure what there is to explore from this point. I am probably a bit dubious about its future.”

Anna, who has knitted since her Wellington childhood and has multiple knitting projects on the go at once (including in her car), still sees a future for Yarn Corner, through which she has made close friends. “What I would like to think is that we could still explore knitting and crochet as art forms without it having to be about yarn bombing. I guess in a way that’s what I would like to come out of the yarn bombing, just a different way of looking at knitting and crochet.”

Further Reading Farinosi, M & Fortunati, L 2013, ‘A new fashion: dressing up the cities ‘, Textile, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 282-299. Groff, M 2012, Mad men, bad girls and the guerrilla knitters institute, Pan Macmillan, Sydney. Kalloniatis, I 2013, Art of yarn bombing: no pattern required, Kindle Edition. Mann, J 2015, ‘Towards a politics of whimsy: yarn bombing the city’, AREA, vol. 47, no. 1, pp. 65- 72. Moore, M & Prain, L 2009, Yarn bombing, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver. Wood, A 2015, Urban street art, Franklin Watts, London. www.yarncorner.com.au

Chapter ends – sidebars to be inserted throughout chapter at design stage follow 82

Getting a Life When Annette Fitton’s eldest son Ajax told her she needed to get a life it wasn’t just a thoughtless teenage insult. She knew it was true.

But what to do? A full-time Melbourne mum with three children, it was almost 20 years since she had graduated in industrial design. Ajax, who realised she was “a frustrated creator”, gave her two books along with his rather brutal life coaching – one on making softies, the other about yarn bombing. The soft toys won and, inspired by a stash of orange corduroy fabric perfect for dolls’ hair, Annette turned to crafts learned from her Swedish mother and Swedish and English grandmothers, stitching the cutest dolls. With the aid of her sister Kristina, the first six sold at a market and her small business Nini and Wink (the sisters’ childhood nicknames) was born.

That was in 2008. It was another four years until Annette’s creativity was truly unleashed when she made and designed knitted food, plates and even cutlery. The inspiration: a call for knitted and crocheted food for a communal table in a local exhibition, Dances with Wools – a play on the 1990 American movie Dances with Wolves, a Western fantasy which posits a sentimental view of masculinity.

Fast forward to the present and Annette is now an internationally-recognised yarn bomber who has been artist in residence at the annual Vogue Knitting Live show in New York. Wielding knitting needles and crochet hook at every spare moment, she has covered everything from lamp posts, bicycles and benches to a vacuum cleaner and fibreglass piglets (now living in her dining room) with colourful and intricately patterned yarn.

Caution: Yarn bomber at work. Annette Fitton’s handiwork. Photographs: Sue Green 83

“Yarn bombing has really pushed the window of creativity for me, the possibilities of knitting and crochet have just exploded for me,” she explains. “It’s the challenge of coming up with something completely different. Because I have this design background I always want to do something original and think, ‘what can I do that has not been done before?’.”

Her large home studio, aka the laundry in her south-east Melbourne home, is packed with her work, from panels of fair isle and three-dimensional faces for wrapping round trees to tea cosies and glove puppets – even a life-like alpaca built of bubble wrap and wire coat hangers, wearing black lace leggings. There are covered poles and a large fibreglass pig in crocheted garb – mum to the dining room piglets, all of whom went to New York in Annette’s four suitcases.

Double knitting baby blanket/knee rug; tree panel: three-dimensional faces, lace knitting and crochet, both by Annette Fitton. Photographs: Sue Green.

The number of woman hours represented is breathtaking – ironic, given her initial response to the book Yarn Bombing: “I thought it looked like fun but couldn’t understand why you would spend all that time and effort doing it,” Annette laughs. Seeing the real thing did it for her, when Bayside City Council commissioned Yarn Corner to bomb Hampton Street.

“It looked amazing. People on the street just loved it. I thought, ‘wow, this is such a great way of putting knitting and crocheting out there and inspiring people to have a go’. There is every different level of skill; with different colours you can make magic with knitting and crochet.”

By the end of a talk by Yarn Corner founder Bali Portman Annette had signed up and had met a yarn bomber who would become a member of the GLAD Rappers (GLAD from their first initials). 84

Numerous commissions have followed. The garden party at Melbourne’s Eastland shopping centre, for which she covered a swinging seat with large-scale lace, was “the beginning of my lace adventure”. From those beginnings grew a plan to knit large-scale white lace to cover 21 rather sad-looking trees beside a Flinders Street high-rise. With the deadline of Melbourne’s all- night arts event White Night on 20 February 2016, Annette “knitted like a complete hooligan, ignoring all the household chores”, installing it just before the crowds arrived, after the building owners agreed at the 11th hour.

Buoyed by that success, the following year Annette decided to install 16 bicycle wheels on fashionable Melbourne Spanish restaurant MoVida’s kitchen window grills in Rutledge Lane. She painstakingly filled each with delicate and beautiful white lace, circle patterns sourced from libraries and online. As well, she created a 16 Circles album with photographs of each for her 2500 Facebook followers. Why? “I aim to inspire people on the street with the simple beauty of knitted lace,” she told her Facebook followers, including one who called them “too precious for yarn bombing”.

Since then Annette has been unstoppable, her Nini and Wink Facebook and Instagram posts a continuous stream of colourful creativity, from the Johnston collection antiques to the Year of the Dog bollard toppers, Annette devising a lifelike dog from cardboard before covering it with coloured lace. Even a violin case received the treatment, covered in knitted liquorice allsorts in time for the 2018 Port Fairy Folk Festival.

Just as she held out for permission to dress the trees, Annette believes obtaining council permits is necessary to avoid wasting hours of work if yarn bombing is removed. But she does take the occasional chance. As part of a Yarn Corner members’ neighbourhood challenge, she clad six sign poles on a local roundabout, the colours matching the geraniums there. She installed it without a permit, tipping off the local newspaper which took photographs. “A Yarn Corner friend helped me, we had fluoro vests on so we looked official and did it in broad daylight.” And no, it wasn’t cut down.

A Flinders Street, Melbourne, urban forest gets lacy thanks to Annette Fitton. Photograph: Elizabeth Roycroft.

Annette’s yarn bombing has exploded out of her studio into her lounge room – “usually just one couch”. She fields constant demands for projects and to talk to community groups. She and a GLAD Rapper colleague have obtained certificates in scissor and boom lift operation, allowing them to operate the equipment needed to reach the tops of trees. So does her son think she has a life now? “Yes, I think he does.” 86

Not Your Average Nonna Nonna Reckless has never been one for doing what people expected; if something is considered inappropriate for women that’s just the provocation she needs. Petite and grey haired, the Adelaide activist, feminist and artist, laughs, “I am a mouthy old woman, I have got lots of things to complain about. I believe we should bear witness.” But the smile belies the seriousness of her work.

Message knit: An Adelaide bicycle rack yarn bombing by Nonna Reckless. Photograph: Nonna Reckless.

In the late 1990s Nonna studied industrial design at the University of South Australia. “Women did not do industrial design back then so I thought, right.” She thought the same about taking up street art: “Generally I do things because women don’t bloody do them and we should. I wanted to see more women street artists.”

But she soon realised walking down train lines in the dark with an aerosol spray can was not the route to a healthy old age. “I thought I might break a hip and I thought I might find some other way of doing it.” So she switched to stencils and paste ups, mostly of renegade young women – Modesty Blaise and Wendy the astronaut. She began buying op shop shirts, had “the aerosol guys” decorate them and made cushions for bus shelters – a softening of the built environment, a theme which now underlies much of her knitting.

Nonna was taught to knit by her mother while growing up in a country town outside Mount Gambier. A massive Doctor Who fan, her first project was a Doctor Who scarf for her mum, 87

“which I never saw her wear”. She knitted again briefly when her son was born, making him jumpers inspired by the special garments knitted for her by her own grandmother.

It was after becoming a grandmother herself – a Nonna – in 2005 that she took to knitting in a big way. This time it was not about garments. Rather, it was the start of more than a decade as one of Adelaide’s best-known yarn bombers. Her inspiration? The television series Artland USA. “There was yarn bombing in that and I thought, ‘that is it, I’m going to do guerilla knitting’. It was not called yarn bombing then, I used to call it ninja knitting.”

There was an added attraction: “The good thing is, I know how to do it and the guys don’t.”

Nonna turned to yarn bombing “as a way of subverting the grandmotherly image held by the general public whilst still supporting her love of graffiti”, according to the program notes for the 2015 Diverse Feminisms exhibition in which she took part at the University of South Australia. Council-sanctioned projects and corporate commissions are not on her agenda. Rather, she combines knitting, crochet and sometimes text to create artworks and installations that comment on social issues – hopefully provoking a response. “I don’t do practical. I am drawing a line there. I won’t knit jumpers. I had to at one point in time and now I have the luxury of not.”

Nonna’s use of yarn bombing as a medium to convey her messages coincided with the start of the Global Financial Crisis. “My first major piece went up opposite a bank; it was a down-facing arrow.” It was the beginning of a huge body of work, mostly text or symbol-based, distributed throughout Adelaide over the years since. A banner proclaiming Knit Your Revolt still hangs, faded and worn, in inner-city Coromandel Place.

From covers for doorknobs on laneway doors and butts at pedestrian crossings, to balaclavas for bollards, even a dumpster during the street art festival Dumpster Biennale, nowhere in Adelaide that Nonna decides lends itself to a knitted statement is taboo. Many people discover her work through the mushrooms, symbols of long life, happiness and rebirth – and male virility – which she attaches to the bottom of poles.

Mushrooms by Nonna Reckless – symbols of long life, happiness and rebirth in downtown Adelaide. Photographs: Nonna Reckless.

A big fan of Aussie hip-hop and believing its lyrics are underrated, she has knitted strips for street poles incorporating phrases from favourite releases: Vents’ “Everybody to the back of the bus, no eye contact, stop chatting with us”; “Volleys pushing trolleys” (Hilltop Hoods). And there’s the knitted cat; in 2014 a group including Nonna added Trim, Matthew Flinders’ feline companion on his circumnavigation of Australia in the early 19th century, to his statue in downtown Adelaide, draping it with crochet skulls bunting.

Matthew Flinders with knitted cat, Trim, and skull bunting; Queen Victoria’s gown in the Migration Museum. Photographs: Lizzy Emery (left); Migration Museum. 89

In 2012 Nonna spearheaded the crocheting of a dress for the Queen Victoria statue in Victoria Square, an Adelaide City Council-commissioned project taken down after two weeks instead of a month following complaints from royalists. Now in the Migration Museum collection, this was her only experience of a council-commissioned project – and it wasn’t comfortable. Her small victory was, with the other makers, stitching their knitted initials onto the gown. “So we tagged Queen Victoria.”

Still in her sights – and definitely without permission – a long rainbow scarf for the statue of Adelaide’s first surveyor-general, Colonel William Light, on Montefiore Hill. But that’s been on hold because she has been so busy knitting rainbow beanies during Australia’s same-sex marriage plebiscite and pink pussyhats before and following the women’s marches. “Who knew protest knitting would become so popular?”

Present Moment exhibition co-curator Lizzy Emery hangs slogan cushions by Nonna Reckless. Photograph: Nonna Reckless.

Nonna works with local groups committed to social action – Radical Craft Adelaide, 8Ply on the Sly. For the 2014 Present Moment exhibition which she co-curated with Lizzy Emery she created slogans on cushion covers “demonstrating hypocrisy of the anti-graffiti regulations. Don’t get me started on how much I despise those regulations.”

As part of Diverse Feminisms Nonna Reckless yarn bombed a drink can for every woman killed by domestic violence the previous year – prompted by friends from all income levels telling her of women they knew who were at risk. Some were colourfully striped, decorated with a crochet 90

vulva. “I was trying to make the point that people are outraged and intervene if they see someone tagging a building but when a woman is being abused they feel awkward and look away or stay silent.”

Yarn bombed aerosol paint can by Nonna Reckless. Photograph: Nonna Reckless.

The exhibition program includes one of the few photographs of this work: “Real graff’ is here today and painted over the next so I tend to put up a piece and walk away. I haven't felt the need to document it, just put it on the street and leave it to its own life.”

Nonna believes she has Indigenous forebears but does not know where her country is – she and her cousins hope DNA testing may help identify where in Australia they belong. “I started thinking about identity and totem. I thought I would create my own dreaming and totems. I made covers over cans, putting them out in little laneways and corners.” The covers, beautifully knitted in bold colourways, illustrate her philosophy that it’s about the making and putting it out there. If it gets taken – so be it.

“I used to do everything at 5am. Now I can do it in the middle of the day and now people go, ‘oh’,” she says, demonstrating the quizzical looks of passers-by. “I am not a 19-year-old boy with 91

an aerosol. I think because I am a woman and I am old and I am knitting, they think it must be okay. It’s not threatening.” 92

Tree Jumpers and Joy How to grow a small town: First, plant the trees. Second, recruit knitters to yarn bomb them with colourful and quirky tree jumpers for two weeks in July. Third, attract visitors who fall so in love with the town that they move there.

That’s what has happened in Warwick, a charming southern Queensland town of about 13,000 people. There a group of energetic locals took an offbeat idea, cooked up in 2004 by a textile artist gallery director and jazz-loving cafe owner, and built a 10 day arts and music festival which now “dresses” more than 100 trees and features a program with about 150 listings and drawcard artists.

Karina Devine, director of Warwick Art Gallery, says the Jumpers & Jazz in July tree jumper exhibition attracts entrants from as far afield as New Zealand, where it has a big following, and even the UK. “We had a couple of New Zealand participants who made an artwork for a tree and came over for the festival and loved it so much they have emigrated and moved to Warwick. They are not the only ones. We say it is the best economic strategy we have.”

Tree jumpers in downtown Warwick. Artwork by Helen Gross (left) and Lyons Street Butchery. Photographs: Barry Alsop (left) and Warwick Art Gallery.

It is not just the town’s profile which is being enhanced. “Some of the artists who initially took part were hobby knitters or crocheters and have grown a little business out of making artwork here. One was a finalist in New Zealand’s World of Wearable Art,” says Karina, who joined the gallery two years after the festival began.

It was started by her predecessor, textile artist Audrey Hoffman, and a cafe owner to jazz up the small, vulnerable-looking trees planted during council landscaping in Warwick’s downtown Palmerin Street. “They nutted out this idea. The mayor thought it was a kooky idea, but thank goodness they gave them permission. They started with about 70 trees and they were tiny. We have an entry from Lancashire in England, they have been participating for a really long time, but they have not grasped the idea that the trees have grown.”

The trees become a riot of inventive knitted and crocheted colour – flowers, fruit and food (think sausages outside the butcher’s shop), birds and animals, faces, landscapes and touching vignettes, plus the occasional offbeat entry such as Iron Bark Tree (with dozens of discarded irons strapped to its trunk). Many have clearly tapped major design talent and require detailed planning, intricate shaping and precise measurements to ensure they cling to their trunks.

Artist demand for trees led the local Southern Downs Regional Council to approve expansion of the yarn bombing to nearby streets. Claret ash and golden ash, massive London plane trees and five-year-old ornamental plums are on offer, with local downtown businesses given first dibs on those outside their buildings. Artists who participate each year choose next, then other entrants. There’s a yarn bombing height limit of three metres, so stepladders can be used for sewing on.

“It is a really conservative farming community, but for that 10 days a year businesses, cafes, other shops take a chance on being a bit more artistic, on having artworks displayed in their stores. A cloud of sadness descends on the town the day we take the tree artwork down. But the spirit of the festival continues 12 months of the year – for example with pop-up art exhibitions in blank spaces and now so many of the cafes have artworks.” Even in the lead up to the festival, there is a crafty feel; at the March prospectus launch for the 2018 festival a clutch of crochet budgies could be seen peeping out of the silverware, along with pineapple tea cosies.

Diggers Garden Group’s tree garden. Photograph: Warwick Art Gallery.

Each year a knit-tastic festival art work is created in secret by the gallery. Most popular so far has been Knitchen, the stunning full-sized knitted, crocheted, felted and wrapped kitchen cooked up by the gallery yarn bombing team in 2014. Drawing on the talents of 50 knitters and seven months in the making, it covered everything from the sauce bottle and salt-and-pepper shakers to dishrack and crockery, the stovetop (Karina’s old one saved for just such a purpose), table and chairs complete with knitted roast chook dinner.

In 2016 the team unveiled a tropical oasis at the local town hall, with palm trees and pineapples of course. The following year attractions included a pineapple garden and a pom-pom meadow. Karina sees the surprise element as a nod to early yarn bombing. For although the festival is well organised, with security guards and local police patrolling the trees, the odd subversive act still maintains that spirit of yarn bombing’s US origins.

“Early on there was a little community element who liked to sneak out and do things in other locations around town. And it still happens that things pop up around town during festival time. I like that because it looks back at the original yarn bombing activities in America and I like that we can honour that in a way,” admits Karina, who harbours a secret desire to yarn bomb the Condamine River bridge on the highway through Warwick – out of bounds, according to the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads. Well perhaps not quite … A few years ago jumpers appeared on the trees on the highway median strip in the dead of night. 96

Chapter 3 Designing Change

“We sit, we watch, we knit, we plot.” Clare Twomey, co-ordinator, Knitting Nannas Against Gas

When friends Clare Twomey and Lindy Scott sat down in a New South Wales field with a thermos and their knitting for a cuppa one morning in June 2012, it marked a turning point in political activism in Australia. Because Clare and Lindy weren’t just knitting. They were keeping watch on a mining site.

Every week they headed to that Northern Rivers site to keep an eye on it, after monitoring truck movements and realising work for a big project was beginning. Their chat over a cup of tea as they knitted and watched marked the birth of Knitting Nannas Against Gas, now an international movement against the exploration of prime agricultural land for coal seam gas and other environmental threats. Undoubtedly one of the biggest – probably the biggest – knitting-based political protest in Australian history, it now has more than 40 branches, known as loops, including in the US and the UK. Its motto: “Saving the land, air and water for the kiddies.”

It’s a long way from nannas knitting booties and bonnets. Instead, these disruptive knitters use their craft in the service of their convictions. In the introduction to her 2010 book In the Loop: Knitting Now textile writer Jessica Hemmings notes: “With our practical need for knitting long gone, this popular pastime now appears in unexpected guises with intentions and meanings that stray far outside the realm of the domestic and utilitarian.”

“Knitting … has become a valid and effective means to critique capitalism, protest against war, peak oil, and exploitative labour practices, and forge alternative identities, communities, and ways of living,” British academic Fiona Hackney has written. She was taught to knit by her paternal grandmother, a Staffordshire miner’s wife, who likely knew plenty about exploitation of workers. It’s less likely she saw a connection with her knitting, as her granddaughter does.

“We were very conscious from the start of subverting the stereotype,” Clare notes of the initiative she and Lindy took after joining an anti-coal seam gas protest group in Lismore, New South Wales. “Some of the men suggested we make cakes and do typing and photocopying. 98

Most of the women there have come from interesting backgrounds and had amazing jobs so we were not interested in just doing all the boring stuff,” she explains indignantly.

“Lindy was in the expectant nanna phase which brings the needles out and we thought, what could we do to look like innocent old women. So we were sitting out in a field in the middle of nowhere, having a cup of tea and knitting. Your hands are busy, it gives you great ideas. Doing knitting in mine sites, we hatched our plans and came up with the idea of the Knitting Nannas against Gas.”

The Nannas’ public knitting is “disruptive, they challenge expectations … their value lies in their disturbance of order,” Perth academic Kyra Clarke has said. Their website emphasises knitting’s subversive role: “We use the common stereotype of the sweet little old lady to lull the bad guys into a false sense of security.” Members are pictured in T-shirts or with tote bags printed with a clenched fist holding knitting needles. Frilly apron pockets are juxtaposed with a print of pirate- style crossed knitting needles.

Some of those joining in have a yarn bombing background and began their public knitting covering poles and bike racks. Sydney yarn bomber Alison Ayers has knitted with the Nannas in front of New South Wales State Parliament.

She and other supporters keep in touch with plans through social media, an indispensable tool for organisation and publicity. Australian researcher Liz Stops has identified the Nanna’s Facebook groups as important in building their support. She compares these connections with knitting itself: “The threads of social connection made possible through Facebook can be seen as metaphorical of stages of the knitting process, of casting on, dropping stitches and of building patterns.”

Their Facebook followers know that these courageous women refuse to conform to grandmotherly expectations. Clare, described on her Facebook page as “professional troublemaker”, twice locked herself to the gates of New South Wales Parliament house for a day during the 2016 campaign against state anti-protest laws. She’s also described as an “innocent until proven guilty action figure”.

Knitting Nannas Against Gas protest with the Eureka flag during the 2013 election campaign. Photograph: Supplied by Clare Twomey.

Subverting History A former public servant, Clare wasn’t even much of a knitter. However, her administrative skills and understanding of legislation serve her well as the Nannas’ full-time, unpaid coordinator and administrator. She also realised that while craft may seem an unlikely outlet for protest, pulling out needles and yarn gave the KNAGs (the ‘K’ is silent) a deceptive innocence.

Women have been incorporating stories and messages into their craft work, including knitting, for generations. London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection has a 19th century sampler by Elizabeth Parker, a young woman sent to work as a nurserymaid at age 13. She recorded in tiny cross stitch her appalling treatment by her employer. In 2012 the Museum of Australian Democracy in Ballarat added a pair of black stockings embroidered with the slogan ‘Votes for Women’ to its suffragette items collection. They had belonged to Yorkshire suffragette Elizabeth Wright.

“The idea that combining crafts with politics is something new, invented by thirty-something post-feminist politico-hipsters, is false,” writes Canadian academic Trent Newmeyer in Knit one, stitch two protest three! Examining the historical and contemporary politics of crafting. In fact, crafts have long been used as communicative tools, including “to communicate more political and subversive messages”. 100

In a notable example of knitting activism knitters from around the world contributed to Danish artist Marianna Jorgensen’s 2006 anti-Iraq war protest, Pink M24 Chaffee, displayed in downtown Copenhagen. A pink blanket – a cover for a World War II combat tank – was created from 4000 knitted and crocheted squares, some with lace, bows, and stripes. Jorgensen, who said that the tank became unarmed and lost its authority when covered with pink, worked with London’s Cast-Off Knitting Club and news of the project spread by word-of-mouth, through knitters’ groups and social media.

“If the blanket is read as a petition, each individual panel of the blanket acts as a stand-in for a signature, but instead of a petition to be delivered pleadingly to a government elite, this gesture defiantly occupies public space,” Andrea Black and Nicole Burisch wrote in Extra/Ordinary: Craft and Contemporary Art.

There are numerous such projects. Canada’s Revolutionary Knitting Circle began in 2000, dedicating itself to promoting community independence from “corporate slavery”. In the US Microrevolt uses knitting to protest against sweatshops; the Body Count Mittens project, coordinated by Lisa Anne Auerbach, memorialises the loss of US soldiers in the Iraq war, each pair including a casualty total and date. The list is extensive and international, and includes Australian projects such as the WARM community art project about climate change (see page 116).

A pink, handknitted hat with ears, which made it onto the cover of Time magazine and The New Yorker, was the focus of perhaps the largest such project to date. The pussyhats, in a colour traditionally associated with women, were worn by thousands upon thousands of women – and a considerable number of men – at the marches following US President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The Pussyhat Project was devised by a Los Angeles woman and her friend responding to President Trump’s sexist comments about grabbing women by the “pussy”.

The hats were knitted by the dozen by knitters for other women. This was so “knitters who could not be physically present could feel part of the tumultuous and historic rebellion against the new president,” wrote leading Australian feminist Anne Summers in The Sydney Morning Herald.

The project’s Facebook page described it as Knit Activism for the Women’s March. Its aims: “To provide the people of the Women’s March on Washington, DC, a means to make a unique 101

collective visual statement which will help activists be better heard.” As well, it would “provide people who could not be on Washington’s National Mall a way to represent themselves and support women’s rights”.

Its reach, however, went far beyond the 21 January 2017, Washington march, with more than 600 solidarity marches around the world. An estimated 3000 people marched in Sydney alone. Numbers wearing pussyhats in the US were estimated at 60,000, some estimates were upwards of 100,000, with celebrities ranging from Whoopi Goldberg to Madonna donning them. Photographs showed a sea of pink. After the marches the pattern continued to go viral – Pussyhat Global – with women around the world, including in Australia, still knitting them.

To harness that enthusiasm the Sydney-based Women’s Electoral Lobby launched a fundraiser to sell the pink pussyhats for $15 each on International Women’s Day, 8 March 2017. Hoping to create a sea of pink hats at marches and rallies across Australia, it put out a call via its website and Facebook, with WEL supplying the pink acrylic yarn. It received “overwhelming” support within hours of its February 17 launch. Reflecting the fact that most Australian knitters learn on two straight needles with many not confident knitting in the round, a member converted the pattern, estimating each hat would take three hours. Pussyhat Project knitting bees were organised.

This project also linked to Pussyhat Global which had become an international movement based at www.pussyhatproject.com. A “global virtual march” – via social media on International Women’s Day 2017 – was brought together with the traditional craft of knitting in the service of women’s rights. Women’s rights supporters worldwide could come together, without buying a plane ticket. Those making extra hats for others were encouraged to enclose a note about the women’s rights issue that was important to them.

Just as the Pussyhat Project became a symbol and a tool for advocates of women’s rights, the Knitting Nannas use their yellow knitting in promoting their environmental message. Researcher Liz Stops, an active Nannas member since 2012, describes their knitting as “a tool for social and political action”.

The Nannas pay tribute on their website to Les Tricoteuses, “who sat beside the guillotine during the public executions in Paris in the French Revolution, supposedly continuing to knit in between executions”. These inspiring craft activists were “The Original Knitting Nannas”. Some were 102

market women, veterans of the 1789 Women’s March over high food prices and shortages. Initially praised, they were eventually excluded from participating in political assembly, it notes, referencing Wikipedia.

Ordinary voters feel similarly marginalised and powerless today, Liz Stops writes. She compares the French women taking their knitting into the streets with the Nannas, who have also “rendered the domestic public”.

Like the Nannas, those 18th-century French women knitted a distinctive symbol – the Phrygian cap, the red conical cap adopted by the revolutionaries as the symbol of liberty. For the Nannas it’s a yellow triangle. That started with Clare and Lindy paying tribute to their local anti-gas movement by knitting with the bright yellow and black used for its triangular ‘lock the gate’ signs.

Nannas use the triangles they make for bunting and sew them together as blankets for the Wrap with Love charity. Some of what they make is sold through their website as fundraisers, so supporters can buy knitting patterns for a choker (with triangle), a Wildlife Victoria joey pouch and a sunflower. “Some of the women who are great knitters make the most wonderful things,” says Clare, who usually sports a trademark knitted beanie.

Passers-by are disarmed, she says. “They sit and say, ‘what are you knitting?’ It is a real icebreaker. If people say, ‘hi, sign this petition’, people put their heads down and scurry past.

“We are seen with great fondness throughout the environment movement, people are always pleased to see us when we turn up at blockades and rallies. We hug everyone, we dance, have music on, we are cheeky old nannas – every person there is our grandchild.” Liz Stops agrees: “A cluster of women knitting in the midst of potentially volatile circumstances has the power to defuse aggression and even generate humour.”

At the Bentley blockade on the New South Wales north coast which resulted in the suspension of gas exploration there in 2014, the “Nannadome”, a protest support centre, played a significant role. Like all the Nannas protests it was extensively covered by the media, which loves them. Clare acknowledges they use “the character of the dotty old lady” to advantage.

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Les Tricoteuses were also immortalised by a successful newspaper reporter turned fiction writer – Charles Dickens. In his A Tale of Two Cities the fictional knitting activist Madame Defarge sits quietly in her Saint Antoine wine shop with her husband, working into her knitting the names of those to be executed. She may be far-fetched, but she “informs an understanding of knitters as social observers”, although “tainted” by her own involvement in the downfall of fellow citizens, Joanne Turney writes in The Culture of Knitting. “Like Mme Defarge, contemporary artists are harnessing the ordinary practice of knitting to communicate and list the atrocities of the times.”

The fight against terrorism has been a key motivator. “Atrocities are happening in our front yards and on our televisions and we need to find ways to react against what is happening without either giving up or exploding,” American writer Betsy Greer wrote in 2003. Eleven years later it was Betsy who, at the suggestion of a friend in her knitting circle, coined the now widely-used term “craftivism” in her book Craftivism: the art of craft and activism.

She said its essence lay in creating something that prompted people to ask questions. “We foment dialogue and thus help the world become a better place, albeit on a smaller scale than activists who organise mass demonstrations. To some, our work may seem unimportant, but to me, the small scale of craftivism is vital. It turns us, as well as our work, into vessels of change.”

A knitter who once cross stitched anti-war graffiti, Betsy was bothered that “two positive words had been culturally redefined as negative”. She writes in Extra/Ordinary that the words craft and activism each provoked strong reactions. “But what if each was treated as a positive entity? What if they could each use the energy created by the other to take on a new idea?”

It’s worth noting that the term ‘knitivist’ for knitting lists has since been coined, it is not clear by whom. The Knitivist Facebook page welcomes those who “knit or crochet to make the world a better place”.

Crafting Revolt Seven years before Betsy Greer coined her catchy word blend, Melbourne crafters Casey Jenkins and Rayna Fahey had launched the feminist crafters Craft Cartel. Their aim: to communicate their ideas about issues such as the environment, violence against women and the consumer society through craft – or, as the Cartel’s Facebook page puts it, “for crafty types who don’t dig rose-scented doilies”.

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Rayna is an activist radical cross stitcher who in 2017 published Really Cross Stitch: The Book, with 40 original designs based on the banners at the recent marches. Subtitled ‘For When You Just Want to Stab Something a Lot’, its promotional material quoted Betsy: “I think every act of making is an act of revolution.”

Casey came to knitting as a way to express political and feminist messages. Not for her the wiggly dolls’ scarves so many novice knitters struggle with – she started with knitted vaginas. Provocative and to some confronting, the Cartel’s “Cunt Fling-Ups” involved pairs of knitted vaginas joined with a shoestring and hurled over inner Melbourne powerlines under cover of darkness by groups of feminist crafters. This process was immortalised in the 2010 documentary Making It Handmade, by Melbourne feminist filmmaker Anna Brownfield, whose previous credits included feminist pornography. The point: demystifying the cunt and undermining its aggressive, negative associations with male-dominated street art, Casey says. “It’s not just art or craft, it’s to draw attention to something in a positive way which makes it activism. It’s about trying to engage people in a conversation.”

Knitting-based activism has been an important part of Casey’s craftivist repertoire since then. In the lead up to the 2013 Australian federal election, she launched Knit Your Revolt! Revolutionary Knitting Force: “A network of rad crafters sticking their needles to misogynistic knit-wits & extreme conservatism”, as its Facebook page describes it.

A Knit Your Revolt! banner; Craftivists get their hooks into former Prime Minister Tony Abbott. Photographs: Marlène Habib, Unbound Photography, Melbourne, (left) and Casey Jenkins.

A key purpose was campaigning against then-opposition leader Tony Abbott. About 140 knitters around Australia contributed knitting to be stitched into banners reading “Knitwit PM” and “Misogynistic Knitwit not Prime Minister Material”. One featured a large crochet Abbott head. 105

Then, thanks to Pozible funding, Casey toured them to marginal electorates, talking to knitters and voters.

“Since then different areas of Australia have been active in different ways,” says Casey. The Knit Your Revolt! Tricycle Gang in Queensland has been particularly active. Its targets have included then-Premier Campbell Newman’s plan to have prisoners wear pink jumpsuits (they delivered a solitary confinement cell made of pink yarn to Parliament house in Brisbane) and his 2013 anti- gang laws. That had the ‘gang’ riding trikes yarn bombed and decked with gang patches around Brisbane in solidarity with motorcycle enthusiasts they believed were persecuted by the government’s crackdown on bikies.

Knit Your Revolt! Tricycle Gang takes a stand at a Brisbane rally (left) and prepares its ammunition. Photographs: The Stitch.

A Brisbane medical specialist who prefers to be known by her activist name, Bad Ass Motherstitcher (known as The Stitch), was a key figure in the Tricycle Gang, which emerged in response to the Newman government’s Vicious Lawless Association Disestablishment (VLAD) law. Her craft activism began two years earlier, while pregnant with her second child. “I was bored and lonely and wanted to hang out with other young mums.” So, coffee with the prams at a local park? Not likely.

Although she hadn’t been involved in political activism since her university days, The Stitch’s “reaction to motherhood” was to found AMUCK (Anarchist Mothers Underground Craft Kollective). These crafty mums with alter egos and balaclavas used their limited spare time and their crafting skills – also fairly limited for some, the Stitch says – as an activist tool. They smuggled a Maternal Guilt quilt, embroidered with messages and with a pocket for gallery-goers’ “guilty thoughts”, 106

into Brisbane’s Gallery of Modern Art during its Contemporary Women in Art exhibition. It stayed six days before being discovered.

Success with their “heists” was energising and more actions followed. These ranged from the soft, such as baby “boobie beanies” and leaving hand-crafted flowers with appreciative messages on the windscreens of cars parked in pram parks, to the overtly political – a piñata featuring (then-Prime Minister) John Howard.

A baby boobie beanie – AMUCK in action. Photograph: Meg Bassett.

It was a natural progression for the group to become the Brisbane arm of Knit Your Revolt! contributing knitted sections of giant banners, with The Stitch as its Queensland representative. But when the VLAD laws were proposed, there were some sleepless nights. “We were doing things that were bordering on being illegal” Legal advice was no comfort – the lawyer warned that the anti-consorting prohibitions may include craft groups. “I thought, that is a bit ridiculous if knitters get put in prison if they knit things the government does not like.” So The Tricycle Gang was born.

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The Cardigan of Immunity When The Tricycle Gang attended its first big protest rally with Queensland bikers The Stitch was on edge. “I was nervous that they might think we were taking the piss but they were all really good-natured.” But it’s a concern all craftivists face – will the intended messages delivered through textiles, made by women using “domestic” crafts, be taken seriously? She has concluded that they are.

“We have had a lot of nationwide press for actions that involved very few people that otherwise would not have gone anywhere.” She cites the gate-crashing of a Liberal National Party men- only International Women’s Day celebration at Brisbane’s Tattersall’s Club by “gang” members wearing dodgy fake knitted beards. “I think because it was so absurd, the juxtaposition between something that is everyday and expressing ourselves, it got attention.

“Craft has power in this coming together of people all contributing and collaborating. We talk about our cardigan of immunity – where basically you can get away with anything if it is covered in knitting.”

As for Clare, for a woman pursuing a “benign and harmless” hobby she has taken her knitting to dangerous heights – literally. In February 2013, at the 300-strong Doubtful Creek blockade, near Kyogle, NSW, protesters tried to stop a convoy of trucks using a forest road from accessing a drilling site on private property. At 3.30am Clare mounted an 8 metre bamboo tripod the protesters had erected over a gate to the mine site. Locked on to it in a sling, so the gate could not be opened before she was safely removed, she worked on ‘The Knitting’ – a scarf she has been making since the Nannas’ first knit-in. It was draped around the tripod and woven around the gate.

“It currently measures about 40 metres, it has been involved at many blockades. It has been run over by drill rigs, cut by police, smashed by front-end loaders and graced several craftivism exhibitions.” At noon, she was removed by police and arrested – one of several Nannas that has happened to. As for The Knitting: “In the end the tripod was smashed down by a front end loader, and my poor old knitting came back to me in shreds. I was able to put it back together, so it lived to fight another day.”

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Clare Twomey on a bamboo tripod over the gate at the 2013 Doubtful Creek blockade with ‘The Knitting’. Photograph: Supplied by Clare Twomey.

The nonthreatening nature of knitting is an advantage in raising awareness and support for their cause, Clare believes. It was a visit to gas wells country in Queensland with Lindy that fuelled their rage – the destruction of land, the callous, uncaring mining companies, the poisoned water children could not drink. “It just made us so angry; we started off bearing witness and giving out information when people came and talked to us, which people do when you knit in public. It opens people up, we’re not scary, like young people jumping up and sticking pamphlets in people’s faces.”

Yarn bomber Alison Ayers also believes knitting’s image works in her favour. Yes, you can recognise her Paddington home by the colourful pom-poms in the tree outside, but more recently she has been proactive on current events and issues. One such example was when young women used fibre art as part of a reproductive rights challenge in Texas, she says. In protest at laws closing abortion clinics artist Chi Nguyen organised a 2016 public embroidery project to stitch tally marks totalling the number of women – 5.4 million – who could be affected. “Being involved in that kind of thing has become a tremendous pleasure,” says Alison. “Just getting to meet like-minded women from around the world. It would not have happened without knitting and the yarn bombing and it would not have happened without Instagram.”

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Alison Ayer’s knitting with a message. Left, suffragette pole close-up, Surry Hill, Sydney, 2016; VOTE banner on the needles. Photographs: Alison Ayers.

Now, an item on the evening television news can prompt Alison to begin a project. She took part in creating a marriage equality pole at a pedestrian crossing and a suffragette pole outside a bookshop for International Women’s Day, decked in suffragette colours and the faces of her favourite feminist authors. In the days before the July 2016, federal election, appalled by reports that 950,000 eligible voters were not enrolled to vote, she and husband Phillip installed a huge knitted sign saying, ‘VOTE’, on the fence outside the local polling booth.

Alison Ayers’ Harlequin project before installation (left) and adding colour to poles on an inner Sydney housing estate. Photographs: Alison Ayers.

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In late 2016 Alison was invited to create and install a yarn bomb as part of a larger project at a public housing high rise with a reputation for violent crime and chronic suicide. “I wrapped three poles on the covered walkway where residents catch the elevators. The Harlequin design aligned with the colours of an artwork used in the nearby hallway.” Alison’s pops of colour were part of an arts initiative that included craft and painting classes for shut-in residents, a community group’s efforts to change the culture there. “Will it make a difference? I was sceptical before the install day, but after being down there and meeting so many beautiful and engaged residents I’m now much more hopeful.”

Through her knitting Alison is now not only brightening the world around her but responding to it. “It just gives me so much pleasure, thinking about it, planning it, and creating art in response to the world around me. “It’s frivolous work, it’s important work.”

Testing the Claims Alison is realistic enough to know she is not going to change the world. But Melbourne craftivist Tal Fitzpatrick says that isn’t always the case: “Craftivism has been known to make quite bold claims about quite small acts of making which need to be tested.” That prompted her postgraduate research on craft as a force for change, a form of resistance and advocacy – and its limitations.

Manuela Farinosi and Leopoldina Fortunati have written about these limitations: “There is, in the urban knitting movement, a completely different political logic from that used in politics in the past and which was based on persuasion, manipulation and power. This one is an affective and viral logic, which does not need to convince and to dominate anybody, which does not have any adversary to destroy but one which conveys warmth and joy.”

Their conclusion is pessimistic, perhaps overly so. “Unfortunately, this peaceful dimension also constitutes, in our opinion, a limitation for urban knitting collective actions, given that the artistic installations do not seem to lead to significant change in political dynamics both at a local and national level of public institutions.”

Craftivism and using knitting for political protest have also been criticised as the preserve of white, well-off women with time and money for useless, impractical leisure activities. While yarn bombers have come to expect criticism, craft activists often face similar flak.

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Tal is aware of these critiques of craftivism’s lack of diversity: “The fact that it is normally this kind of young, white educated woman who has the leisure time to make work that is labour- intensive and has the resources.” She concludes that while most is at the level of an individual maker, with some not even given the craftivist label, “I think there is a great deal of work happening around our history, to tell stories that are not being heard or to make political statements. Some slips under the radar because it is seen as feminine.”

She has heard the argument that using ‘women’s’ crafts such as knitting damages the feminist cause. But like Clare and The Stitch she believes this stereotype can be used to advantage. “A good thing about craft that is effective and subversive is that it is connected with this kind of feminine and domestic thing that is seen as kind of harmless. So (it) can say things without being perceived as adversarial.

“It is a way to be playful and there is a lot of wit in craft work, but there is also a lot of anger and frustration. As makers we are trying to process these feelings of anger and frustration and trying to generate something positive from that negative energy, channelling that through a process that takes time and is mediated and create something that tries to alleviate these feelings.”

Tal is a Griffith University fine arts graduate who came to craftivism and her own medium, quilting, only in 2013, through three years post-university work with Volunteering Queensland. She coordinated natural disaster resilience leadership programs, and worked with communities such as Grantham, where 12 people died in flash floods in 2011. She saw art initiatives (including craft) bring the community together. “I was interested in what art can do. The traditional question has been, what is art? But for me the interesting question is, what art can do and how can it effect change.”

She realises the impact is limited – mostly local, person to person. But she is more optimistic than Manuela and Leopoldina, and believes that it can be significant. She cites the example of indefinite detention and asylum seekers – the subject of some of her own work. Despite the weight of evidence about illegality, damage to health and wellbeing, this is not the dominant narrative. “Craft is effective in getting alternative narratives told; voices for those otherwise silent … It is a good way to show solidarity.”

Sarah Corbett, founder of the UK’s Craftivist Collective and author of A Little Book of Craftivism, agrees. It’s easy to slip into defeatism and think that one person cannot make a difference. But 112

craftivism can be part of the solution and “create safe spaces for honest, open conversations”, she believes.

Tal agrees: “There is value in this way of working.” That’s so whether it’s small-scale, individual craftivism – for example Melbourne’s Sayraphim Lothian, who leaves toy cupcakes as random gifts for passers-by – community projects such as Red Cross volunteers knitting Trauma Teddies or larger, more overtly political projects across state borders such as Knit Your Revolt and the Nannas.

That’s a view shared by sustainable lifestyle advocates Tracy Bourne and Lisa Kendall. They created the WARM project believing knitting could help raise awareness of climate change. However, Andrea Black and Nicole Burisch sound a warning: “Politically engaged crafting is now being presented in formal exhibition spaces such as major museums, national galleries and educational institutions” and is being incorporated into their marketing strategies, they write. While this is recognising the inclusiveness of craft and potentially bringing new audiences, they ask what this means for the original work. “The danger is that the shift in context can also result in the erasure of community identities or of the activist issues that these practices seek to address”.

So, like yarn bombing, craftivism is at risk of being mainstreamed and commercialised and in the process losing the edge so essential to its effectiveness.

Strength in the Extraordinary Tal and curator Katve-Kaise Kontturi describe craftivism as gaining “global traction”. In an article for digital magazine Harlot, they echo the views of Clare and Alison that the homely, womanly qualities surrounding knitting, rather than undermining its use as a medium of protests, increase its effectiveness. It’s unexpected and subverts the stereotype. They write: “The ability to use craft to soften the blow of dissent is a unique strength of the craftivist movement.”

They have found the loud messages, protests and demonstrations often associated with activism can often be seen as “too confrontational and antagonistic, as well as futile”, while there is scepticism about how well online activism – e-petitions and the like – actually translate into action.

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But their conclusion is upbeat: “What we want to suggest is that craftivism as micro-politics is as political as any macro-political action such as large-scale demonstrations or the implementation of a new law. Its political efficacy lies in its ability to engage with diverse groups of people and provide them with a sustainable way of interacting, communicating, and taking action with one another.”

Psychologists Winnifred Lewis and Emma Thomas agree that attracting diverse groups is a strength. In an analysis of Casey’s 2013 nude knitting in The Conversation, Winnifred, from the University of Queensland, and Emma, from Murdoch University, wrote that it was unusual and therefore likely to attract coverage and public attention and could attract a different demographic from mainstream activism. “Some of it is sexy – and ostensibly sex sells…. Naked or knitting protests are also likely to stick in punters’ memories … Similarly, knitting could be associated with nurturing women, with elders – people you respect and want to listen to.”

Also previewing that year’s World Naked Bike Ride, they saw such “quirky and offbeat” protests as irritating many serious-minded activists. Their research showed that “the more conventional the protest format, the more people are open to the message, but the less motivated to attend to it. The less conventional the protest format, the more media and public attention, but also the more negative that public and media attention tends to be.”

But they saw potential for it to work with the new world of e-activism. “New expressions of artistry, confidence and creativity in public action are likely to draw attention to worthy causes, and to attract new demographics to their social movements.”

Trent Newmeyer writes that crafts, including knitting, represent “a resistance to consumer society, to the time crunch resulting from the demands of work and family (real or perceived), and to exploitative labour practices of corporations”. Politicising craft is also a reaction to the perception that feminists devalue it, he believes. “The conservative image and practice of crafting is being turned on its head and infused with subversive messages that communicate dissent and protest.”

While some knitters such as Casey learn to knit specifically to subvert its traditional image and use it for political purposes, most learn for more traditional and domestic purposes. They labour to create a basic scarf, a dishcloth or squares for a small blanket. Increasingly though knitters, many of whom will have begun in this mundane way, are open to the possibility that they have 114

in their hands a tool which can draw attention to an issue, convey a message, and attract media coverage through this play on its quirkiness and wide appeal.

An Australian pussyhat goes to Paris – Aurora, yarn bombed by Alison Ayers, February 2017. Photograph: Alison Ayers.

Alison realised she had at her fingertips the power to go beyond mere beautification. Onlookers laugh, but then they listen, they empathise – after all many of them, too, are knitters – and the message becomes more potent in its relevance and immediacy. When, during a Valentine’s Day visit to Paris in 2017, Alison added a pussyhat to the statue of Aurora, posting it on Instagram, she knew that whether those who saw it were shocked, amused or simply confused they would remember and likely think about what they had seen.

Liz Stops understands this: “Although craft may be perceived by some as old-fashioned or irrelevant … it can also function as a powerful strategy to examine and challenge contemporary issues and materially, socially and ideologically contribute to the crafting of culture.” She believes people from different walks of life and with differing political views have, through the Nannas, become empowered. “No longer helpless in the face of corporate might or political disregard, knitting has provided a language with which to speak.”

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So here is activism with the power to make community connections, to unite diverse groups for a common purpose, to harness the power in being viewed as harmless. More than this, as the Knitting Nannas have demonstrated, using knitting in political activism can be extremely unsettling – even threatening, as knitting artist Ruth Marshall (see page 83) contends. Its exponents dare to step beyond the invisible boundaries created by society’s expectation of knitters and, by extension, of women.

Lindy and Clare may call their organisation “a disorganisation” but it is anything but. Across Australia hundreds of women with their knitting, some in their ‘80s, are disruptors, handing out ice blocks, hats, sunscreen and even nappies for protestors locked onto mining equipment, turning up at work sites, rallies and politicians’ offices with their camp chairs and tables – with lacy tablecloths. They are knitting for a tea party that is destabilising in its ordinariness and its extraordinariness.

Further Reading Buszek, ME, 2011, Extra/ordinary: craft and contemporary art, Duke University Press, Durham. Corbett, S 2013, A little book of craftivism, Cicada Books, London. Dickens, C 1973, A tale of two cities, Oxford University Press, London. Greer, B 2014, Craftivism, Arsenal Pulp Press, Vancouver, Canada (See also www.craftivism.com) Hemmings, J (ed.) 2010, In the loop: knitting now, Black Dog Publishing, London. Turney, J 2009, The culture of knitting, Bloomsbury, London. www.knitting-nannas.com www.seam.org.au/warm

Chapter ends, sidebars to be inserted throughout chapter at design stage follow. 116

Keeping WARM for Climate Change

The WARM project combined more than 1000 knitted pieces to create a rejuvenated landscape. Photograph: Sue Green.

When Tracy Bourne and Lisa Kendall set out to inspire knitters to knit gum leaves, flowers and even wind turbines, behind the individual efforts lay a larger, more political purpose. Those small contributions, mailed in from across Australia and even overseas, were to form a large-scale knitted landscape. It would be the culmination of a two-year community art project to raise awareness about the damage wrought by climate change.

Lisa, a Ballarat sustainability director, and Tracy, a singer and theatre director who manages a retreat near Canberra, chose knitting as their medium because they enjoy it. Their large-scale textile art project WARM arose from long conversations over the knitting needles about the 117

impact of climate change. For the 40-something friends and sustainable lifestyle advocates it also had the power to bring together knitters of all ages and political persuasions.

“There is a groovy element to it now,” says Tracy. “A lot of older women knitters might not feel comfortable about the green movement, but care about the changes they are seeing.” So while Knitting Nannas Against Gas exploit the contrast between two stereotypes – political activist and knitting grandmother – Lisa and Tracy’s organisation SEAM (Sustainable Environment Arts Movement) opted for knitting’s cosy image to create a soft, tactile artwork with a serious message.

WARM was prompted partly by Frank, a sheep farmer who sold his family farm after five generations because the drying land, fickle weather and global economics made it unviable. So dependent are we on fossil fuels, we no longer remember how well wool keeps us warm, he told Tracy and Lisa. So they wanted to create a work about the redundancy of producing energy from fossil fuels and the beauty and practicality of wool.

“It is kind of like a call to care about the devastation that coalmining causes to landscapes and to be involved in finding better alternatives to keep warm, including using wool and natural fibres as well as renewable energy sources and energy efficiency. It is also about making lifestyle choices – like putting on another jumper – that allow the natural environment to thrive, rather than be degraded,” says Tracy.

They aimed to include people – not only women – who cared about nature but weren’t engaged with climate change politics or “the angry vibe of protesting”. Not that they oppose protesting, but they wanted to draw in as many people as possible, including from rural areas. “It is a very political work but it is not a protest as such. Part of our inclusiveness and deliberate populism is that we are not going to be protesting.”

For six months until August 2016, through an icy winter, SEAM organised knitting workshops in venues across Victoria. Knitters whipped up everything from flowers, bark and trees to squares in patterns textured to resemble landscape. The plan: to use those small pieces to construct a textile artwork based on the second of two 150 by 180 centimetre paintings commissioned from Ballarat-based landscape painter Lars Stenberg. His “before” painting in acrylic on fibreboard – “because I thought it looked nastier” – shows landscape scarred by coalmining; the “after” shows that same landscape regenerated and is painted on canvas. 118

Before and after – the paintings by Ballarat artist Lars Stenberg on which the WARM project textile artwork was based. Photographs: Lars Stenberg.

Devised while both lived in Ballarat, this was SEAM’s second project – Tracy and Lisa had developed a play for schools about climate change. They attracted sponsors, including grants from Regional Arts Victoria and the City of Ballarat. The spectacular completed work was unveiled at the Ballarat Art Gallery on 3 September 2016, installed on a large wall with a scatter of knitted gum leaves on the floor below. They also commissioned knitting designer Georgie Nicolson of tikkiknits to create patterns based on elements of Lars’ second painting. She ticked three boxes: “Her patterns were beautiful, she is local and interested in sustainability.” Some designs were offered free online, others sold individually for $2 and $4 each, a book of 15 was $20. “We thought of offering these things for free but we did not get enough money to pay everyone a fair wage – often artists and actors are not paid properly and we’re not comfortable with that ethically,” Tracy explains.

In keeping with the sustainable ethos, carbon offset business 15 Trees planted trees to counteract unavoidable emissions – from postage and driving, for example – and knitters were encouraged to use recycled wool. Georgie designed useful patterns including a bark bracelet, bark mittens, landscape beanie and wind turbine toys. Nonetheless, a suggestion by Lisa at the opening that the work may one day be dismantled and put to those uses drew looks of horror from Georgie and Lars, who had just completed the daunting task of assembling it in two-and- a-half days.

Before they did so, no one was certain how it would look, Tracy and Lisa included. Artistic decisions about construction would depend on the number and colour of pieces received. “It’s a mystery what it is going to look like knitted,” said Tracy, midway through the project. “I think 119

it’s going to be quite a thing to put together,” she mused. There was a risk they may not receive enough knitted pieces.

But they did. More than 1000 pieces were contributed by 250 knitters, some sending bundles of 30. They came from across the state, interstate and, thanks to Ravelry, from the UK, Singapore and even from a German refugee women’s knitting circle.

Tracy Bourne and artist Lars Stenberg at the WARM launch, Ballarat Art Gallery. Photograph: Sue Green.

Construction involved projecting creative director Lars’ “nasty” image, inspired by the Morwell open cut mine, onto hessian (cost and time prevented having it printed on). The knitted pieces were layered on it, arranged and sewn into place. “The idea was to give the appearance that we covered up the evil landscape with wool,” Lars explains. Sounds straightforward? Not so.

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Hats, gloves and patchwork squares are arranged to recreate Lars Stenberg’s landscape painting. Right, a tree trunk close-up. Photographs: Sue Green.

Georgie’s biggest concern had been to translate Lars’ landscape into engaging patterns. “I could have done it in fair isle or intarsia, but wanted a broad range to challenge everybody – a way of bringing the community together,” she said at the launch. While camping at Mogg’s Creek with her family, she compared her bark bracelets with the real thing and laid the gum leaves on branches. She had avoided specifying a narrow colour range so as not to deter knitters, but reckoned without the inventiveness of some knitters’ colour choices.

“Pulling them all out of the bags and boxes, it was like the best Christmas ever,” says Lars, who had worked with timber and stone but not textiles. Combining the contributions into a coherent, cohesive 3 metre by 3.6 metre whole however, meant plenty of head-scratching moments, especially thanks to the very bright and even multicoloured ones. He solved the problem by “layering” – code for hiding some of the less appropriate colour choices under others – and very few didn’t make the cut. There was a brief crisis caused by a shortage of pale blue sky pieces. “We put a call out and people came in with bags and bags of pale blue and we had just enough.”

After three weeks in Ballarat the work’s regional journey continued at the National Wool Museum in Geelong. For Tracy, who compares it to an Impressionist painting, that attention 121

from galleries was exciting, but the making and focus on the issue was most important. “We did not want it to be a tokenistic piece so that people would go, ‘it’s a worthy cause, we don’t mind that it is not a very nice artwork’. We wanted it to be something that would stand alone and be beautiful and we achieved that.” 122

Animal Attraction “The twenty-first century is gripped by the predicament of habitat loss and species decline. There is an urgent desire in me to say new things about this disappearing world and to contribute to the efforts to help wild animals and wild places endure. I am devoted to telling the stories of individual animals who have been forgotten, lost, or who are in danger of becoming so.” Ruth Marshall, artist’s statement, ruthmarshall.com

Knitting rarely has shock value. Yet so powerful is Ruth Marshall’s work that those encountering it for the first time are unsettled, even horrified. Stretched onto string and bamboo frames in the style of a big game hunter displaying trophies, her knitted replicas of tiger, ocelot and jaguar pelts challenge our preconceptions of what knitting is.

“Everybody knows it is not appropriate to have a tiger skin on the wall so people go through an emotional journey,” says Ruth. “The interesting thing about my work is that there is a point where you realise that it is not the actual thing and that gives more impact when you are replicating endangered animals like a tiger.”

Australian artist Ruth Marshall at work in her New York studio on one of her knitted animal “skins”. Photograph: Adi Talwar.

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Rendered life-size in astonishingly precise detail, her big cats tell a story of a world disappearing through the loss of habitat and endangering of species. Her coral snake series, knitted replica skins of almost all the 70-plus varieties, affirms the importance of animal preservation.

Melbourne-born Ruth agrees that “activist is a great word” for her and her work. But it wasn’t always so. Back in Australia to visit family, including her Scottish mother Fay Marshall who had taught her to knit at age five, she tells how a job as an exhibit sculptor at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Bronx Zoo – sculpting vines and trees, concrete rocks and giant cat toys for tigers – transformed her life.

She took the job in 1995 after completing her Master’s degree in sculpture at Brooklyn’s prestigious Pratt Institute because staying in New York required employment in her field of study – challenging for a sculptor working mostly with steel. The zoo, where she stayed for 14 years until being laid off in an economy drive in 2009, not only introduced her to new materials such as resins, but to world-leading animal conservation.

“Bronx Zoo is one of the leading zoological institutions in the world. We would be immersed in the environment that these animals originally came from … making the artistic elements that go into making the exhibit look as real as possible. Most of my job was about replicating nature artificially.”

Ruth went to New York on a scholarship to Pratt after her bachelor’s degree at RMIT. She reconnected with knitting during a visit to Melbourne. Rummaging through her 15-year-old stash, she began knitting every member of her family a pair of socks. “I’m still knitting socks, when I have a few minutes, they are the things you go to because they are quick.”

Back in New York she knitted during her lunch break. “Once I picked up the needles I just could not stop knitting.” Then came the day she was assigned to repaint a realistic plastic sculpture of a coiled Gabon viper, its brilliant diamond pattern chipped because zoo visitors, thinking it real, threw rocks at it. “My boss said as a joke, ‘you should knit that’ and I thought, ‘I should knit that’.

“I charted it all up, I wanted it to be as accurate as possible and had the idea that I wanted it to be pinned like a museum specimen. I used the same sort of yarn I was using for my socks and did a lot of hand embroidery as well. I tried to find out more about the snake and do due 124

diligence with the research, so from the first one I was trying to make as natural and real representation as possible.”

By then Ruth was settled in New York. The zoo sponsored her employment visa and her green card and she loved her job, but in her spare time still sculpted. That included casting gorilla hands and antlers, exhibiting in a Brooklyn Gallery. “Knitting the snake piece and getting more dissatisfied with the resin I was using at the time – it was this realisation that I could use the knitting to get detailed and intricate animal markings.

“I picked up the colour work from where I left off (in childhood); I had worked from knitting charts before and knew how to use one, but had never designed one myself and I could not work out why it was not looking like the chart.” Eventually, she realised that a knitting stitch was not square, unlike her graph paper. But first came Rocky.

“Rocky was a tabby cat. It was fairly obvious early on that I wanted to knit big cats at some stage, but I knew I did not have the process figured out. So I started out with my own cat. He was completely uncooperative. He would see me moving towards him with the tape measure and he was like, nah, and he would just go under the bed. I needed those measurements, I had no idea about girth or shape of body.

“He had to get his teeth cleaned, I asked the vet if he could keep him under the gas for a little bit longer. The vet was completely nonplussed. He looked at his watch and said, ‘you have got 20 minutes’. So I had my camera, tape measure and drawing pad. I’m trying to measure girth, length head to neck. The staff had no idea what I’m doing. I’m rolling him round, the staff were just looking at what I’m doing and I said, ‘I’m going to knit him’. They thought I was going to knit him clothes.

“I got all the information I needed. I made a lot of mistakes on that pattern. It was awful. But I was really happy with the results.

“I did not use graph paper, I did a full-scale drawing of him and laid over acetate which I had photocopied with a graph on top. I coloured in all the different colours and in this notebook I wrote down every row that I would do. The acetate moved around … then he came out like this slightly squished, short shape. Rocky would want to sit on my lap (while I knitted) and I couldn’t let him. 125

“I still have the notebook with every single row written down. Rocky’s skin went to a collector in London.”

For Ruth, that knitting seemed like “the right fit”. She had kept alive the goal of her original sculpting – craft and working with the hands. Sick of fragile resin breakages and transport difficulties, she embraced this compact, safe, easy-to-store medium which could be done anywhere and exhibited in many different ways. “When I go on residencies and they ask what I need, it’s like, ‘I just need a table and a comfy chair and lots of TV if possible’.”

It’s a recognisable form – “everybody knows what knitting is” – and the realisation that her work is handcrafted informs the viewer’s perceptions. “What I have found with the work is a lot of people start laughing that it is knitting, knitted animal skin, so it is a double-edged sword that I cannot completely control ... people will laugh but they still get it. They still take away the message that it is much better to have a knitted tiger skin than a real tiger skin. It is like there is some sort of little joke being made.”

Snow leopard ‘skin’ knitted by Ruth Marshall. Photograph: Robert Lowell.

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Since the 2005 Rocky project Ruth’s work has received worldwide recognition, with exhibitions and residencies in Australia, the US, Turkey, France and Germany and her large works sell for up to US$14,000 – although they are a difficult sell. “People want to throw them on the couch. I try to explain that these are one-off artworks, not things you sell the pattern for, which is what the knitters want. I struggle to maintain the integrity of the fine art piece.”

Ruth lives in a studio apartment in the Bronx with her two cats, taking knitting commissions and teaching drawing one day a week at the School of Visual Arts to pay the bills. Her work is backed by intensive research, including at the Bronx Zoo’s library, the American Museum of Natural History and studying tigers in the Berlin Zoo. She still thinks of herself as a fine artist and colleagues describe her work as sculpture, but she calls herself a textile or fibre artist because it’s easily understood. “The crazy cat lady” has been embraced more by the textile community than the fine art community. “There are some big walls that need to be broken down,” she says.

Ruth Marshall’s Leadbeater’s possum kit (right) to raise conservation funds, and completed “skin”. Photographs: Robert Lowell.

She has researched Australian species at the Museum of Victoria and created an endangered Leadbeater’s possum knitting kit – the Knot Impossumble – to raise conservation funds. She has also replicated striped possum, bandicoot, tiger quoll and Tasmanian tiger skins. Now, she is 127

turning her attention to flora: “I want to incorporate the animal skins into talking about the environment they live in.” Last year, during a five-month residency on New York’s Governor’s Island, she experimented with knitting dense flora; then, commissioned by the Montefiore Health System, she made a hanging garden which included crochet contributions from women at a local seniors centre. A request from Brooklyn Botanical Gardens to create a botanical art work offered a research opportunity and she produced a knitted lotus.

“One of the reasons we are losing a lot of species is that their habitat is disappearing. Now that I have figured out how to knit the animals, there is this larger direction of the biodiversity, and I’m still swimming in that pool of ideas.”

Knitting, says Ruth, is a very egalitarian, versatile language. “But in the right hands it can be transformed into something conceptually quite powerful.” She cites the Knitting Nannas, whose knitting she believes has become threatening to people. “It is interesting to me that such an innocent ‘female’ craft has the capacity to symbolise really powerful ideas. I think that is what a lot of nonviolent activism is about – using something that is nonthreatening but has the ability to become threatening.”

For her, too, knitting is an activist’s tool, a means of challenging those who see her work, spreading a message about species decline and the destruction of habitats, as well as provoking introspection about notions of possession. But it’s also about the knitting itself: “It is about animals, but it is also about my love of knitting as well. I could not make these animals if I was not willing to devote several months to a full-sized tiger pelt. And I am still not sick of it.” 128

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Chapter 4

Women on Top

“They don’t see the blood, sweat and tears, they think emotional labour comes naturally to people, but I say it is learned, it is expected. Knitting, and embroidery, all that stuff, it was part of the role of the perfect wife.” Makeda Duong, Adelaide textile artist

Adelaide textile artist Makeda Duong slides her hand into the fine wool gloves, the lace trim cradling her slender wrists. As she does, the words she has knitted into them in fair isle and intarsia colour work, along with traditional motifs, stretch over her hands and fingers and become easier to read: “laundry”, “children”, “washing”, “cleaning”. These gloves are part of her 2015 Duties of a Wife series, as is Innocence, white lace with tiny pearl beads symbolising purity and femininity and “the connection between the purity of the cloth and women’s bodily fluids”.

Duties of a Wife, 2015, by Makeda Duong. Photograph: Sue Green.

Makeda conducts historical research, incorporating it in work exploring the involvement of knitting and embroidery in the suppression of female sexuality and the development of 130

femininity. She began crafting these bold artistic statements in 2012 when her university announced plans to drop its textile arts courses. The affected students – almost all women – were stunned. They gathered in a cafe on the University of South Australia campus and a protest group, Chopped Collective, was born.

For Makeda knitting is not only a tool in the service of her feminism, as it is for craftivists, its gendered nature means it is integral to her art. Until 2012, when her university decided to dump her course, she had separated her feminist views from the work she was making as an art student. “I had not previously connected myself and feminism and femininity with my art works,” she recalls. Now she sees no incompatibility between the two, embracing them for her own ends.

Taught to knit as a child by her mum, Makeda rediscovered it as a student. She also taught herself crochet and embroidery, spurred on by her frustration at the demeaning responses to her specialisation. “You almost cannot escape the whole feminising of it. That’s why I like to bring it up in my work.”

Affection, by feminist artist Makeda Duong. Photograph: Sue Green.

In an essay about the history of craft, author and museum researcher Paul Greenhalgh discussed the promotion of crafts in the 20th century by the Women’s Institutes in Britain. He wrote: “Craft here was a skilled pastime, or something which was in effect a rarefied form of household husbandry.” In the 21st century such attitudes are still prevalent, as Makeda well 131

knows. In response, she crafts works startling in their juxtaposition of fine knitting – white lace, for example – and delicately cross stitched female reproductive organs.

Taking an Axe to the Stereotypes When her course was dropped Makeda was outraged by suggestions that textiles was an easy option. In response she knitted a cushion with traditional fair isle XO motifs and the message, “Bitch Please” in intarsia colour work. A subsequent work summed up the group’s anger: a yarn bombed axe. “I had a dream and saw an artwork with the axe – a big, stripey, pink and red axe and red blood going everywhere,” she reveals. “I yarn bombed my grandmother’s axe. It was difficult for exhibition spaces, they thought it was going to be like a Styrofoam axe.”

One of her best-known works is The Cursed Boyfriend Sweater, part artwork, part cosy winterwear with a feminist message. Every knitter knows about the boyfriend sweater curse – knit for him and it’s curtains for the relationship. Makeda decided not to buck the curse but to embrace it. “I wanted to make the cursed sweater. I started asking people, ‘what are some of the things your partner has said to you in past relationships?’. Not abuse, I didn’t want to get into that, but mean things.”

So she began knitting into the pure white yarn messages such as: “I changed so much for you I don’t even know who I am anymore”; “Your food is going to make me fat”; “I hate your dog”; “That dress is way too short” and, inevitably, “I don’t want to hurt you”.

The work has been exhibited several times, including at Melbourne’s Brunswick Street in March 2018. For the Diverse Feminisms exhibition catalogue at Adelaide’s Urban Cow Studio in September 2015, Makeda, who has a boyfriend – no, she hasn’t knitted him a sweater – wore it in the cover shot. On the gallery’s website she wrote of the impact of traditional attitudes towards women’s work on the way the roles of wives, mothers and girlfriends are viewed today.

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Makeda Duong wears The Cursed Boyfriend Sweater. Photograph: Lauren Miller.

“Historically, the production of beautiful needlework by housewives was seen as part of their role as the ideal wife or mother. This type of work was not valued anywhere near as much as traditionally male-dominated art forms, such as painting or sculpture, just as ‘women’s work‘ like care work is undervalued today.” Yet women’s invisible work – unseen hours spent knitting a jumper for a loved one; cleaning the house every week – never goes away. “Australian society has seen a huge shift towards women’s liberation, yet women still perform the majority of house work and childcare.”

That reality is despite the best efforts of trailblazing feminists such as American Betty Friedan. In her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique she portrayed housewives as trapped in the 133

comfortable concentration camps of their homes, dissatisfied with empty lives that were filled with household chores and domestic activities. Its publication struck a chord with women around the world, including Australia. Ten years later, in the anniversary edition, Friedan wrote of the thousands who had told her the book was life changing.

In those early decades of the feminist movement, some women, as does Makeda now, used their arts and crafts to make statements about the oppression of women. In the 1970s the Women’s Art Movement flourished in Australia, with branches set up in several states, supporting and promoting women artists and their work and tackling sexism and discrimination. Work by the late lesbian feminist artist Frances Budden (later Frances Phoenix), such as her 1976 Kunda, with zips sewn into the centre of doilies all referencing female genitalia, powerfully illustrates this. The original was shown in Adelaide at The Women’s Show in 1977 and later sold. An image of this work was included in Adelaide Migration Museum’s 2015 exhibition Love a Good Yarn – Knitting and Crochet from Nanna to Now. Aiming to show the role of knitting in all sorts of people’s lives, it drew on the migrant community, traditional knitters and those at the cutting edge.

Corinne Ball, curator since 2013, says she also wanted to explore the stereotypes and assumptions associated with knitting. In the exhibition booklet, she wrote: “While in many cultures knitting and crochet are skills used and valued by both men and women, in the Western world men who can knit are seen as unusual and noteworthy because they depart from ‘traditional’ male pursuits.” She asked: “In our modern world, knitting is often thought of as an amateur, female pursuit, not real work but ‘just’ for leisure and fun. How did the male profession of 500 years ago come to be so strongly associated with women and the home?”

She is keen to showcase the hours of female labour in the everyday in the museum’s collection but finds donors think they want only special occasion garments such as wedding and christening dresses. “I wanted to show the household things and how much work went into them. I really wanted people to appreciate the woman hours in these things.” The collection, which does not buy because it wants the provenance of items which come to it, is not as diverse as she would like: “Women are not thinking that people value what they make.”

More than 40 years since Frances Phoenix made Kunda, ‘domestic’ crafts such as knitting are still demeaned as women’s work. Many knitters will be all too familiar with the sarcastic remark, the raised eyebrow, the sneering comment when they reveal their passion for this traditional 134

pursuit. Undoubtedly more men are knitting – some to reclaim knitting from women, as will be later discussed. But as textiles scholar Joanne Turley writes in The Culture of Knitting: “When one first thinks of knitting, one thinks of women… Knitting is firmly gendered in the popular psyche. One reason for this is that knitting is largely a domestic pursuit; it is associated with the home and, by association, with women.” In the 21st century, knitting still has what textile historian Linda Newington has called an image problem: “The word is often met with an impassioned response, but that passion is not always positive,” she observes in her book In the Loop: Knitting Now.

Adelaide artist and scholar Lizzy Emery co-curated the Diverse Feminisms exhibition, which featured five emerging artists whose work explores feminist politics, including two knitters – Makeda and yarn bomber Nonna Reckless. Lizzy wrote: “Through their work these artists demonstrate how feminism as strategy and visual art creates a transgressive and liberating voice which challenges mainstream representations of women’s lives.”

Feminist scholars don’t usually wield knitting needles – or that’s another stereotype. But Lizzy, artist, textiles and art history lecturer, does. For her, too, outrage at the university’s decision to shelve textiles was a call to action. An art studies textiles elective in 2010 spurred her passion for textile art, especially knitting and embroidery. Learning to knit was “like really discovering myself”, so she wanted the same chance for others. She took strong exception to those who said very few men studied textiles, implying that was a reason to can the courses. “I think, why does that matter, why can’t it just be 30 women in a room wanting to learn traditional skills, why does it have to be validated by men?”

Lizzy ditched plans to be a photographer to study textiles, and is now lecturing and undertaking a PhD. The research and study is as important as the making because so much of women’s culture has been ignored, she explains. But she also makes art – such as the sequined “lady parts” with fluffy trims revealed inside a cute display box. “It started as a joke with a curator friend who said, ‘wouldn’t it be funny if you made 1000 of them and filled a room’. It went from being a joke to, ‘now we’re going to do it’. It’s just a humorous response to the way that we talk about the body.”

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Crocheted and knitted vaginas by Lizzy Emery, destined for Adelaide parks. Photograph: Lizzy Emery.

Lizzy relishes the “double take” reaction to artworks with a strong feminist message. She has been inspired by the US women’s rights activists who in 2012 campaigned against politicians’ attempts to regulate women’s health issues such as abortion and contraception. They sent handknitted pink vaginas and uteruses – some with friendly little faces – to congressmen and senators. “The message is hands off my uterus. If you want one to control, here’s one of your own," the group’s co-founder and knitting book author Donna Drunchunas told (US) ABC News. Patterns for knitted wombs and vulvas were made available online.

Lizzy believes knitting and crochet lend themselves to conversations about otherwise awkward topics; “those ideas of menstruation and women’s bodies being dirty when it is just natural – yet you cannot talk about that on TV”. She loved the lifelike crochet Boob Beanie created and sold online by Heidi van Rijswijk, an Australian mum fed up with being judged for breastfeeding her son Brock in public, and the media attention that drew to a taboo subject. “That is the great thing about knitting and crochet, that you can come up with a playful response to heavy issues.”

Having recruited other knitters – “knitting and crochet lend themselves to women collaborating” – Lizzy is contemplating a workshop teaching women to crochet vaginas, then yarn bomb public places with them. Unsuspecting Adelaide strollers may come upon a fluffy knitted vagina or uterus in a park or laneway, she warns. “I have started implanting a few round the city in secret 136

little places but my long-term vision is covering the walls of a small gallery space. It is celebrating the body, but looking at the way we become so dissociated from even talking about genitals.”

For Lizzy, as for Makeda, knitting is not only an artistic medium, but a tool to draw attention to attitudes to women and issues affecting them – a weapon of protest. Its “fluffy” and domestic nature contrasts with the seriousness of those issues, an unlikely juxtaposition which adds potency to the message. Says Lizzy: “I think of knitting as this living, breathing culture. You think of the women who have gone before us, it carries so much with it. Knitting lends itself to this balance between looking domestic and comforting but with a subversive edge.”

Sandy Black, knitting designer, curator and Professor of Fashion and Textile Design and Technology at the London College of Fashion, puts it this way: “Several artists have recently adopted knitting to signal a repositioning of traditional women’s work, and to provide an ironic and subversive humour, for example making hard masculine objects such as tanks and cars soft and feminine. The inherent perceptions of knit as old-fashioned, domestic and safe, which are embedded in the wider social consciousness, enable these works to succeed.”

Is Knitting a Feminist Act? So is simply taking out the knitting needles and yarn and casting on a feminist action? Yes, say some knitters such as Melburnian Sophia Cai; it’s reclaiming an activity traditionally associated with domesticity. “I think the thing about feminism is, it is not about defining people more one way or the other as in, some people may feel like if you want to be a housewife you are not really a feminist – a view perhaps perpetuated when feminism first started,” she explains.

“Now we have moved into this general view that as a woman you can do anything and feminism is not here to tell you what you should do. I can feel very free to do things like knit and crochet and not feel like I have to defend my choices.”

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Sophia Cai knitting in her Melbourne apartment. Photograph: Pia Johnson.

Sophia’s charming apartment is a shrine to cuteness. Colourful dolls and toys jostle for space on shelves and in display cases. Some peep over the edge of bookshelves in the lounge area where, at night in front of the television, she knits clothes for the big-eyed Blythe dolls she collects. Japanese cartoon character toys keep a watchful eye from above her computer. So would she call herself a feminist? She is unequivocal: “Yes, I would.”

Sophia Cai’s Blythe doll Burger sweater design “went crazy” when posted on Instagram. Photographs: Sophia Cai. 138

Her “hobby” knitting and craft offer a creative outlet – her dolls’ garments are tiny, detailed works of art, including fair isle and bobble pom-pom hats, an intarsia Christmas tree sweater, a fashionable pinafore and a Burger sweater. It featured in Frankie magazine after it “went crazy” when she posted it on Instagram, and she sells them on online craft marketplace Etsy.

Sophia knows some feminists may see a disconnect between this and her identifying as one of them. But for her, both are about the freedom to be herself. “Knitting, crochet, dolls, dolls clothes, toy collecting – I have always liked cute things in my life and I have never thought that made me any less of a feminist.”

Her family migrated to Australia from China, her mother having supported herself through university as a test knitter. Sophia mastered knitting on her third attempt after abandoning it as a child and again in her teens. She was on an art history scholarship at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art in 2013, alone in London for a year, studying for her Master’s degree. She drew on those early lessons and taught herself, inspired by the city’s yarn shops. “I was exposed to this beautiful world of knitting and the possibilities.”

Sophia was studying three Chinese artists who use craft practices in their artwork, when she took up knitting and was reading widely on the art versus craft debate and the dematerialisation of art – that is, valuing ideas in contemporary art over what it is made from. “So forms that were previously considered inferior, such as textiles, can be used.”

Since then Sophia, who exudes contagious enthusiasm for her toys and dolls, yet is also thoughtful and erudite, has used her work as an independent curator and arts writer in striving to break down those art/craft barriers and to include the excluded – women, Asian artists, textile artists and crafters. “I try and include a lot of what would have traditionally been considered craft but what I am trying to do is break down these barriers.”

In October 2015 she co-curated artists from several fields, including textiles, in the Melbourne exhibition Secret Garden with designer Caitlin Shearer. The following year, preparing for her all- women show No Woman Is an Island in October, she read widely on feminism and women’s rights. “I was thinking about a show centred on the female gaze, about lived experience as a woman and what that might mean today.” Feminism for her “means I believe in equal rights for men and women and also, more broadly, I believe in equality for everyone.” Increasingly aware 139

of the under-representation of women in major art institutions, her curatorial work is informed by that “imbalance at the top level”.

The notion of reclaiming knitting is controversial. Reclaiming it from what? ask not only writers and academics but long-time knitters who say it never went away. In a 2005 article for Herizons Jennifer O’Connor wrote of feminists embracing domesticity as “proof that the sisterhood is powerful indeed”, with feminists exercising their options. But she quoted Lisa Jarvis, publisher of Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture as telling her: “I think it’s a mistake to cast something as political or feminist only because it used to be considered this unimportant feminine realm and now we can reclaim it and say ‘this is important’… and that makes it feminist.”

The ‘I chose this, I’m a woman so it’s feminist’ argument gets little sympathy from Laura Portwood-Stacer, now an assistant professor at New York University. She laid it on the line at a 2007 conference in San Francisco: “The idea that taking up leisure activities that have, at times, been denigrated because of their association with women and domesticity, is political in and of itself holds appeal for the young activist who’d like to imagine she can make a difference in the world. Saying that something is subversive does not make it so.”

Girlie culture, she said in her paper Do-It-Yourself Feminism, doesn’t do anything to radically disrupt the gender system. It re-appropriates gender roles, but doesn’t change, let alone abolish them. She had a rap on the knuckles for young women with the luxury of taking for granted the achievements of second wave feminists (suffragettes having been the first wave), apparently not realising the gains which resulted from their efforts.

This message is reminiscent of the response when, in 2002, Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger angered second wave feminists. Writing about discovering she had left it too late to get pregnant, she criticised “our purple-clad, feminist mothers” who encouraged women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, yet had not “thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock”.

Ironically, one of those mentioned in her list of feminist foremothers was leading Australian feminist Anne Summers. In August 2017, Haussegger hastened to praise her on Twitter when Summers wrote about the pink knitted pussyhats worn by women marchers after the inauguration of US President Donald Trump. Haussegger revealed her own knitting skills were 140

“truly… deplorable”. In a conciliatory gesture, Summers offered to knit her one. “Give me a week,” she tweeted.

What our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us (or did they?) Some young knitters believe the feminists of the 1960s and ‘70s spurned knitting and other domestic crafts, seeing them as oppressive. Joanne Turney thinks they have a point: “Second- wave feminism views knitting as a sign of women’s oppression, as a largely domestic task that takes up a considerable amount of time for little – if any – remuneration,” she writes.

In a conference paper in 2012, Tove Hermanson of the Costume Society of America said: “Second-wave feminists generally viewed knitting as a symbol of women’s oppression: work that bound women to their homes and occupied them in invisible, unrewarded labor.”

But some leading second wave feminists contend this is based on a misunderstanding – even misrepresentation – of those attitudes. Eva Cox, founder of Australia’s Women’s Electoral Lobby, social and political researcher and commentator, believes some recent “myths” about early feminists portray them as against all feminine skills. “This allows them to define us as radically anti ‘real women’.”

In her landmark 2003 book Stitch and Bitch: The Knitter’s Handbook, Debbie Stoller tells of rethinking her “original feminist position” after finding friends disdainful when she became hooked on knitting during a book tour in 1999. She realised that had she been doing a traditionally male activity they would have approved, but not this “frivolous and time wasting” female activity.

“And that’s when it dawned on me: All those people who looked down on knitting – and housework, and housewives – were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being anti- feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile,” she wrote.

Debbie then resolved to “take back the knit”, using her magazine BUST to help her increase its visibility and cultural value. From that came the first New York City stitch and bitch group which she wrote about in BUST. It spawned hundreds of similar groups around the world, including in Australia.

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In a 2010 article about recent “third-wave” feminist magazines – for example BUST – Canadian women’s studies academic Elizabeth Groeneveld writes that one of their key features is promoting the reclamation and re-politicising of traditionally domestic activities, particularly knitting. However, she believes this is based on a somewhat inaccurate view: “The reconfiguring of knitting as feminist relies on an assumption that feminists have historically devalued domestic activities” and that they have criticised women who enjoyed them and who stayed at home. “The idea that crafting is ‘new’ for feminists betrays a kind of historical amnesia about the place of domesticity and feminism… the continual presentation of ‘new’ knitting as “not your grandma’s” betrays a kind of ignorance about older generations of women and the ways in which crafting may have served a similar purpose in their lives.”

Debbie told a 2016 Radio New Zealand interviewer during a visit there that she grew up in a crafty family, but “I also understood that feminists in the ‘60s and ‘70s were really trying to open avenues to get women out of the home and that all of these house-ly domestic things seemed like a way to trap women.”

Acknowledging that a woman’s choice may not be feminist just because a woman made it, Debbie referenced The Feminine Mystique. Feminists of that time didn’t have all the answers, she said. Rather, they had a solution “from where they were”– basically careers for women – but now she’s trying to posit a present-day one.

In 1970 Australian Germaine Greer – herself a long-time knitter – published The Female Eunuch. Like The Feminine Mystique it would become a classic feminist text and an international bestseller. For many women its message of sexual liberation was a clarion call and earlier that year Germaine concocted a provocative item for satirical magazine Oz headlined ‘New Ways with Play Clothes’. It featured instructions for a crochet ‘Keep It Warm Cock Sock’ and ‘The Fun City Bikini’ – female genitalia embroidered on a bra and pants set. More recently, she has occasionally written about knitting in her column for The Guardian newspaper (warning against foisting clumsily knitted Christmas gifts on loved ones, for example).

Germaine wrote in The Female Eunuch of liberating women by replacing the compulsion to undertake activities such as cooking, clothes and housekeeping by using them for fun. In it she occasionally references knitting – in her chapter on Family, for example. She writes of the loneliness of the wife-mother at home, her struggle to hold onto her children and complaints about her husband. “The best thing that can happen is that she take up again where she left off 142

and go back to work at a job which was only a stop gap when she began it, in which she can expect no promotion, no significant remuneration, and no widening of her horizons, for the demands of the household must still be met. Work of all kinds becomes a hypnotic. She cleans, she knits, she embroiders.”

Eva – one of four leading Australian feminists included in Australia Post’s Australian legends stamp series in 2011, along with Germaine – doesn’t recall any edict about knitting’s incompatibility with feminism. “There was a sense that you should not do things because other people demanded them of you. Possibly some women decided they were not going to knit because all they remembered was their mother knitting forever. My mother knitted because she thought it was the right thing to do, even though she was not very good at it. I think a lot of women knitted because it was the ‘right thing’ to do.”

There’s a misunderstanding that being a 1970s feminist meant doing things “more or less on male terms”, Eva believes. That the ‘70s women’s movement was about giving up on the feminine and doing the masculine instead. Not so, although “certainly there were campaigns about doing too much housework.

“The message was: If you don’t enjoy doing it don’t get forced into doing something because it is a feminine thing. As far as I know there was never really anything that said, don’t do sewing, don’t do knitting because they are girls’ sort of stuff, but I think later there was a way of reworking this.” But saying, don’t do it unless you want to – “that’s different from saying, don’t knit because it is betraying the women’s movement”.

For retired University of Sydney e-learning manager Mary-Helen Ward there was no suggestion of any such betrayal. Knitting and feminism have both been mainstays in a life of immense challenges and upheaval. A highly skilled knitter, now education coordinator with the 800-plus member Knitters’ Guild New South Wales, Mary-Helen, who moved from New Zealand to Sydney in 1998, knitted throughout her English studies at Wellington’s Victoria University in the 1960s, then married and had her daughter and two sons in quick succession. She recalls taking her knitting along to her mother and babies group, but her memories are not of lacy babywear. She made all-in-ones and flared trousers for herself.

As she breastfed Mary-Helen devoured The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique. While a young mum she began attending a small, local feminist group. There retired and current public 143

servants read and discussed feminist literature. “That was very important for me because these women were sensible, mature feminists. Most of them had had rotten marriages. There were no lesbians, they were all domestic mothers, I don’t remember any single women.” So did she knit there? You bet. She has never felt pressure from fellow feminists to put down her needles.

“Before 1987 I was a suburban matron in Upper Hutt. After that I was a nomadic, casually- employed lesbian, a very sad person for a long time; my children were with my husband. I knitted a lot at home, but I did not have much money for yarn.”

Mary Helen Ward at home in Sydney knitting – and wearing her knitting. Photograph: Sandra West.

During her Wellington childhood in the 1950s and ‘60s, knitting was done behind closed doors: “My mother would never have knitted in company, if friends came round you did not bring the knitting needles out. I think to her and her generation knitting was housework as opposed to craft and creative. I think for her it was utilitarian, though she enjoyed it.”

She has no such qualms, and wears her knitting proudly: a complex, flared jacket with lengthways stripes and short row gussets; a green and blue Transatlantic shawl by outrageous 144

designer Stephen West; gloves with a challenging construction by Scotland’s Ysolda Teague. Even when undertaking a Masters of Philosophy degree in women’s studies in the mid-1990s she had no problem reconciling her feminism and passion for a gendered craft. “It was not an issue for me; it was creative, it was relaxing, it was keeping people warm. I do have a fairly thick skin – I am not a person who is easily discomfited,” Mary-Helen laughs. “I knitted in women’s studies conferences and no one ever commented on it.” Although she does recall a hard-line gender studies lecturer who was shocked that she valued “domestic work”.

Now, with knitting important in her retirement, even the European trip she took with partner Sandra West (whom she calls the “lace queen”, also a knitter, of course) immediately after finishing work was devised with knitting in mind: mostly train travel so they could knit as much as possible. For neither was this inconsistent with their lesbian feminism. “I have not been aware of conflicts between my ideological position and my personal needs, being comfortable with knitting,” Mary-Helen explains. “I cannot imagine taking an ideological position on anything that would stop me doing something I enjoy. I have never been a great one for guilt.”

Uncomfortable Bedfellows The relationship between feminism and knitting has long been complex, with differing and often ambivalent feminist attitudes towards it, as Joanne Turney notes in The Culture of Knitting. “When a woman knits, is this an expression of her intelligence, creative ability and tenacity, or is she adhering to and reinforcing the conditions and values of a patriarchal society?”

The problem is not so much the knitting as what is knitted and why, she says. For example, is it for personal pleasure, for wider community benefit (such as charity knitting), for personal adornment or “an expression of solidarity and a continuation of sisterhood”? Of course, to this list should be added: Is it for political purposes or to make a feminist statement?

However, some knitters may appear to be making clear political or feminist statements yet not see it that way themselves. In April 2016 yarn bomber Annette Fitton created a knitted installation in response to the painting out of women’s nipples on two large murals of female nudes in Melbourne’s street art central, Hosier Lane. Yet surprisingly, she does not see this – colourful nipples on a black T-shirt – as a feminist statement, nor herself as a feminist.

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Annette Fitton installs her nipples installation in Hosier Lane. Photograph: Lou Chamberlain.

Writer and academic Beth-Ann Pentney suggests some who don’t identify with the term may be attracted to it if it allowed for differences among feminists rather than assuming or demanding they take a particular position. She advocates more inclusive feminism. With knitting readily able to be politicised for various purposes, she believes this would make room within a feminist interpretation for knitters who use their craft to convey feminist messages but who don’t identify as feminist.

Writing about yarn bombing, Lesley Hahner and Scott Vada describe knitting as “articulated to a particularly progressive vision of modern womanhood”. They see it as “a subversive craft that enables women to challenge traditional gender roles”. But, as discussed, many yarn bombers say it’s not about that at all. Rather, it’s about fun, a community of women, beautifying the environment, protesting against inappropriate development and other political statements.

Despite her reluctance to identify as a feminist and rejecting suggestions she was making a political statement, Annette concedes her nipples installation was about more than just fun and decoration: “Inspirational knitting is generally what I’m aiming to produce although a message does add interest,” she says. “I did see this as sending a message, a criticism of our society’s view 146

of the human body. I’m not sure my message was clear or strong enough,” she commented after installing the work, adding that men’s nipples were decriminalised in 1930 so it was time women’s were desexualised.

Nonetheless, she insists: “I don’t see myself as a feminist. There are so many different ideas on what feminism is, I prefer to think of myself as an equal rights for everyone supporter. Not saying women are superior to men, we should be equal. Not looking for a war between the sexes, not taking sides, just saying mutual respect is what’s needed.”

Annette’s installation was the result of an invitation by Lou Chamberlain to contribute a piece of yarn bombing for the Hosier Lane launch of her book Street Art International. “Here was a topic I could bring attention to. I called for contributions of pairs of knitted or crocheted nipples from my friends thinking other people might like to show their support and started knitting generic nipples,” she explains. “This is not a political statement, it's a criticism of our society’s view on the human body. We have become progressively more Victorian in the last 50 years. I think that is a shame.”

The association of knitting with women has, inevitably, also meant it is undervalued. That’s not only in the financial sense although that is certainly true, but as a worthy pursuit, as a craft and, as Makeda and Lizzy discovered, as deserving a role in art, as is further discussed later. Even artists and craftspeople have struggled with the appropriate attitude towards it. Writes British academic Fiona Hackney: “The feminine and amateur status of home crafts as a hobby, which extends the idea of craft to essentially domestic skills, has resulted in such pursuits being undervalued, disregarded, or derided by craft professionals and historians.”

Jude Adams, a practising artist in 1970s Australia who later lectured and wrote on art and gender, has written of the female aesthetic as “a reflection of womanliness or female experience” and work which “referenced the domestic crafts (traditionally relegated to the lower echelons of the visual arts)”. She writes of women’s artwork relating to issues raised by women’s liberation, such as suburban isolation – something Mary-Helen was all too familiar with

– and mass media images of women’s bodies.

Renowned curator and writer Glenn Adamson, previously director of New York’s Museum of Arts and Design, has written of 1970s and ‘80s feminists’ “re-evaluation of amateur (usually domestic and unpaid) crafts historically practised by women, such as spinning, quilting, 147

embroidery, fancywork, lace making and china painting … Feminists approached these crafts with an acute ambivalence, seeing them as ‘trivialized and degraded categories of “women’s work” outside of the fine arts’, but also as an arena for self-expression in the face of oppression. Historical female creativity was not simply celebrated, but was also seen as the result of social constraint.”

The enthusiastic spread of yarn bombing in Australia, the use of knitting in political activism and its “reclaiming” by a new generation of feminists indicate change in traditional attitudes towards knitting. However, a 2013 controversy clearly demonstrated that those views are still strong in the minds of many Australians.

Australia’s first woman prime minister, Julia Gillard , was pictured in the July 2013 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly knitting a toy kangaroo for the soon-to-be-born Royal baby, Prince George. Photographed with needles in hand, a jar of needles and balls of yarn at her feet, she created not just controversy but international headlines.

The time-poor Prime Minister, who told journalist Caroline Overington that she derived satisfaction from finishing small projects, said the knitting was “an opportunity to show another side of me because I can’t imagine (the Nine Network’s chief political correspondent) Laurie Oakes saying, ‘Hmmm, knitting patterns. What are you working on at the moment?’.”

Julia, who refused an interview to discuss this, had been the subject of sexist abuse and made a point of calling out then-opposition leader Tony Abbott for sexism. But the photo shoot – her staff’s idea – was a decision which made her the target of criticism, and, and in some circles, the subject of ridicule, while others leapt to her defence.

The Guardian Australia summed up some of the responses: “News Limited columnist Andrew Bolt said Gillard was "giving encouragement to young female politicians by plying a hobby now synonymous with mad old aunts”. Nationals Senator Fiona Nash told Fairfax it looked like "a bit of a stunt" that showed "a lack of connection" with the Australian public. Senior Liberal Christopher Pyne told reporters in Canberra: "We know the Prime Minister is good at spinning a yarn, now we have a picture to prove it."

Under the headline, ‘Julia Gillard can knit all she likes: she is still a feminist hero’, London Telegraph columnist Alice Sholl commented: “Perhaps society is still squeamish about 148

femininity, especially when – as in this case – it’s a bit kitsch … the images are a bit reminiscent of advertisements of the ‘30s, featuring housewives embracing polished floors.” In response to social media outrage from women who believed the magazine had treated the beleaguered Prime Minister contemptuously, its editor denied trying to send her up.

One thing was clear. Attitudes to knitting may be changing, but its long association with the domestic sphere and women’s traditional roles as housewife and mother mean many people – feminists included – still have trouble seeing it as a legitimate activity, particularly a public one, for a liberated woman.

In her 1984 book Good and Mad Women: The Historical Construction of Femininity in Twentieth- Century Australia, women’s studies expert and historian Jill Julius Matthews discussed the way society “produces” women. “For women the gender order of any particular society creates an ideology of femininity, which establishes both the imperative and the meaning of being a good or true woman. This ideology is a patterned set of ideas and beliefs about women that influences both the behaviour and the treatment of all women in the society … It involves strategies to instil in each woman the desire and need to be feminine. Such desire and need become part of the woman’s sense of herself, and direct the path of her becoming,” she wrote.

More than 30 years on, her contention that the performance of women is judged according to a “checklist”, with women constantly subjected to scrutiny by others and themselves, still holds true. So, too, her view that women’s experiences, “have been made subordinate and relative to men’s” and that feminist history faces the challenge of breaking this down. “It is a difficult, political task … The historical meanings of war, of work, of leisure, of politics, of migration, (are) vastly different for women and men.”

Sophia Cai understands this. She has a strong network of women friends who are also makers and their commitment to feminism while engaging in traditionally domestic craft has not been questioned. “But maybe we are in this little bubble?” She does not see herself as making political works, but concedes her knitting and craft could be interpreted that way: “I think if there was a political aspect to it, it would be like, we are doing it, we’re giving it visibility and therefore we are giving it value. Maybe you are not just showing your love for it, you are standing behind these other people in history and pledging your support.”

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Then she hesitates: “One thing that is interesting for me is the only time I used to feel self- conscious about my knitting is when I thought about my career; for example, someone looks me up online and finds my doll knitting, they might not want to hire me because they think I’m frivolous.

“I used to not post a lot of these things on my general Instagram, but more recently I have embraced it wholly as part of who I am. My knitting, curating, writing, they all inform each other.”

Further Reading Adamson, G (ed.) 2010, The craft reader, Berg, Oxford. Frieden, B 2001, The feminine mystique, Norton, New York. Hemmings, J (ed.) 2010, In the loop: knitting now, Blacktop Publishing, London. Stoller, D 2003, Stitch and bitch the knitter’s handbook, Workman Publishing, New York. Turney, J 2009, The culture of knitting, Bloomsbury, London.

Chapter ends, sidebars to be inserted throughout chapter at design stage follow

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Fighting Online Trolls One Stitch at a Time In October 2013 Casey Jenkins sat in a small Darwin art space and cast on a knitting project which would impact on her life for years to come. She didn’t know that then, of course. She saw Casting off My Womb – 28 days spent knitting with wool she had inserted in her vagina, including days when she was menstruating – as a gentle, meditative piece of performance art. Even when SBS made a small documentary she was unconcerned: “It was SBS2 – I thought nobody was going to see it.”

For her it was about demystifying women’s bodies and society’s expectations of them. But when that video was posted on YouTube Casey, a Melbourne feminist artist and craftivist, became international media fodder. “Artist shoves ball of wool up her VAGINA to knit with it for a month,” shouted The Mirror. “It’s her vagina and she’ll knit if she wants to,” proclaimed BuzzFeed, in a story with excerpts of the video it said “freaked out the Internet”.

Many of the reactions were pure vitriol. Casey was “sick”, “weird”, “mad”, “disgusting”. She was given some right of reply: “I am the ‘vaginal knitting ‘performance artist and I want to defend my work,” she wrote in The Guardian. Then in early 2016, with the video having been viewed more than 7 million times, she struck back with a new work inspired by the attacks on her.

“It was about thinking about what I wanted to do with my body and what people would expect me to do,” she says of that first performance. “There is a big expectation that you have children in your mid-30s and I needed to sit back and think about whether that is something I wanted. So it was about how your individual identity and actions are informed and formed by societal pressures.”

Casey was surprised and worn down by the negative response – though some people told her she should have expected it, had even courted it. “But it was not like that. Even if I know people are going to respond negatively I do it despite that because I don’t think I’m disgusting. I could avoid expressing myself that way but I would feel like a phony really.”

Early in 2016, after categorising the thousands of critical comments posted online – those calling her “gross”, denouncing her as “crazy” – she read them to camera in a robotic, repetitive way as part of Programmed to Reproduce, a new work for Melbourne’s Festival of Live Art. She also used a knitting machine – like her critics, she was technology-assisted – to knit some of those comments into large woollen banners. As with much of her work in the aftermath of that career- 151

defining performance, the banners incorporated wool soaked in her menstrual blood. Think banner bearing the words “OMG Freak”, with the name of the poster of that comment and that date, along with an Australian flag, and the Union Jack in dull red yarn.

As well, determined not to let the negative responses define her, Casey crouched on a large cushion, finger knitting from wool lodged in her vagina. Describing this, she recites: “One long thread made into a womb-like cocoon round me, branching out into a spider’s web like a safe space,” referencing part of a letter poet John Keats wrote in 1818: “Now it appears to me that almost any man may like the spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel …”

It’s provocative stuff but Casey doesn’t flinch. After all, she came to knitting in her 20s as a way to express feminist and political messages. Her novice knitting project was knitted vaginas. She believes that second wave feminism brought with it a denigration of being a woman at home and everything associated with that. “This is a kind of honouring of that, things that have been dismissed because they have been viewed as being feminine.”

Her activism remains at the intersection between feminism and agitation for change, as it does for many women craftivists. For Casey, feminism and politics are inextricably linked and she subverts knitting’s traditional domestic image to convey her messages.

This knitting-based activism has been an important part of her feminist activist repertoire since co-founding Craft Cartel. The Knit Your Revolt! election campaign, previously discussed, was, in part, a response to media coverage of Julia Gillard knitting. For Casey, the community of women which has developed around these actions has been as important as the actions themselves: “I went into knitting for a pragmatic reason: because it was a really neat way of subverting and getting a point across because it disarms people. But through doing that I discovered the personal benefits of it, the process of it, which is community building and communicating with people.”

For Melbourne’s 2016 Midsumma festival Casey knitted Give us a smile sweetheart – a cream baby blanket embroidered in blue with the words, “give us a smile sweetheart”. So far so harmless … but no prizes for guessing how the pink rosettes got their colour. And there was an even more subversive element: Casey knitted words into the blanket with invisible, UV-sensitive yarn using the colour knitting technique intarsia. In bright light the words “whore”, “slut” and “dyke” appeared in pink on that seemingly-innocent cream background. 152

Casey Jenkins’ take on a baby blanket, Give us a smile sweetheart; before sunlight (left) and after. Photographs: Casey Jenkins.

As she prepared to stage Programmed to Reproduce Casey told Melbourne’s The Age she had no regrets about her initial performance, but was looking forward to “putting a fullstop to the end of this”. However, she continues to make new work, including performing sMother, in which she bound herself in knitting created with yarn held in her vagina, at the prestigious Venice International Performance Week in December 2016.

This was serious knitting-based work with a strong feminist message, yet Casey’s frustration at the media’s continued defining of her as the vaginal knitter was evident. Invited to take part in the closing night of Melbourne’s 2017 Midsumma Festival she linked on Facebook to a The Sydney Morning Herald report, noting: “In this article performers at the event are described variously as "award-winning", "special", "incredible", "refreshing" & "favourite". Plus me, who they simply describe as "notorious vaginal knitter". Delightful.”

Despite the notoriety, this powerful work has helped cement Casey’s reputation as an artist and recognition of her work as serious art. In September 2017 she undertook an artist’s residency in Berlin and the following month Bad Blood, developed in conjunction with Susan Bewley, Professor of Complex Obstetrics at Kings College London, was on show at Science Gallery London. Part of its Blood: Life uncut exhibition, her menstrual blood-soaked scarf attracted special mention from the director, Dan Glaser, in a The New Scientist report on the show. Casey 153

attended the opening and also showed a word cloud, “part-knitted with menstrual blood dyed yarn, depicting the most common words directed at the original piece from 10,000+ social media comments”, the gallery’s website reported.

For knitting, it was breaking new boundaries. Not only was Casey offering one in the eye to the Internet trolls who so viciously and relentlessly targeted her, she was taking knitting in new and radical directions. What’s more, she was doing so in the company of a Melbourne group also snubbing their noses at the traditional use of women’s “domestic” craft: the Hotham Street ladies, who work in cake icing, decorated the toilets at the gallery with sweet treat menstruating uteruses.

Casey Jenkins at Craft Victoria, International Women’s Day 2018. Photograph: Sue Green.

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Back in Melbourne she continued to expand the limits of knitting and protest, crafting hardline messages from the soft and fluffy. On International Women’s Day 2018 a pregnant Casey joined a Craft Victoria panel wearing a dress she had knitted in solidarity with the Hollywood-instigated movement against sexual harassment of women. Incorporated into the fabric in colour work were #metoo and, stretched across her swollen belly #notme. It later had an outing in Melbourne exhibition Queer Threads, along with a football-style scarf proclaiming “Queer AF” and other work.

“END RAPE CULTURE” bunting, snowflakes and icicles – winter is coming – in Melbourne’s Hosier Lane, 2018. Photograph: Sue Green.

After the Craft Victoria event, Casey and the Snowflakes Street Art Crew, gathered through a closed Facebook page, joined – and bewildered – tourist hordes taking selfies with the street art in nearby downtown Hosier Lane. They erected “righteous” anti-rape bunting, crocheted snowflakes, many of them made by the women at a neighbourhood house knitting group, and tampon icicles. It was a trans-Tasman project, with some bunting sent by the Wellington Craftivist Collective following the vandalising of messages previously installed by the deletion of the word “no” in the plea for “no rape”.

“The stereotyping of knitting as a woman’s craft is the beauty of it as a tool for political expression. If you present as a woman and you are on the street doing street art you can get away with it, particularly if you are using craft materials, because people do not take this 155

seriously. They think of it as a hobby, very benign and harmless, and you can use that to your advantage.” 156

Trailblazing a Career One Stitch at a Time At a time when women were being urged by feminists to fly free from the cages of their suburban homes, pursuing domestic crafts only if they wanted to, rather than as a womanly duty, Barbara Schembri was churning out dozens of jumpers. But trailblazing feminist Betty Friedan would have approved. A Melbourne single mother-of-two, living on a government pension, Barbara had dreams beyond what Betty described in The Feminine Mystique as “the narrow walls of their homes”. One of only three women in her university accounting course, Barbara knitted late into the night at home and in lecture theatres to pay for it. It was the education knitting bought.

For Barbara, fulfilling her long-held career goal was made possible thanks to the skill learned from her grandmother Lois Pengelly. “Knitting made my education possible. We could not have eaten sometimes otherwise,” she recalls. “I used to have to knit a sweater a week to get enough money for petrol to drive all the way from Kew to Phillip Institute of Technology in Bundoora.

“This was for a shop in East Kew, I think I got $20 for a sweater. I remember once getting $80 for a man’s sweater and it had to be ready in three days. I used to knit in the car at the lights on the way to university.

“They called me Madame Defarge and all the young men would ask, ‘What is Madame knitting?’. I used to pop a little recorder up on the desk, I did not take notes. A lecturer said I could not knit in class because I was not paying attention. He said I was distracting them – I used to sit in the front – and I said, ‘well you can always look over my head’. I said I would stop knitting when I failed or they could pay for the petrol for me to get there.”

Barbara had long dreamed of becoming an accountant. But life doesn’t always deliver on our dreams and, like so many young women in the late 1950s, she married young and had a son, Mark. When he was about one she started accountancy at Swinburne College with special permission to enrol in a men-only class. But she had to drop out – a university degree was made compulsory for accountancy and with a child it would have taken too long to finish.

Through it all she knitted – baby clothes, children’s clothes, school socks and jumpers for Mark, who complained he was the only boy in his school without a store-bought jumper, and for daughter Joelene. Barbara had had plenty of practice when, as a child, she lived with her 157

grandparents in post-war austerity England. “We used to unravel old jumpers and make new jumpers because there were no machine knitted ones in those days.”

After 17 years, her marriage ended and she joined Parents without Partners – one of the many organisations for which she is now volunteer treasurer in her “retirement”. A counsellor who had survived a Nazi prison camp urged her to look to the future. “He asked what I had always wanted to do. I said I wanted to be an accountant.”

That was on a Friday. By the following Monday Barbara was enrolled at the Institute. Four years later, at age 43, she graduated, not the least bit sick of knitting despite making hundreds of jumpers to achieve her degree. Nor was she daunted by feminist anti-knitting sentiment. “My grandmother was in the Women’s Royal Navy Service in World War I. She was a paymistress and she wore pants. She was taught jujitsu by the Navy because she carried cash,” she says. “When we came back from England we wore trousers and we were walking down the street in Kew and a policeman came up to my grandmother and said, ‘you must be new to this country, women don’t wear trousers on the street’. She asked why and he said, ‘it isn’t ladylike’. So she started unbuttoning her trousers and he said, ‘oh no’ and started backing away.

“We didn’t have any more trouble … my grandmother always taught me that women had as much right in everything as men.”

Barbara is now a white-haired retirement home resident with adult grandchildren. But her gentle demeanour belies her pioneering role. “When I had my own tax agency people would ring me up and ask if they could speak to the tax agent,” she recalls. “I finished my course in the top 10 and those students were taken by the top five firms. They interviewed me but said, ‘I’m sorry but you’re too old and you are a woman, and junior partners would be young men and would have to tell you what to do’.”

Work with a superannuation company followed, but she returned from treatment for breast cancer to find she no longer had a job. It was a cloud with a silver lining. Approached by a woman tax agent planning her retirement, she was offered, free of charge, a 75-customer tax agency in her local suburb of Blackburn. In the years that followed 75 became 600 as Barbara built a thriving business from which she retired in 2013.

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Despite the demands of her career and single parenthood, she always found time for knitting. Later it became her way of giving back. Barbara knits everything from bunting for a community house yarn bombing project to blanket squares for Anglicare (she makes one every night) and scarves for the homeless. She even has a knitting seat in her courtyard and a garden kneeler filled with yarn and muses, “would you call it an addiction?”

But there’s more to it: “I give so much away from it, that’s my contribution to people,” says Barbara, who owns nothing she has knitted. Despite battling multiple health problems, she sets herself a daily knitting target and if it’s not met, it is added to the next day’s. “I’ll knit anything,” she laughs. But her smile fades as she remembers the debt she owes knitting and the struggles of other single mothers: “Knitting made my education possible and a lot of women are doing cleaning jobs or other menial tasks when they are on the pension, because you could not live otherwise.” 159

Crafting a Rebellious Voice Liz Saltwell was a quiet girl, a choir girl, not one for speaking her mind. Now, in her fifties, yarn bombing has helped her find her voice, transforming her into a fearless activist.

“I was raised as a quiet English girl who then went and got involved in the church and became even quieter,” she confides in a soft voice with hints of an English accent; she arrived in Australia in January 1999. “Having gone from so timid and you don’t rock the boat, you do everything right… It’s about finding me,” she says of her life-changing journey which had an unlikely start.

Liz and her friends decided brightening up the trees across the road from their struggling local cafe in suburban Brisbane might attract new customers. “You start with a bit of beautification and you find that there are other people out there who think like you, who maybe think a bit more radically than you but because you like the person you listen. And then you find yourself absorbing that viewpoint and maybe going a bit further again and you find yourself deep into activism and looking to put yourself out there.”

She has no recollection of getting “hot under the collar” as a young girl. “I was a churchgoer, a quiet, ‘do as you are told’ kind of person. A person who required people to use logic and be fair. She is still there, the person I was as a younger person, but she has got a much stronger voice now.”

Now, though, with extra-short hair, peacock-patterned leggings and Doc Marten boots, Liz looks every inch the activist. Her transformation from stay-at-home mum to anti-government, anti- coal seam gas protester, yarn bomber, environmentalist and participant in online activist group Knit Your Revolt! is dramatic. “I think Australia has found the rebel who was inside me all along.”

This is a recent transformation, one in which activist knitting and crochet and its community of women helped Liz survive a menopause which took her to the brink, physically and mentally. Luckily, husband David has not only coped with his wife remaking herself, he is hugely supportive of the stronger person she says she is on “the other side” of menopause. “My husband, he just loves what I am doing, that I am standing up and having a voice for all of us.”

Growing up in Carshalton Beeches in Surrey, Liz “dabbled” in crafts, but was not an accurate knitter and did not knit for her three babies – now all in their twenties. She remembers with horror the string dishcloths her mother required her to knit each Christmas as presents for 160

relatives. So her yarn bombing began with fabric made by others. “My daughter was decluttering and gave me a bunch of scarves that she had knitted when she was younger and I said, ‘do you mind if I put them on the trees?’.”

That was in 2012. Although Liz and her friends don’t take all the credit, the local café in Morningside is now a popular community hub where they run regular “crafternoons”. “We’re trying to pass on the skills to the younger generation. And while we’re doing that we are also plotting and scheming what other things we can do.” Each year they replace the knitted decorations on those trees across the road.

Liz Saltwell says yarn bombing helped her find her voice. Photograph: Maria Freeman.

It was that first small act of knit graffiti that led Liz to discovering a community of like-minded women on Facebook. “You discover that there are other people out there doing the same thing as you and you are not a complete weirdo. They are thinking about beautifying the environment, adding a little sunshine and then somehow, along the way, adding a bit of a political message there.” 161

Those first trees led to a pom-pom making stall at a local festival, then a request from a local artist to yarn bomb a street for a much bigger festival in a nearby suburb. “I ended up organising the yarn bombing of 140 poles all the way along the street, with just two to three weeks leading up to the festival. So suddenly I was organising school groups, church groups, mothers’ groups. I managed to pull out organisational skills from running a household of five, six, seven people.”

By coincidence, the festival theme colour was yellow, the colour of knitting sought by the Knit Your Revolt! Facebook group for use in the Knitting Nannas’ protest outside Origin Energy in downtown Brisbane. “I then realised that there were these other people who did knitting and protesting,” Liz recalls. She is now a regular at protests outside the Brisbane offices of Santos, each week leaving a little yellow and black knitted yarn bomb – “something that I attach with cable ties and make it quite difficult for them to remove it”. It’s a style of activism that suits her: “Just sitting outside the offices knitting and talking to whoever. It’s quiet.”

Far noisier was her biggest project to date: Knit Your Revolt!’s 15-metre wide, 10-metre long Bye Bye Newman banner made from blankets and tablecloths, a January 2015 protest against then-Premier Campbell Newman. Carried through the streets of Brisbane by protesters wearing masks and balaclavas (knitted of course), it was hung from Kangaroo Point cliffs.

“He annoyed me so much that I found my voice,” says Liz, who realised that if she committed herself to the project her children could manage without her. She was “letting go of all that stuff I had hung onto for the last 20 years”. But meeting the radical knitters was intimidating: “I thought, well, these people are a bit scary because I’m taking a huge step out of my comfort zone right now – people who are covered in piercings and tattoos and swearing even more than I did. But they had a good heart and it felt like I could do this with these people.”

Now some of those scary women are close friends. “On the other side” of menopause, Liz finds the knitting and crocheting, the yarn bombing, the community of women are an integral part of her life. “I feel very grateful to have done this journey, however dreadful it has been.”

She remains a committed yarn bomber, contributing to bigger projects but still enjoying her small, quiet actions, spreading a little sunshine. “I always have stuff with me, I will probably leave a little something here,” she says with a glance around the spacious foyer of her Sydney hotel. “You make a small piece, it has a tail on already, you have your plastic needle in your pocket and you can stitch that thing on really fast and can move on. 162

“Mostly people give you a sly smile. It makes me happy and I know it is going to make people happy. That one is purely to put a smile on people’s faces.” 163

Chapter 5 Thanks Girls and Goodbye

“It is felt that, at the present time, the chief interest of woman is to make a contribution to the defence of her country, to grow more food, to preserve more food, to equip herself to help with transport, farm work and nursing and in her spare time to spin her wool and knit for her soldiers.” Warworkers Woolcraft, compiled by the Country Women’s Association of Victoria (c1940s)

When a letter arrived for Sydney schoolgirl Win Bucknall from her uncle Eric Green, a Brisbane pilot who had been shot down and imprisoned, it was a moment of great excitement for her entire school. Win had sent him socks she had handknitted and that letter was, as far as she knows, the only one to reach a family member from his prisoner of war camp in Germany.

Born Winifred Small in June, 1932, Win was just seven when World War II broke out. But it fell to even young girls to do their duty by the soldiers. Although Edith Cowan had become the first woman elected to an Australian parliament in 1921, women’s participation in the workforce was limited; they were paid far less than men and excluded from many roles. Australian Year Book 1933 statistics show about 78 per cent of personal and domestic service workers were women, but only about 16 per cent were in manufacturing and construction and 5 per cent in transport and communication. When the war was declared on 3 September 1939, their role was to keep the home fires burning.

As shortages began to bite because of fewer imports and the lack of Australian men available to work, knitting, feeding and clothing themselves and their children became increasingly challenging for these women at home. In mid-1942 rationing by coupons of clothing, including fabrics and handknitting wool (later exempted) and some food was introduced.

An onslaught of knitting patterns for soldiers’ garments – and not just socks – reinforced this home-based role. Reflecting what soon became the new reality, Patons & Baldwin Specialty Knitting Book No. 104, Comforts for Land, Sea, Air and Hospital Use included designs not only for cardigans and a balaclava, but for a handknitted splint cover and hospital stockings.

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Naval knits included designs for submarine drawers (right).

‘Approved designs for Operations and Bedstockings (heel-less)… Woollies for bedwear and convalescence’ was the subtitle of Hospital Woollies, No. 8 in the Weldon knitting series from London, marketed in Australia. It included special editions such as No. 7 Woollies for our Sailors, Soldiers and Airmen, while No. 12, illustrated with a warship, included designs for submarine drawers (above, right) and sea boot stockings. The Missions to Seamen booklets and Woollies for the Royal Navy (above left), produced in collaboration with the Admiralty in November 1939, offered regulation patterns for pullovers, scarves, gloves, mittens, stockings and a helmet.

Win, now 86 and living in New South Wales, enjoyed the challenge of knitting the stocking stitch soldiers’ socks on four needles, but still clearly remembers the yarn’s scratchy feel between her fingers. The coarse 4ply khaki wool she remembers as “soldier’s green” was a far cry from today’s soft wools.

Necessity dictated that such yarns were used far more extensively than just to protect soldiers’ feet inside their boots. For instance, in keeping with the need for thrift and to accommodate shortages, The Australian Women’s Weekly published a design for a “smart cardigan” knitted in blanket wool on 29 May 1943. Some of the ‘yarns’ developed in response to shortages were as imaginative as some of the quirky, thick versions produced to create today’s fast fashions. A photograph in the 10 February 1940 issue of Picture-News was captioned: “Old silk stockings 165

tightly rolled into ‘yarn’ made into helmets to protect Auxiliary Territorial Service girls from chilblains.”

Win, who still knits occasionally, has clear memories of sock knitting while a boarder at a private school in Manly, Brisbane. She knitted in her room or her school lounge and recalls this as low- key – no targets or tallies for the number of socks made by the school. “We did it together after lessons. We had time before we had dinner and we sat round in a circle and yattered and made mistakes.”

Whether all the socks were sent overseas to soldiers, she’s unsure. But her memory of that letter means it’s likely some made their way to prisoners of war, she says. “It had been photographed and had bits cut out because of the censors. It went all round the school, the teachers were delighted.” It’s also a story with a happy ending: Eric returned safely from the war and lived until 1999.

Win had learned to knit at age seven or eight, taught by her grandmother. She’d spent most of her childhood with her grandparents because her mum worked. “Always knitting”, her grandmother made many of her clothes, including knitted winter dresses.

Producing such clothes, along with garments for the troops, was trumpeted by the knitting pattern companies as women’s patriotic duty. Just as women’s and knitting pattern magazines would later play an active part in pressuring women back to the home after the war, so they reinforced the Australian Government’s initial resistance to giving women a greater wartime workforce role. As a Sirdar advertisement for two penny sock leaflets trumpeted from the back page of the c1939 Weldon Knitting Series No. 12: “If you can KNIT you can ‘do your bit’.”

Forbidden to fight, women had been pressing the government for the opportunity to help with the war effort. But although they had risen to the challenge of war work during the so-called Great War, 1914-18, afterwards they had been expected to return to their poorly paid jobs or the home. The Depression which followed meant any hopes of a more lasting transformation in their position in society had been short-lived.

The cover picture on The Australian Women’s Weekly of 24 January 1942, almost two-and-a- half-years into World War II, illustrates the airbrushed charm of portrayals of women’s life at home. An elderly woman sits in a beautiful garden knitting, her yarn a dull, army serge brown. 166

Behind her is a lovely, shuttered home and at her side on the grass a young woman reads a letter, as Win and her classmates did, a Red Cross stamp clearly visible. Photographs lie nearby and a boxer dog sits at her knees.

It’s a peaceful scene, the work of staff artist Wynne Davies, titled Dream Home. However, for most Australian women raising children alone, coping with shortages and struggling to make ends meet, a scene such as this was just a dream – particularly given the national housing shortage.

Source: Australian Women’s Weekly, Trove http://trove.nla.gov.au/aww/read/204391#page/1/mode/1up

Knitting for the Soldiers Unsurprisingly, women’s magazines such as this came enthusiastically to the party in providing patterns to knit for servicemen. Knitting for Soldiers, produced by The New Idea and sold for threepence, included patterns for socks, a helmet, a sleeveless pullover and scarf. With one coupon needed for 2 ounces (56.7 grams) of wool knitting yarn, it included hints on wartime recycling – straightening unravelled wool by winding it on a piece of cardboard, laying a damp 167

cloth on it and pressing it with a hot iron. “The wool will look equal to new and is much easier to knit with.”

Knitting for the Soldiers emphasised women’s home-based role.

Guilt-inducing wartime propaganda techniques even extended to knitting patterns. The Australian Home Journal supplement Knitting for the Soldiers reminded women of the British Red Cross motto, “nothing is too good for the soldiers” and emphasised their home-based role: “Australian women are already busy knitting socks for soldiers, although the war is only in its early stages. This is something that women can keep doing all the time, knowing that socks are a most acceptable and useful gift.”

It played on knitters’ emotions with a warning against using low-grade or cheap wool: “Such socks won’t last and will be a source of swear words all the time.” Those who used shoddy or cheap grade wool had not done their duty by “our fighters and defenders”, it said. “Better to refrain from knitting, or present such socks to the enemy.” Poorly made or ill-fitting socks were equally frowned on.

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Designs from The Australian Home Journal supplement Knitting for the Soldiers

The Victorian Division of the Australian Comforts Fund which sent ‘comfort’ packages to the troops abroad, provided instructions for khaki stockings, to be worn with shorts. Its publications included the January 1940, 13-pattern Guide to Knitting for Active Service with patterns not just for standard socks, but spiral stockings and garters. Museum Victoria, which has a copy in its collection, notes that this was produced early in the war for women who wanted to contribute to the war effort as thousands had during World War I.

The following year The 1941 Lux Book Supplement (produced by Lever Brothers for buyers of Lux soap) asked: “Is Your Man One of the Lucky Ones? Knit for him from these simple Lux instructions.” These included a shaped scarf to fit smoothly under a uniform tunic and a balaclava helmet with shoulder piece. There was also a pattern for mittens with a palm opening for greater control – of a gun, for example; these days a similar design is marketed to windsurfers. Presumably “the lucky ones” were wearing such mittens on the front, not tucked up safely in their beds at home.

For 7 pence – also the price of Marvel’s popular mystery comics (and more than $2 today) – knitters could buy Patons Service Woollies, Specialty Knitting Book No. 153. Its back cover was headed ‘On Duty with the Services’, with pattern shots and pictures of a plane, tank and naval vessel, and in a blatant appeal to patriotism, the Australian flag. Along with the usual designs – socks, balaclavas, helmets – was a Hospital Comforts section which included a hospital stocking, with or without foot. The women knitted these not knowing what fate lay in store for the men they loved. 169

Today it’s impossible to imagine a modern day pilot or first officer in their high-tech aircraft decked out in handknitted mittens, but that’s exactly what Lurline Stuart knitted for her trainee aircrew boyfriend Jeff Arnold early in World War II. “He said it was very cold in the plane, and I also made him a navy scarf,” she recalls.

“Everyone was knitting in those days, we were expected to,” says Lurline. She had learned at age five during nine months in hospital in Ballarat with the bone marrow infection osteomyelitis. Parents were discouraged from visiting – it was thought to be too upsetting for the children – but because her father was the local Methodist minister he was allowed in every day. She rarely saw her mother.

“It must have been very boring, I can remember quite a lot about it. A woman from the church came and taught me to read and someone else came and taught me to knit. I knitted little squares and practised.”

Lurline remembers making a scarf after starting school at age seven, and later, with her eldest brother in the Air Force and his wife expecting a baby, she worked every day after school on an eight piece layette. By then knitting for the soldiers was expected. “I feel a bit sorry about the soldiers, because I wasn’t very good at socks, I didn’t turn the heel well,” she laughs. More successful was the fashionable fair isle vest she made later for her brother.

Although she can laugh about some anecdotes, the war years were tough. “I had seven brothers; the two eldest were killed in the Air Force within 10 days of each other.” The others – one in the RAAF, three in the volunteer AIF army – were spared, the youngest turning 18 just as the war ended.

Her father’s postings meant the family moved every five years. At that stage they were in the Melbourne suburb of Auburn and she recalls: “The war had an enormous effect on my family. The early years when we lived in the parsonage in Auburn were the last time the family was together.”

Like Win’s grandmother, Lurline knitted entire dresses. She recalls making two for herself while at Methodist Ladies College – one, mostly in slim-fitting rib, was in dark red wool with a contrast 170

stripe, another in green 4ply wool. “I think to go and buy one cost quite a lot of coupons. I think we got 40 a year so, I would have soon used those up.”

Those large projects were done without the aid of today’s sophisticated needles. Most were knitted on two metal needles, although four were used for socks. “One of the dresses I made I did on circular needles. I had mumps at about 18 and had to stay home from work. I had a pattern that called for circular needles and could not get them. My mother contacted someone she knew who was a keen knitter and she had one in the size I wanted. It was all metal.”

She recalls knitting in class, the students having persuaded their gullible new teacher that if it was for the Red Cross that was allowed. “We did it for a while, then another teacher came and saw us all knitting away. She took one girl’s work and unravelled it.”

The Australian branch of the Red Cross Society also played a role in producing pattern booklets, including a compilation with socks, a woollen helmet, and knitted cardigan jacket. Despite scientific evidence, it included a knitted cholera belt – a long fabric strip worn twisted round the abdomen under a shirt, believed to prevent cholera by keeping the abdomen warm (a measure by then virtually discredited, but apparently still in use).

In 2013 the Australian War Memorial hosted an exhibition Knitting for the Troops, honouring what an Australian Comforts Fund booklet had called the amazing “flying knitting needles of Australians”. The display covered both World War I and II and included leaflets, letters and souvenirs. One of its perennial pattern collection favourites was Directions for knitting two socks at once.

Socks had been produced in massive quantities during World War I when, according to the AWM, more than 1 million pairs were knitted for the troops. “Keeping one’s feet dry and regularly changing one’s socks were two ways to help stop the spread of trench foot,” its website notes. Historian Michael McKernan has estimated that effort at 10 million hours – mostly woman hours – of work.

This task was immortalised in the iconic 1915 Australian painting The sock knitter, in which renowned artist Grace Cossington Smith, then a student, portrayed her sister Madge knitting socks for the soldiers on the front line. The Art Gallery of New South Wales, where the picture now hangs features it on its website, describing it as distinctly modern in its outlook. It says: 171

“’The sock knitter’ counterpoints the usual narratives of masculine heroism in wartime by focusing instead on the quiet steady efforts of the woman at home.”

The sock knitter was featured in the light-hearted The Sunday Age column, ‘It’s been a big week in art …’ by Melbourne artist Jim Pavlidis in February 2017, as the first-ever Australian Football League women’s round got underway. Each week this column in the sports pages focused on a well-known work of art, along with a contemporary version of it digitally created by Jim. Describing The sock knitter was acutely observed, he wrote: “Painted against the backdrop of war, the image is a reminder of women’s unheralded efforts at home.”

Jim’s own picture was of talented footballer Katie Brennan, captain of the “highly fancied” Bulldogs AFLW team (he’s a Bulldogs supporter), knitting a football scarf in team colours. He wrote: “There’s plenty more to come in her footy adventure but she’ll be ready, as exemplified by this spell of scarf knitting. The Queensland-born Brennan knows that the success of the AFLW will inevitably lead to the introduction of more teams and a season that will stretch deep into winter, when that scarf will be essential.”

Talking about his column later Jim, a printmaker and painter, said he loved The sock knitter. “It’s a very beautiful painting, I prefer it to her more stylised later paintings”. But what particularly grabbed him was that it had reinforced an understanding he had gained while looking at old photographs during a State Library fellowship in 2010. “There’s a sense that the blokes were at war and the women were here working. The women got on with their lives at times of war. That painting, I thought, she is knitting but that does not have to be an oppressive woman thing. It is not necessarily a symbol of that.”

Jim was aware he risked criticism for portraying the ground-breaking woman footballer in a traditional, domestic pursuit – and in case he hadn’t thought of it, his editor reminded him. But he was willing to take the chance because he did not see it that way and had considered his rationale. “I thought through whether by having a woman knitting it was giving into that sort of fear, but once I came to peace in my head, (I thought) no, there is a reason for this.”

So did he think that, just as women footballers are breaking new ground, knitting was losing its traditional image? No, says Jim, although more men are knitting, he knows lots of women knitters but only one man who knits.

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During the world wars that gendered division of labour and the association of knitting with women was even more pronounced than now. In Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in twentieth century Australia, Jill Julius Matthews refers to the prevailing “gender order”. She writes: “This gender order is a systematic process of power relations that, for the individual, begins at birth and turns barely differentiated babies into either women or men of the approved types, thereafter keeping them to the mark as the definitions change. It is a systematic process of power relations that, for the society, establishes a basic division of labour, and initial social differentiation that permeates and underpins all other distinctions.”

At the outbreak of World War II this order determined gender roles, with men at the front and women on the knitting needles. This time more than 3 million pairs of socks were knitted – and that’s not including all the mittens, vests, helmets and other garments which flew off the knitting needles. But women wanted to do more than just knit.

Women at Work It soon dawned on the men in power that with male labour in very short supply and thousands of women willing to work it made sense to let them, particularly as the Japanese forces gained ground in the Pacific and the threat to Australia came closer. In December 1941 Cabinet approved their employment when men were not available. The following year measures to bring more women into factories were announced.

Men left the farms to join the forces, but as they did so more food was needed to feed local troops and overseas troops based in Australia. Women signed up for the Australian Women’s Land Army and more than 66,000 enlisted in a branch of the women’s services during World War II – just under 7 per cent of the almost 1 million Australians who served.

By 1943, while still mostly in personal and domestic services, women were now 13.4 per cent of transport and communication workers and 16.6 per cent of those in manufacture, building and construction, a National Museum of Australia publication quoting Australian Year Book statistics shows.

Historian Kate Darian-Smith, who has described women as begging to be allowed to use their talents to help win the war, has noted that by 1944 more than 855,000 Australian women were 173

employed in industry, the military services and on rural tasks, with women almost 25 per cent of the total workforce.

“Industrial mobilisation of women was sold to the Australian people by the government through the media, where female employment was emphasised as the epitome of feminine patriotism … Women were represented as ‘helping out’ in the workforce because of their love for male friends and relatives in the forces, and the value of their labour was relative only because male workers needed to be either replaced or assisted.” But, she notes, the overwhelming motive for women was economic.

As women’s wartime roles changed, so did what was on their knitting needles. Knitting became not only about keeping the soldiers in socks and mittens, but about garments for servicewomen too, and creating practical clothes women could wear to work in offices, factories and on the land. Gloves for Servicewomen, an Australian Women’s Weekly pattern published on 15 May 1943 was for serviceable, practical gloves made to fit either hand, modelled by a woman in uniform – but it is significant that she was wearing heavy makeup and looking in a mirror. She may have been “helping out” in the workforce, but she was expected to remain “feminine” and to keep up appearances.

Fashion historian Peter McNeil, who describes dress as the single most powerful marker of gender, says that social conventions about dress were suspended while women did traditionally male work. But throughout the war advertisements for women’s uniforms emphasised maintaining feminine elegance, while those for men’s uniforms were about presence and power.

Some advertisements capitalised on this new role for women – a Kraft advertorial for cheese sandwiches, headed “No sissy sandwiches for you now!” told working women that “Doing a man’s job calls for a man-sized meal”. Others reminded women of their traditional responsibilities: “Busy hands… keep them lovely,” urged the beauty page in The Australian Women’s Weekly of 30 May 1942.

After all, as The Weekly reminded women under the heading ‘Attractive Austerity’ in its 24 October 1942 issue (which also featured nutritional advice on eating raw cabbage): “To look lovely in spite of austerity is a problem every woman can solve. To bring brightness and charm – to bring inspiration to herself and others is every woman’s duty.” 174

Two weeks earlier, its editorial called for stable prices following a 22.5 per cent increase in the cost of essential foodstuffs since the beginning of the war. Yet in that same issue the model in an Escapade lipstick advertisement proclaimed: “It is my job to always look fresh and smart, give special attention to my personal appearance and keep the tiring effects of nursing and War strain in the background.”

The need to mend and make do in this time of shortages meant knitting fashions embraced what was available. They also reflected the militaristic climate of the times. In 1941-42 Patons & Baldwin Specialty Knitting Book No. 140 featured a striped, short-sleeved top in red, white and blue, its red buttons decorated with white anchors. This combined a naval theme and stripes, popular because of the small quantities of each colour needed.

Stripes used odds and ends, and the military climate also influenced knitting designs.

A striped, short-sleeved top in the same magazine was headlined, ‘Gaiety and Thrift!’. The accompanying upbeat text read: “Don’t be downhearted! It doesn’t matter one bit if you are unable to buy sufficient wool to make a garment all in one colour – Go Gay! Stripes of every 175

width and colour are positively ‘it’ – add a really cheerful note to your outfit. Help the war effort by using up odds and ends – and help yourself to look smart and dashing.”

A woman’s short-sleeved jacket with a naval feel – striped fronts and a pocket insignia – was included in Woolworth’s Knit Book No 17 “Economy”, as was a jumper in red, white and blue featuring stars and stripes. One of those busy working girls knitting such garments was Nancy Sheppard. She was 15 and had just started working for the Commonwealth Bank in Sydney when World War II was declared. Her knowledge of knitting came in handy as shortages began to bite – she made all her work knitwear, including a dress.

“I have never bought a jumper in my life,” says Nancy, now 93 and living in Bowral House, a nursing home in the New South Wales Southern Highlands. There the elderly residents, virtually all lifetime knitters, spend their Sunday afternoons making squares for rugs for Sydney’s cold and hungry. They reminisce about wartime knitting and Nancy says they recall a hive of industry knitting for the soldiers. One resident, who lived in Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands, remembers the Sydney-Melbourne trains pulling into the local station and women taking piles of patiently knitted scarves and socks and handing them out to the soldiers packed on board.

Nancy, who grew up in Northbridge, knitted all her life including making clothes for her five children, until breaking two fingers in a fall in 2013. She was taught by her mother, Marjorie Foster, at about age six. But she did not knit for the soldiers during the war – Nancy was too busy working, making her own clothes and making her own contribution by entertaining visiting soldiers and sailors at the canteens in Hyde Park which provided meals and organised dances.

So it was her mother, who did not work outside the home, who knitted socks, balaclavas and mittens and who sourced wool for Nancy’s wartime work clothes, despite rationing. She also gave new life to old jumpers by embroidering on them and, a legacy of the Depression-era mend and make do ethos, cut up the very oldest knitted garments to make blankets.

The popularity of uniform-style garments was picked up on with Patons & Baldwin book No. 140 design for a zipper front garment modelled by a woman in slouch hat and jacket. Book No. 141 included patterns for servicewomen – “lady’s service gloves” and a “lady’s service scarf”. Garments were plain, practical and boxy-shaped, shoulders were squared and some even 176

featured military-style epaulets. Few frills and little lace were in evidence. These were designs born of shortages, the need for economy and for comfortable, serviceable workwear.

Utilitarian cardigans and jumpers were photographed against plain backdrops such as walls and women’s magazines focused on the practical. On 19 June 1943 an Australian Women’s Weekly pattern for a form-fitting jumper – “nothing cheap looking about this” – carried a photo caption assuring it had been designed for “long, distinctive service”. It required five coupons for the wool. Patons & Baldwin embraced the reality of thousands of young women working on the land with its pattern magazine No. 176 cover shot: two young women dressed in short-sleeved jumpers, one in a ribbed knitted skirt, one in trousers, holding a sheep by the horns. Behind them, a flock of sheep.

Back to the Home September 2, 1945: The end of World War II with Japan’s formal surrender. Not only did this mean a return to civilian life for most Australian troops, it heralded a completely different life for women on the home front.

They had kept their households and the nation running, working in factories and on farms, in shops, offices and doing previously men-only jobs such as Melbourne tram conductors. After the government approved women working outside the home during the war, that had become their new patriotic duty. A woman factory worker in overalls and mob cap graced the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly on 1 May 1943. Advertisements urged readers to “Get a Victory job”. The Women’s Land Army, war production factories, essential foods production needed them for “the most interesting job you’ve ever done” – far more interesting than what they were doing which “many a modern grandma could do”, the advertisement promised.

As historian Patsy Adam-Smith wrote in Australian Women at War: “Never before had Australia’s women been so emancipated from the tyranny of the home, family and conventional society.”

Fast forward fewer than three years: Not only did women face extreme social pressure to return to the home, it was government policy that they should do so. When Federal Cabinet had approved the extensive employment of women in industries in December 1941, because of the lack of available men, Prime Minister John Curtin promised that this would be “only for the duration of the war”, noted Patsy. When the men came back they would take over. 177

Now women were expected to make way for the returning servicemen – and revert to being housewives and mothers, or to become so, even if they had known only the working life since leaving school. Men received employment preference and service personnel, mostly men, were reinstated. Some women were forced to leave jobs classified as male before the war. Kate Darian-Smith noted that the first of Melbourne’s female tram conductors were retrenched in February 1946. By 1947 they were totally displaced. By then the proportion of women in Australia’s total workforce was back to the 1939 level – just over 23 per cent.

Along with this dramatic change in expectations came a transformation in what was on their knitting needles. Goodbye to military-look fashions and practical garments, comfortable for the factory floor. Instead it was all about baby jackets and bedjackets; as Patons & Baldwin knitting book No. 213, published circa 1947, declared, “Lacy bedwear is back.” It was about looking feminine, knitting to complement the full-skirted frocks of the ‘New Look’ – a tiny-waisted, corseted look that Australian fashion designer Dorothy Broomham told The Australian Women’s Weekly “makes a woman feel she can face anything”. But for many, that anything included the drudgery of household chores without the appliances we take for granted today, including fridges and washing machines.

Lurline had worked as a stenographer at the Department of Air for three years towards the end of the war. She clearly remembers the pressures young women faced to return to the home. Lurline was allocated to work for the bombing officer, based in a house commandeered for the purpose in the upmarket Melbourne of suburb of Toorak. When her boyfriend, Air Force wireless operator Jeff Arnold, came home at the end of the war the couple became engaged, then married at the beginning of 1946.

“I worked for a little while after getting married,” she recalls. “But young women didn’t usually go to work if their husband was in a good job. There were high standards for housekeeping, you were expected to do this on Monday, this on Tuesday …. we had a wood-burning copper to do the washing.”

She had her two sons Peter and John within the next few years, but before then she defied public opinion and twice returned to work. “I went back to work a couple of times because we had enough for a deposit on a house with his deferred pay, but not for furniture. I worked for a 178

government department and brought in a bit of money.” Conceding that was unusual, she says: “Yes it was, but I didn’t see why I couldn’t help to do something.

“I did the same when we wanted to buy a car and I did the books in an underwear factory. One of the neighbours, an older woman, spoke to me, that it wasn’t the proper thing to do for a young woman to work outside the house.

“My husband did not say anything against it. I could not have done it without his approval. It was a time when men made most of the important decisions.”

Making jumpers, cardigans and other garments for the family was Lurline’s main evening activity. “There was no Target to buy clothes. I was always making jumpers and if I had scraps left I made striped ones. Every night when the children were in bed we used to sit and listen to the radio and I would knit.” She also recalls making numerous bed jackets. “If someone became pregnant, you made them a bed jacket.

“Patterns after the war were more personal. I think women were starting to have a role for themselves as people instead of domestics. But there was a bit of a reversal to get things back to ‘normal’ the men had the last say.” It wasn’t easy to adjust.

The pressure to quit work at war’s end was enormous, whether or not they wanted to. The media, particularly the women’s magazines which had been so vocal in urging women to join the workforce, did a dramatic U-turn, helping to apply this pressure. That began even before victory was officially declared. In an editorial on 18 March1944, The Australian Women’s Weekly declared: “In the reconstruction period after victory, many much-needed social reforms should be undertaken urgently so that women can fulfil their true destiny of motherhood without the doubts and difficulties that now beset them.

“Mothers are Australia’s most important citizens. Our future is in their hands.”

Patsy Adam-Smith writes of the bombardment of this kind of advice. “There is nothing that completes the home like the wee babe’s cot or the toddler clinging round one’s knees,” said a brochure on Spiritual Parenthood. An Australian Army Chaplains’ Department pamphlet urged: “The girl of today is the BRIDE, the WIFE and the MOTHER of tomorrow. She may type for 2, 3, 4 years, but children and work in the home is her LIFE’S WORK.” 179

Not everyone saw it that way. Carmen Virgoe was one of 13 former land girls interviewed by Sandra Hardisty for her 1990 book about the Australian Women’s Land Army. Carmen, who had hopes of staying on the land, soon found that the returning men, who hadn’t previously had to accept women farmers, still would not. “So I realised that there wasn’t going to be a place for me, that the properties were going to be run by men again.”

Sandra Hardisty says about 7000 women joined the Australian Women’s Land Army for at least a year, and more than 6000 passed through as auxiliaries. But after the war they were virtually abandoned by the government, promises of training were not fulfilled and little support was given to their difficult readjustment into post-war society. Only since 1987 has the RSL allowed them to march on Anzac Day.

“The long-term changes one might expect to find in women’s lives didn’t happen for most women. After the war, society’s attitude towards women reverted to pre-war days … Former land girls were not expected to be able to exert themselves physically now the men were home … The moral pressure for women to again assume a more limited role in society was indeed great,” Sandra writes.

In its ‘Return to Civil Life’ editorial on 12 January 1946, The Australian Women’s Weekly, declared: “By September of this year demobilisation will be complete, and nearly 50,000 women will be back in homes or jobs… Many of the girls enlisted straight from school; others gave up good jobs. Many of them found in the services a more satisfying life than they had in peacetime employment… Yet it is all to the good that nearly 50,000 women are equipped to understand the problems of returned men. They will make all the better wives for knowing why a husband wants now and then to see the boys of the old unit.”

Knitting patterns reflected these changed expectations, reinforcing the prevailing message: a woman’s place is in the home, having children, looking after them and her husband while looking alluring. In 1939-40 a knitted convalescent jacket with extra room for bandages had featured on the cover of Patons & Baldwin’s Specialty Knitting Book No. 120. By No. 204 the cover shouted “Happy Days” and a gloves design was modelled by a woman with a camera. Four issues later, the cover design, Trina, featured elements of the defining post-war fashion trend – the New Look.

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The Not so New Look As women returned to home duties and childcare, leaving behind the munitions factory, office jobs or the hard life on the land, practical workwear and military-inspired designs gave way to a completely different way of dressing. The fashion industry had been hard hit by wartime austerity. Garments were manufactured with an eye to scarce resources – in Australia puff sleeves had been banned. So, too, long gowns, while hem lengths and unnecessary buttons were restricted. Now came the chance for a revival of the industry’s fortunes.

The New Look was created by French couturier Christian Dior, a man said to have been nostalgic for the pre-war glamour, long skirts and petticoats of his mother. Dubbed the New Look following a comment by Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief, American Carmel Snow, it actually wasn’t – its figure 8-based silhouette was influenced by the full-skirted, Belle Epoque looks of the late 19th and early 20th century. It featured wasp waists, skirts billowing just 30 centimetres from the ground and a ‘natural’ womanly silhouette achieved with close-fitting bodices, padded bras, padded hips and bone corsets.

Shown in Paris on 12 February 1947, this collection was among the first since war was declared in 1939. The styles exuded luxury and elegance, some using 40 metres of cloth for just one dress. “It was a style which not only abolished any lingering thoughts of war and deprivation, but in its total lack of practicality and emphasis on the utmost in femininity convinced women of just how wonderful they would appear once they eschewed ‘mannish’ activities and stuck to looking decorative,” Australian fashion historian Alexandra Joel has written of it. Women’s wardrobes were immediately out of date and she reported that they adored the new designs which were “indulgent, luxurious and, above all caused men to look at them in a new, protective way”.

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Knitting design Trina emulates the style of the New Look suit Bar by Christian Dior.

The 90 models of the first New Look collection combined nostalgia with curves and softness. Perhaps its most memorable design was the Bar suit, a beige, peplum-look jacket with a nipped- in waist and black wool crêpe skirt made from 12 metres of fabric, worn with a wide-brimmed hat. A 1987 version of this design was shown at the National Gallery of Victoria’s 2016 Dior exhibition. It was described as “the single most discussed and photographed work from Dior’s debut collection”.

A similar hat was worn with Trina, a knitted suit with tied, nipped-in waist and wide-pleated peplum, the cover design on Patons Knitting Book No. 208, as the pattern companies rushed to emulate the fashions of the day. Just as they and the women’s magazines, a source of patterns but also of information for women in those pre-Internet days, embraced the wartime working woman, they now joined this push for a return to “femininity” and glamour.

The uncompromising Cherie (below left), a silk gown using a staggering 80 metres of fabric, most of it pleated into a 47.5 centimetre waist, most epitomised the look. Shortages and rationing in the late 1940s meant not everyone could fully embrace it. A vast, impractical hat with flower- 182

covered brim and netting featured on the cover of The Australian Women’s Weekly 12 January 1946, but rationing still made its mark. Inside was a Breton sailor hat pattern, crocheted from a ball of string.

These impractical looks – about as different as they could be from the military-inspired look and workwear of the war years – would influence fashion worldwide in the late 1940s and ‘50s. They became, according to fashion historian Jonathan Walford, “the symbol of post-war prosperity and defined the silhouette for the coming decade”. Softness and fullness replaced the previous boxy shapes, hand sewn full circle skirts were worn with cardigans or little knitted boleros.

Lurline is taken aback at the suggestion she may have made something in the full-skirted New Look style: “I was a young matron,” she says. But her knitting was influenced by the fashions of the day and she recalls making boleros – in particular a cable-edged bolero made from Patons Fuzzy Wuzzy, then a popular new angora yarn, a world away from that scratchy wartime khaki knitting.

You could even knit the whole dress if you had time – and, suddenly, women did. Nina Wall’s Knitting Book for 1947 featured Rue de la Paix (below right), a complex, full-skirted, off the shoulder lace evening gown that was modelled by Sydney supermodel of the day Maide Hann. It also included a chenille jacket, bolero, a bedjacket tied with a satin bow, lacy underwear of “exquisite daintyness” and Mayfair, a rather daring bare midriff top worn by a model with cigarette.

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A New Look-influenced Nina Wall knitted dress.

“The New Look Is Now the Basis of All Fashions,” Knitcraft Quarterly declared in its winter 1948 issue. Describing the look as characterised by figure-defining waists and smoothly rounded shoulders, it declared: “Your knitted garment must be up to the minute.” This freshness and newness was exhilarating. “The result of all this is a new interpretation of a lovelier you. These new clothes reflect more a changing outlook as much as they reflect a change of silhouette and lowered hemline.”

Inside were advertisements to aid in creating this “lovelier you”. There were ads for heavily- structured undergarments, beauty products and fat reduction (the New Look was not accommodating of extra pounds). Patterns included waist-hugging jackets, figure-fitting jumpers to be worn with full skirts (including a knitted version), “hip-hugging and waist-whittling jackets” with the new, rounded shoulder look and of course, a bedjacket and baby clothes.

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The nipped-in waists of the New Look, from Knitcraft Quarterly, winter 1948.

Peter McNeil believes the New Look played on feminine roles – princess, bride, debutante – with undergarments actually re-forming the female body. Vogue described it as the replacement of a masculine silhouette with that of the “real” woman beneath. McNeil speculates that for many women it spelled pleasure after the enforced restrictions of wartime – certainly a view shared by women’s magazines such as Vogue and The Australian Women’s Weekly and the editors of knitting magazines.

Fashion historian Margaret Maynard has written about fashion, femininity and the New Look and argues it signalled changes to the idea of femininity of previous decades towards more modern incitements to sexual pleasure. Reforming women’s bodies and their sexuality made them prey to those looking to sell their products. “Australian women were conditioned to believe that to be sexually and romantically alluring it was imperative that they used generous amounts of fabric, waste-nipping guepieres, hour-glass corsets, underwear, and other glamorous commodities, reminiscent of the mystique of nineteenth-century Paris.”

The knitting magazines of the day were part of this conditioning process. In autumn 1948 Knitcraft Quarterly overworked the word ‘glamorous’. It featured patterns with evocative US place names – Las Vegas, Miami, Palm Springs. There were designs for such occasions as morning shopping, keeping warm between tennis sets, hosting an afternoon tea party and a hurried invitation to lunch. One feature was headed, ‘The most important part of knitwear is YOU’. It advocated improving the look of knitted clothes by wearing corsets – advice presumably not derived from personal experience by its male managing editor. “Wear your knitteds over a slim, 185

satin smooth foundation, and you will feel on top of the world,” it urged. “It not only will make you more attractive and desirable, but give you the warming knowledge of your enhanced allure.”

Of course not all women fell in with this post-war return to traditional expectations. Leading Australian feminist Eva Cox, born in February 1938, and an outspoken voice for Australian women since the late 1960s, is “a lousy knitter” – but not because she thinks feminists shouldn’t knit.

Eva learned to knit at school while the boys did woodwork. “With knitting part of the war effort, it was still important post-war. So in primary school, they made all the girls do a piece of knitting. I was bad at it so passed it around so others all added a row or two, very uneven but the right size.” She never did get the hang of it, so when her daughter was born in the 1960s it was Eva’s mother who produced baby knits – like so many women of her era, she saw it as her duty.

Mostly, though, the era was about glamour, sex appeal – although those words were not actually used – and women being women again. In 1946 Complete Home Knitting Illustrated gushed over a pattern for a quilted-look bedjacket with lined hood: “It’s not easy to be a glamour girl first thing in the morning, but in this enchanting bedjacket and hood, you simply can’t help it.” Designs for knitted lacy underwear were included because “we like to let ourselves go all frivolous when it comes to underclothes”.

This influence would extend well into the next decade – in August 1955 Vanity Fair’s 12 pages of quick to knit patterns included the fully fashioned ‘Briefest Bolero’. This was modelled by a glamorous, wasp-waisted woman in a full-skirted, New Look-inspired dress, in her hands a cigarette in a long holder and a cup of tea.

So how could women who had been independent, working outside the home for the first time, many in traditionally male jobs, embrace this impractical, overtly feminine and frivolous look?

Some didn’t. There were objections – even protests and demonstrations. The cost, the extravagant use of materials, the return to restrictive, impractical clothing, the creation of an artificial shape through corsetry and the attack on their new-found independence and status – all these caused an outcry. In Backlash: the undeclared war against women, US feminist 186

journalist Susan Faludi writes: “Women who had discovered slacks, low-heeled shoes and loose sweaters during the Second World War were reluctant to give them up in peacetime.”

But a two-year campaign by retailers and the fashion media lead to women wearing it, albeit mostly a toned down version of the New Look. “In every backlash (against women) the fashion industry has produced punitively restrictive clothing and the fashion press has demanded that women wear it,” Faludi writes.

As the House of Dior took on extra staff to cope with demand, French couturier Coco Chanel, who had created comfortable, practical, unstructured garments for the independent woman, raged against Dior, the man she believed had undone her life’s work. In Britain, Princess Margaret wore the New Look to her parents’ silver wedding celebrations in April 1948, but some leading women spoke out against it. MP Bessie Braddock described it as the ridiculous whim of idle people. In the US, women demonstrated at events attended by Dior and in France, ravaged by strikes and shortages, models at a photo shoot in Montmartre in March 1947 were attacked.

In Australia, too, there were objections and letters to newspaper editors. But with the influential Australian Women’s Weekly embracing Paris fashions and hosting post-war parades of original garments since 1946, the look was widely publicised and increasingly popular. It sold through exclusive originals, copies and patterns, with the Australian Wool Board describing its effect as “come hither – not here I come”. In 1948 Dior cooperated with the first full-scale showing of his originals outside Paris, organised by retailer David Jones.

Surely women were turning back the clock by embracing such a constricting look, in contrast to the comfortable, utilitarian clothes of wartime? Some historians, however, don’t see this as an aberration; they question whether attitudes to women changed at all during the war. After all, the government had decided their employment would be temporary, a message reinforced by women’s magazines which insisted that a hard day on the factory floor was no reason not to remain alluring. They were doing it for the boys – but only until the boys came home.

Kate Darian-Smith explains that by 1944, when peace was a certainty, media discussion about the return of women to their domestic role as mothers and wives did not contradict previous propaganda because that had stressed women were working out of patriotism. “The value of wartime employment was constructed in relation to men: women were assisting those males they loved to win the war, or were releasing men to join the forces. The source of personal 187

satisfaction women derived from employment was presented as being male-oriented, because a woman’s contribution to the war effort was a source of pride for husbands or lovers.”

Allure, glamour, fascination: it was all a long way from the factory floor, the frontline ambulance station, buying wool with ration coupons and knitting for practicality, comfort and a hard day’s work. It was understandable, however, that by the war’s end many women had not been sorry to say goodbye to the hard work and long hours of a munitions factory or farm. Conditions had been harsh and often dangerous, the hours long, the pay low, the work often boring. The men’s attitudes didn’t help; there were numerous reports of sexual harassment of land girls by farmers.

Roma Donnelly, who has studied women in the Australian munitions industry during World War II, writes that although the prejudice of many male unionists against women workers lessened as they demonstrated they really could do the work, it did not disappear. When peace came, those divisions were reasserted.

“For most of the married women, working outside the home had been an aberration brought about by war, and in the first euphoria of peace many looked forward to resuming the role of a housewife in what was expected to be a new and better world but the euphoria did not last,” she writes.

The perception of women as inferior workers and never breadwinners was reinforced by the lack of childcare, the low pay and their shift arrangements, British women’s historian Penny Summerfield asserts. “It is evident, then, that the expectations that marriage, home and dependency with the appropriate conditions for women not only survived the challenges of war, but were throughout major determinants of policy towards women.”

Certainly the feminist movement did not begin in the late 1940s and 1950s. During those war and post-war years many women never completely abandoned women’s traditional roles. Media portrayals reflected this. The Australian Women’s Weekly of 6 March 1943, carried a story about an Australian “girl” working as a “sparks” (a radio operator) in the Allied Merchant Navy. But its cover image featured laughing soldiers watching a young woman in bathers and long cover-up caught on barbed wire while heading for the beach. Her ditsy look of alarm suggested a failure to connect with reality.

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As for Lurline, now 93 and living in Rylands retirement apartments in Hawthorn East, she worked part-time after becoming a widow at age 33. Her husband Jeff died suddenly in 1958, when her sons were just 11 and eight.

Lurline worked part-time but had left school in 1941 at 16 and she began to rue her lack of education. “I was typing the boys’ essays and so on and started realising I had missed a lot so I did adult matriculation.” When she married her second husband Ron Stuart he thought he was getting a domesticated wife – but was quickly disabused of that notion. “I had just started studying,” she recalls. With her excellent matriculation marks she won a place at Monash University and went on to do a bachelor’s degree, then a Masters, with her husband supportive of her efforts.

Still interested in knitting and yarn trends, Lurline has a knitting project in a basket by her chair and picks it up every day. Fully engaged with the world, she clearly recalls the assumption when she married Jeff that despite her wartime work she would be a stay-at-home housewife and “a domestic”, as was expected then. Now with a PhD in English, Dr Stuart had the last laugh.

Further Reading Adam-Smith, P 1984, Australian women at war, Nelson, Melbourne. Bassett, J (ed.) 1998, As we wave you goodbye, Oxford University Press Australia, Melbourne. Faludi, S 1992, Backlash: the undeclared war against women, Vintage, London. Hardisty, S (ed.) 1990, Thanks girls and goodbye! the story of the Australian Women’s Land Army 1942-1945, Penguin Books, Australia. Joel, A 1984, Best dressed: 200 years of fashion in australia, William Collins, Sydney. McNeil, P 1993, ‘‘’Put Your Best Face Forward”: The Impact of the Second World War On British Dress‘, Journal of Design History, vol. 6, no. 4, pp. 283-299. Walford, J 2008 Forties fashion, Thames & Hudson, New York

Note: The Australian Women’s Weekly has been digitised by the National Library of Australia and is available at trove.nla.gov.au/aww

Chapter ends – sidebars to be inserted throughout text at design stage follow 189

A Life Coloured by Wartime Austerity When Isabel Foster’s mother and her friends were busily knitting socks for the soldiers during World War I, Sundays in church were a favourite time. “They got together in church and they knitted while they were listening to the service,” Isabel recalls her mum telling her. “It was important because the men were away and needed a lot of socks so the women were doing all this knitting flat-out all the time.”

But while the women were enthusiastically doing their patriotic duty, the pastor in their country town of Dooen, near Horsham, Victoria, wasn’t so keen. “One Sunday he asked them not to knit while he was giving his sermon because he could not concentrate, thanks to the noise of all those steel needles in a small space. They put their needles down. But the moment he had finished the sermon and it was time to stand and sing the next hymn, they took up their needles to continue their knitting.”

Isabel, born in November 1921, still has the sets of four fine steel needles her mother used to make those wartime socks and remembers her mum, always a keen knitter, laughing as she recounted this tale. By the time World War II broke out, Isabel, then 18, was also a very competent knitter, thanks to expert tuition from her mother and aunt. “My aunt decided I had to learn knitting and my mother agreed so they taught me to knit socks. I was about 10.”

Just as her mother had done a little more than two decades earlier, Isabel launched into her own sock knitting marathons. Working as a typist at a Melbourne engineering firm, she knitted for the soldiers before work and every spare moment when there was no typing to be done. “I came to work early and automatically picked up my needles.” She recalls knitting the tops of numerous socks, then taking them home for her mother to turn the heel and finish. “I was young, it took time to knit socks but my mother was very quick. Mum would do the heels and foot so between the two of us we were always knitting.”

Making socks and other clothing for the soldiers as well as plain jumpers to match her simple, home-made work skirts occupied much of her spare time. She knitted on the train from Caulfield, where she still lives in her home crowded with her colourful and creative textiles – a stark contrast to the dull colours required in wartime. Fellow regular travellers checked her progress each morning. “Some men sat in my compartment and waited for it to be finished.”

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Clothes rationing meant knitting jumpers was essential: “I made a lot of jumpers to go with my skirts, because you could not buy as much as you would like,” Isabel says. Despite the rationing, Isabel’s mother, one of a family of 12 children, and her five aunts somehow managed to track down jumper yarn and a constant supply of the grey wool needed to knit for the soldiers. There was no stockpiling as knitters do today.

Isabel Foster poses in her handknitted wartime workwear. Photograph: supplied by Isabel Foster.

“Between my mother and I, I always had my handmade clothes,” she recalls. “We did not have choice but what we had was lasting because it was made to last. I just made plain clothes.” A sepia photograph from her album shows Isabel in a wartime striped, short-sleeved jumper – on trend, ideal for using oddments and for her outings with sailors on shore leave as she helped with entertainment provided by the Navy. After the war, in 1948, Isabel married a sailor.

From the album: Isabel Foster on trend during World War II. 191

She clearly recalls when, towards the end of the war. Knitting patterns began to be printed in colour. Since then colour has defined Isabel’s creative life. Born at a time of austerity and mend and make do, her creativity and delight in colour after the endless grey of wartime knitting lead to a life of creating colourful textiles. Isabel became an expert spinner and laughs at the contrast with the war years: “I have got yarn by the tonne.” In 2013, at age 92, she held a retrospective exhibition at the Burrinja Gallery in Upwey, Melbourne. The Challenge of Colour showcased the fruit of her decades of crocheting, spinning, dyeing, weaving and, most of all, knitting.

Isabel Foster at home with creative textiles she has made. Photo: Sue Green. 192

Knitters Salute the Women at Home Deb Rhodes opens the presentation box to reveal the medals within: The British War Medal, the Victory Medal, the 1915 Star. But these were never pinned to the chest of a returning World War I serviceman. They are handmade replicas, their ribbons patiently and lovingly knitted by Deb in fine embroidery cottons on tiny 1 millimetre needles.

In April 2015, Deb and fellow members of Victoria’s Handknitters Guild had the chance to create a window display for Ross House, home to the guild’s headquarters in Flinders Lane, downtown Melbourne. “It was decided amongst the group that because of the commemoration of World War I it would be a war theme,” says Deb, a livewire Melbourne health administrator and qualified nurse. Immediately the all-woman committee members’ thoughts turned to the Gallipoli Centenary celebrations and they decided to commemorate not only the boys on the battlefield, but the women left behind.

The aim was a tribute, ‘Australia’s Homes in World War I’, with knitted items, some made from patterns of the day to evoke a wartime home. “We were seeking anything that had to do with the domestic situation back in Australia during World War I, preferably with a focus on knitting, but not exclusively.” Deb, then a guild committee member, recalls a brainstorming session to think of items used and activities undertaken at that time, but not now. Members were called on to knit for the display and to check the cupboards for anything that could be included. “Anyone that had anything to do with the domestic situation back in Australia during World War I preferably, with a focus on knitting, but not exclusively on knitting. It was an open invitation for any kind of imaginative thing.”

Deb, a creative knitter whose email sign off is, “I love knitting”, threw herself into the project, knitting mock-crêpe bandages in cotton and wool on vintage needles and a tea cosy made from a vintage design. She even produced, after much trial and error, peaches which she displayed in two Vacola preserving jars by Fowlers, an Australian company that began in 1915.

It was the medals which drew on her knitting skills – a knitter since age four, she was taught by her mother and grandmother during her Yorkshire childhood – and the research skills honed while undertaking her Masters degree as a mature age student. Deb researched the medals with typical enthusiasm and thoroughness before embarking on her replicas. She knew how important these would have been to families: “You can imagine that during World War I some 193

of those medals would be sent home for the families to keep. Something to treasure and look back on the achievements of their loved ones. It was about what the women would have had.”

Replica war medals made by Handknitters Guild member Deb Rhodes. Photo: Deb Rhodes.

Deb created the three medals using aluminium foil over leather for the King George, copper over leather for the Victory Medal, while she embossed the 1915 Star on copper. She placed them, with the prayer book, in the presentation box she made: “It all tied together quite nicely.”

The Handknitters Guild April 2015 war tribute window in Flinders Lane, Melbourne. Photos: Deb Rhodes.

Although she organised the display, it was a team effort. Other guild members made a draft excluder and knee warmers, a World War I prayer book was loaned as were vintage kitchen accessories including Mrs Beeton’s cookbook, complemented by knitted carrots, beans and loaf of bread. A guild member made a khaki jumper, also donating military paraphernalia dating from her son’s time in the school cadets. A typewriter and an old suitcase helped evoke the era and 194

the pocket of an apron contained “letters from the front” mocked up by Deb. She also created a photo display of wartime nurses’ knitting and there was fresh rosemary, for remembrance. Passers-by were enthusiastic; “We got people stopping while we were setting the window up and lots of people said, ‘that looks really great’,” says Deb. “It was all really positive and surprising how many people took the time to stop.

“It was not just about the women at home, but also about the men who had been injured in the Boer War and who would have wanted to fight but could not, those who were wounded at the beginning of the war and had to go home, and those men who were not physically or mentally able to go. It was about World War I homes.” 195

When Flora Met Eleanor Flora Westley was 17 and enjoying her first job learning to be a dressmaker when World War II broke out. Change did not come overnight – but when it did, it was life altering. Not only would she be forced to change jobs, Flora and the other five young women from her wartime office would meet Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She did so during the US First Lady’s hush-hush visit to Melbourne in September 1943 – a day Flora clearly remembers more than 70 years on.

“They were tipping everybody out of unessential industries. I went to an office. I was good at figures and I became a cost clerk,” recalls Flora, who was born in 31 January 1922, and still lives independently in her own Melbourne unit. The office was at the front of Cliff & Bunting, an agricultural engineering firm in Flemington Road, North Melbourne. “They made farm machinery, but in the war they made transformers as well.”

At lunchtime and during any spare minutes Flora and her office colleagues knitted for the soldiers. “We always took our lunch, you never heard of buying lunch.” But one lunchtime was different, after a colleague got wind of the fact that Mrs Roosevelt – a keen knitter, sometimes nicknamed “the First Knitter” and frequently photographed with her knitting – would be visiting the nearby newly-built Royal Melbourne Hospital. It was turned over to the Americans during the war to cope with the influx of injured from the Pacific. Over the road went the office team, and sure enough, there she was. “She was an enormous woman,” Flora recalls. Photographs taken during the Canberra leg of the visit show the 180 cm First Lady towering over those beside her, including Prime Minister John Curtin

Most lunchtimes were less exciting for the office team, as they churned out khaki socks on four steel needles. This was an activity of which the First Knitter would have approved, given that she had launched the US World War II knitting effort at a Knit for Defence Tea in September 1941.

“The socks were pretty boring,” says Flora, who prefers sewing and describes herself as “an ordinary knitter”. She recalls her sister Rosie helping out by turning the heel on her socks. “I did the top bit.”

Flora doesn’t remember who taught her to knit – after all, it wasn’t considered anything out of the ordinary. “It was no skill to knit in my day; it was what everybody did. You were a bit of a dill if you could not knit.” And when war broke out she did not leap into action, knitting for the 196

soldiers – after all, few people thought it would last. “Over by Christmas was the story. I don’t think I knitted too much in the beginning. I just gradually came to it.”

The war dragged on. One of her two brothers, Private Archie McColl, was sent to the Middle East so Flora and her three older sisters knitted for him. “We sent him socks sometimes, and his friends. We used to write every week so he got plenty of mail. We knitted balaclavas. My sister got it backwards or sideways or something – she had the face on the back. She just pulled it out and did it again – we never wasted anything.” Unpulled yarn was washed and hung on a coat- hanger on the clothes line.

The sisters also knitted for their dad. Flora’s mother had died while she was a child. “Dad was left with us. We have always knitted for our father. He always had handknitted socks, I don’t ever remember him wearing anything else his whole life. There was always a community task – left on the sideboard for anyone to work on – if you had the time.”

So did he knit too? “No,” she laughs. “He lived in times when men were men and women were women. Soldiers getting better learned to knit in hospital. But I never knew any men who knitted. That was very much out of the ordinary, other men would laugh at them.”

Life wasn’t all ration coupons, adding up figures and knitting khaki socks. Flora, who earned about five shillings a week (about $20 in 2018), recalls saving up six shillings to buy herself Patons Daphne wool in a fine burgundy crêpe for a jumper. “There were no jumpers or knitting in the shops. We had coupons. If someone was getting married, you were honour bound to give them a coupon.”

Wool was bought on a kind of layby system: “Wool was chosen and ordered and the shopkeeper kept it for you. You could have a skein at a time until your garment was complete. No deposit was paid and the shopkeeper just took back anything unwanted.”

There were also boyfriends to knit for. “I sent them (knitted) stuff. I had a boyfriend, temporarily, in the Air Force and I sent him navy blue socks,” says Flora, who worked Sundays at The Dugout, the Allied Services Club run by Myer department store in Capitol House, in downtown Melbourne. While it was known for the dances and concerts put on for the troops, the food was also a plus “We cooked fried eggs, the soldiers loved it. They never got them in the Army apparently.” 197

Towards the end of the war Flora met Cyril Westley who, in 1948, became her husband. They waited until the war ended and Cyril had settled back into home life, on her father’s advice. When she married she gave up work, remaining at home until her daughter Barbara, born in 1951, was in high school. “Everyone did”, Flora recalls, though not everyone was happy about it. “When the war was on you had to stay on. There was a thing called ‘Manpower’ and you had to do it.”

She heard few complaints from those who would have preferred to stay at work – although there were some. “The men had to keep their families. Some of the women did not want to give up. I had a friend who was a supervisor in, I think it was Myers, and she was mad about it, she was independent and wanted to have her own money and do her own thing.

“Some would have worked all their lives… it was a big adjustment to stay home.”

After the war, Flora’s attentions turned to knitting for her daughter, and she became more ambitious and learnt multicoloured fair isle, with more colours than the endless khaki, red and blue of wartime becoming available, and fancy yarn such as Patons Fuzzy Wuzzy. Flora still knits occasionally – hats for Aboriginal people in Alice Springs, and teaching knitting to recently- arrived migrant women with Barbara, for example. In Barbara, an exceptional knitter and a long- time office bearer with Victoria’s Handknitters Guild, she has left a knitting legacy. 198

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Chapter 6 Making Connections with the Past

“I felt a kinship with the women whose men had gone off to war and their job was to keep the home fires burning. They knitted socks and balaclavas and sent them off to the soldiers. I have talked to other women about that and they felt that too … they said they were conscious of the knitting wives and mothers.” Meredith Atilemile, volunteer organiser, 5000 Poppies

When Lynn Berry and her friend Marg Knight began what became the 5000 Poppies project in 2013 the plan was simple: use their knitting skills to create a floral tribute that honoured their dads’ contribution to World War II. Within a year the two Melbourne women found themselves heading a nationwide project that fostered intense connections between communities of women, many of whom had never met.

Those connections took on an importance well beyond being part of a war commemoration, fostering a sense of belonging, assuaging loneliness and even depression. The project became a bridge between the past – the men who served, the women who kept the home fires burning and the nation’s wartime industries functioning – and knitters of today.

Just as changes in handknitting during and post-World War II both responded to events in women’s lives and shaped them, knitters not only responded passionately to 5000 Poppies, it became an international response to their desire for the personal connections so often lacking today. But there was also, critics said, a failure to engage with wider issues of national identity and sentimentalising of war, and more than a whiff of obsession as knitters produced poppies by the hundreds of thousands.

Marg acknowledges that for some contributors the project became obsessive, but she isn’t concerned. “I don’t know whether that obsession becomes unhealthy. If they get enjoyment from doing it and they want to contribute to the project and they have got nothing worthwhile they would rather be doing then is that obsessive?”

However, University of Melbourne Professor of History Joy Damousi and other writers and academics who have analysed the community response to remembrance – the growth of Anzac 200

Day commemorations in particular – wonder whether such immersion leads to a blinkered response to the events being commemorated. Does it, in focusing on remembering those who served, sanitise war and overlook its horrors – deaths by bayoneting and the rape of local women, the sacrificing of young men to serve a British colonial end, for example. Does such a project glorify war? Lynn and Marg emphatically reject this.

“It was about remembering and honouring those who fought, their families and their communities – it was never, ever about the number of deaths,” Lynn emphasises.

Joy says it’s clear the project became a major endeavour with the power of commemorating those who perished in the wars so “people find it a very emotive exercise, I can see that you do get a bit absorbed in it”. Many of the knitters are inspired by the personal stories and personal contributions, but she fears such absorption can blind people to the reality of war.

“It just blunts critical assessment and people do get immersed in it,” she asserts. “Australians killed, they raped, they murdered. They were soldiers in a war zone but that is not the narrative, that is not the story they are interested in and you think, well, you are just presenting one side of it. Once you get into that language of heroism it is pretty dangerous, I think.”

Certainly that was the language of some of the dedications attached to the poppies knitted (or in some cases crocheted or sewed) by tens of thousands of women and some men from around Australia and overseas. But for others such as Hazel Flay of Port Noarlunga in South Australia, it was about the young lives lost: “I dedicate my poppies to my father Albert George Symonds. He was in the RAF and captured in Singapore Harbour when the Japanese took over. He was taken to Sandakan prison camp where he eventually died. We never really knew how or when he died. I dedicate my poppies to all the prisoners in that camp. I believe only six ever escaped – such a waste of young lives,” Hazel wrote.

“I dedicate each of my poppies to the beautiful young men who were underage when they enlisted. As a mother of sons, it chills my heart to think of men (barely more than boys) who were subjected to the unspeakable horrors of war. My 11 poppies represent the Armistice date/number,” wrote Lisette Dillon of Scarborough, Queensland.

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A poppy with dedication, ready to be added to the 5000 Poppies online record. Photograph: Sue Green.

For Lynn, day after day spent typing such heartfelt dedications into her blog was intense, so draining that some days she cried from the moment she began until the moment she stopped. “Some of those were just absolute cries of pain,” she remembers. “Some days I really struggled.”

Canberra-based Meredith Atilemile helped Lynn transfer the dedications to the online record and she, too, felt that pain of the dedication writers and found it gruelling. “Sometimes you had to stop typing to gather yourself, it was so emotional,” Meredith recalls. So caught up in the project had she become that during regular visits to her children in Melbourne she volunteered to help. Yet for both women this effort was intensely rewarding.

Unlike so many soldiers, Lynn’s father Wal Beasley, whose framed war medals have pride of place on her lounge room wall, came home from World War II to Melbourne. After returning to Melbourne, he married Lynn’s mother and they raised seven children. Marg’s father Stan Knight also survived, returning to the UK then migrating to Melbourne as a “10 pound Pom” in 1957 with his two children. His ashes are scattered in Western Port Bay.

Lynn and Marg planned their tribute after collaborating on previous knitting and crochet art projects. These included a 2012 midnight “planting” of crocheted daffodils in Melbourne’s Treasury Gardens, across the road from the former Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre. Friends joined in and Lynn began making poppies with the group she was teaching to crochet at Federation Square. She posted patterns – two knit, two crochet – online. Federation Square management agreed to an Anzac Day 2015 display, the Facebook page and blog were set up and in July 2013 Lynn was interviewed on Radio National. “That is really when it took off.” 202

The pair could hardly have foreseen where their “little” tribute would lead – even to London and a meeting with the Queen, and to the World War I French battlefields. Nor could they have envisaged when others asked to join them in making poppies that this would grow to an avalanche of red. By Anzac Day, 25 April 2015, more than 257,000 poppies from around the world had flooded into Lynn’s south-east Melbourne home, thousands accompanied by those moving dedications.

“Towards Anzac Day we were getting a minimum of 10,000 poppies a week. One day we received 24,000,” Lynn recalls. The makers ranged in age from a two‐year‐old Bendigo girl who made a felted poppy to a determined 106‐year‐old Frankston woman. Schools, libraries, RSL Auxiliaries, the CWA, and many aged care residents joined in; even the cast and crew of the musical Les Miserables made them. Some women made hundreds, a few made thousands. One made 3500.

By June 2014, the 5000 Poppies project had taken on such a life of its own that Lynn quit her three‐day‐a-week marketing job to become its full‐time creative director. With no public profile nor public speaking experience, she found herself the face of a project that was capturing imaginations across the world. By May 2016, when the spectacular installation at the Chelsea Flower Show was seen by more than 150,000 people, including most of the Royal family, the total number of poppies had risen to more than 300,000.

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The spectacular 5000 Poppies installation at London’s Chelsea Flower Show, 2016. Photograph: Marilyn Healy.

Joining the Threads When Lynn and the team took the poppies to the French battlefields of Fromelles and Pozieres after London, Meredith, a high school teacher, went too. Aware of the forthcoming Gallipoli Centenary, she had been researching the life of her grandfather Charles George Schroder who served in World War I, when she learned of the project from her mother, Kath Schroder. Meredith discovered her grandfather’s younger brother, John Donald Schroder, also served. “At the end of August, beginning of September 1915 my grandfather landed in Gallipoli. I loved the idea of contributing to the remembrance … Both my grandfather and his brother came home thankfully, but I put my dedications in because they would have come home different and neither of them ever spoke about the war.”

Meredith’s personalising of her contribution typifies the meaning this project took on for so many contributors. “All of a sudden we became a repository for people’s memories, and there is a lot of pain out there and people have used this project as an opportunity to voice that. “What an honour,” says Lynn of receiving the dedications. “Although it became quite daunting.” 204

It’s a personalising of war remembrance which goes some way to explaining why, more than 100 years since the outbreak of World War I, war commemoration in Australia, particularly through Anzac Day, continues to grow and is embraced by younger generations. Former Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu well understands the importance of this personalising of war links to foster commemoration – he made it his mission to promote this. Chair of the Victorian Anzac Centenary Committee, his patronage was key to taking the poppies to Chelsea and to France. For him its significance is hard to understate: “I think it is the most significant arts and craft project in Australian history – perhaps with just one exception,” he says, later explaining that top of his list is the wartime Comforts Fund which sent packages to soldiers.

Joy Damousi’s concerns about the potential to blunt criticism of war extends to using personal connections this way. “We cannot be uncritical, it becomes about something else. It is not really about the war, it is about their connectedness to the story and how they are getting immersed in it in a way,” she explains. “It just stifles any understanding of what the war is, as well. It gets reduced to an emotional reaction and that’s one response, but it cannot be the only one.”

She sees the merging of family history and military history forming “a new sense of pride in the role of military sacrifice in shaping the nation, and in encouraging families to locate themselves in the national story”.

In a chapter called ‘Why do we get so emotional about Anzac?’, in the controversial 2010 book What’s Wrong with Anzac?, Joy wrote of the Department of Veterans Affairs’ (DVA) involvement in school curriculum materials promoting this connection – the sentimentalising of wartime experience and the “emotional responses that seem to defy historical or political engagement”.

She sounds a warning: “I think you have to be careful about that fine line between commemoration and recognition of what war is and some people take it personally when one is critical of such endeavours and how you remember the war. People get really angry,” she said, recalling the furious response to What’s Wrong with Anzac?.

A particular target was Professor Marilyn Lake. In her chapter ‘How do schoolchildren learn about the spirit of Anzac?’ she expressed surprise at the extent of funding for the DVA to make its case for “the centrality of war to Australian history” to schoolchildren. A decade of such educational campaigns had disarmed “the critique of Australian participation in war by casting 205

it as an attack on Anzac and the nation itself”, she warned. This meant that history “as a critical practice, and as a way of explaining and understanding the past, is in danger of succumbing to nationalist mythology”.

Perth artist Lex Randolph, who uses art as a form of activism, understands the need to provoke other responses to war. In 2010 a handknitted peace sign with a broken GI Joe toy at its centre and a tag asking, “who’s your hero?” made a mysterious overnight appearance on Perth’s Anzac Day parade route. It was outed by a West Australian newspaper reader who spotted it as the work of Lex, aka Captain Plaknit.

Captain Plaknit’s 2010 Anzac Day message: “who’s your hero?”. Photograph: Lex Randolph.

For more than a decade as an active yarn bomber – probably Perth’s most active – he brightened its streets and coordinated community arts projects through his Captain Plaknit alter ego. His website sums up his philosophy: “Lex is passionate about sharing stories, social justice, and using the arts as a catalyst for social change.”

He explains: “I wanted people to think about what Anzac day really means, and I stitched it onto the fences along the Anzac day parade route in central Perth the evening before. “I tried to always send a message in my art, like one that gets picked up by the media.” 206

Angry responses to war critiques are not unique to Australia. In Blood Sweat Lands and Seas of Red, a 2014 tribute to Britain’s World War I dead, a sea of 888,246 ceramic poppies was created around the Tower of London, an art project at which the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh laid a wreath. Criticism by The Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones drew outrage. He called it “trite, fake, and inward-looking”, and deeply disturbing that 100 years after the war “we can only mark this terrible war as a national tragedy”. It was a response rejected by everyone from the volunteers who worked on the project to the artists who designed it and Armed Forces charities.

British academic Debra Marshall, in her article Making sense of remembrance, writes about the way war remembrance has become incorporated into the fabric of our lives, through a cycle of anniversaries, war memorials, films, exhibitions, television documentaries, and so on. “But there are dangers inherent in this apparent integration with the everyday. Naturalizing war remembrance in this way inhibits the critique that is a vital to understanding what we mean when we talk about remembrance ….”

When Ted Baillieu first saw the poppies, he had the vision to see not just a local, commemorative craft project, but one with the potential to make the kinds of connections central to his committee’s role. He surprised Lynn and her team by strolling into the Federation Square atrium as they set up for their 2013 Remembrance Day display, filling the Fracture Gallery with the 5000 poppies already collected. “He said he expected to find a bunch of old ladies crocheting and knitting and instead he found this dynamic group of women running up and down ladders and making this fantastic display,” Lynn laughs.

Here was an idea completely in sync with Ted’s desire to commemorate the Anzacs in an innovative way. “I said I thought 5000 was a bit low and they should be aiming for 50,000,” he recalls. To him, the poppies represented all that his committee was trying to achieve.

Ted had attended numerous Anzac commemorations and was well aware of the standard model, used by organisations ranging from schools to the RSL. It went like this: speaker, podium, plaque unveiling, presentation, perhaps an exhibition, storytelling and a cup of tea. It served its purpose, but although those present say, “lest we forget”, forget was exactly what most people did. “I asked if anyone could remember what happened on the 50th anniversary and no one could. I asked people what happened last year and they did not remember.”

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What to do? “If we’re going to connect with the next generations, we have to have a contemporary connection.” That was his committee’s focus.

“How do you make a connection? There are obviously family connections but family connection fades after three or four generations. There are lots of other connections – institutional, schools, churches, sporting clubs. There are occupational connections,” he says, recalling a visit to Victoria Police and asking what police knew of the officers who served in World War I. They knew only of those killed. Using the now-searchable service records of the first 10,000 troops to leave Australia Ted could show them not only how many police were in that convoy, but who they were.

There are also multicultural connections; Ted believes few Australians realise just how multicultural their country’s World War I battalions were. There are geographic connections, too, especially in small towns, but also in suburban streets. Using the searchable AIF database residents can see in which houses the departing troops had lived. Ted has done this at functions statewide: “I am of the view, as an architect, that place is one of the most powerful of all connections.”

He tells of inviting people at functions to provide names and addresses and, using balls of red wool and the AIF records, locating their World War I service personnel ancestors. He then laid the yarn across the room to make unexpected connections between those present. “Connection leads to an emotional tap.”

Such connections are at the heart of the poppies project, Ted believes: “Five thousand Poppies puts community at the centre. Nobody has been paid to do it, nobody has been paid to put it all together. It is a living, breathing, organic resource. I think it has given people a sense of belonging, a sense of connection, a sense of something to promote, a sense of contributing.

“Here are two or three women from the eastern suburbs knitting poppies, creating poppies as tributes using red wool and every thread is a contemporary connection of the person knitting to the people, lives and events (of the war). It is the very essence of what constitutes connections – using threads, people using their hands.”

He pauses and expands on the exception to his view that this is Australia’s biggest community arts project; the largest was the Comforts Program, coordinated from Government House, 208

collecting and distributing knitting (and foodstuffs) for the troops during World War I. “They have a different genesis but the two projects were born of the same spirit. The community were contributing to the centre to support our troops.”

A Healthy Obsession? Clearly, the project which began as small and personal for Lynn and Marg has “turned into something else”, as Marg puts it. “We often laugh and say, ‘wouldn’t Wal and Stan (their fathers) be amazed at what we have done for them’.” Despite this enormous growth, she has no sense that their personal tribute has been hijacked – for commercial or political purposes, for instance – and is thrilled that on Anzac Day 2015 they planted their 120 poppies at Lynn’s father’s battalion tree as they originally intended. Lynn agrees: “That was never lost, for us it was always about our dads.”

For Marg, what followed was no great surprise: “From its earliest days, as soon as Lynn approached me and said, ‘I would like to take this further with the community’ and I agreed, I kind of knew it was going to get big. But neither of us knew how big. I remember saying, ‘Lynn, what is going to be your exit strategy because this is going to take over your life?’.”

Ted is also unsurprised that the project grew so fast and large; “Above all, it’s an acknowledgement of service.” And if there is an element of obsession in the making of so many poppies by some contributors? “It could not be a more harmless or benign obsession,” he says. “The power of the connection is quite extraordinary, it is the power of place, it is the power of family.”

He adds: “Each poppy has been made by hand with love and often with a tribute. Lynn and Marg and all the thousands of volunteers have touched a nerve and have done it all with the power of love.”

That power was demonstrated again in 2017-‘18 when the team agreed to make 50,000 poppies to be sold for the 2018 RSL poppy appeal. As well a nationwide call went out for another 62,000 poppies. These would each represent a life lost in World War I at the project’s grand finale installation at the Australian War Memorial, November 11, 2018.

By 21 February 2018, Lynn was calling a halt: no more poppies please. Both targets had been reached months ahead of schedule with poppies still flooding in. Posting photographs of the 209

mail mountain in late January, she noted that 11,000 poppies had been received over the summer break. In the next month another 50,000 had arrived.

“It seems as a nation, we can’t get enough of handmade poppies … It’s been absolutely mesmerising … the heart that has gone into creating this beautiful tribute … your hearts, your histories, your memories, your love, honour and respect,” she wrote.

The call to stop making poppies caused consternation. But immediately representatives of commemoratives committees in small towns Australia-wide began posting on the Facebook page, asking for excess poppies for their Remembrance Day memorials. One woman, on her town’s Remembrance Day committee with five men, wanted to make a metre high waterfall of poppies from the local war memorial to the ground – but the men were refusing to learn to knit or crochet. Another offered to take spare poppies to the Western Front.

Meredith remembers the excitement when the poppies total topped 2500, then, by the Gallipoli Centenary on Anzac Day 2015, it topped 250,000. “I can tell you it is extremely addictive,” she says of the making. “I am a really busy person but here in Canberra in the winter with the heater and making one, and next thing it is four; I have probably made about 250.”

She, too, agrees it became obsessive for some. “But a lot of the people who’ve got involved, there were some very, very lonely people who are now connected to people with a shared love and it is not just poppies anymore, there are people who are sharing other craft. It has become a community that has done more than just poppies for remembrance.

“I am aware of several people with depression who have credited their whole involvement with the poppy community as helping them get through that difficult time. Some (are) women whose husbands have passed away, and the community has supported them through that time.

“It has been a very positive, encouraging, supportive thing. There have been disagreements, but they have been handled politely. It has been generally a very, very positive thing. It helps that it has been led by someone like Lynn who is a very positive person.”

After the Remembrance Day, 11 November, official launch at Federation Square, the target of 5000 would be increased time and again. One blind woman sent white poppies, many purple 210

ones arrived in memory of the animals which died. One woman copied her grandfather’s letters from the Front onto red fabric, then made poppies from it.

On 24 April 24 2015, after up to 30 people had worked every day for three months to attach them to nets, the 800 metres of mounted poppies – knitted, felted, sewn, plastic, leather, some even made from yoghurt cups – carpeted Federation Square. Next morning, as Anzac Day dawned, the 5000 Poppies team together with firefighters manhandled the 30 kilogram nets, sodden from the pouring rain, onto nearby Princes Bridge – a sea of poppies through which the dawn service attendees walked, and the Anzac Day marchers marched.

Left: The poppies on Melbourne’s Princes Bridge, Anzac Day, 25 April 2015; Right, Federation Square carpeted in poppies. Photos: Marilyn Healy.

It was a spectacular and moving display. Service people and members of the public wept as they walked through it. Many were no doubt remembering the fallen, in some cases members of their own families, with 8700 Australians having died on the Gallipoli Peninsula. But it’s questionable how many were remembering that Australia was actually defeated at Gallipoli – a loss which isn’t actually mentioned on the Australian War Memorial’s First World War home page: “The Australians landed at what became known as Anzac Cove on 25 April 1915. The troops were evacuated on 19 and 20 December.”

That date had quickly become a focal point for the 5000 Poppies project. It’s a date of which defence analyst and former army officer James Brown wrote in his 2014 book Anzac’s Long Shadow: “Anzac has become our longest eulogy, our secular sacred right, our national story. A day when our myth-making paints glory and honour so thickly on those in the military that it almost suffocates them.” 211

In The Gallipoli Story Patrick Carlyon writes of the “romantic glow” in which Gallipoli is bathed – a military defeat turned to legend; “a triumph of the Australian spirit”. He writes: “The Gallipoli campaign was a military folly, but it long ago came to double as something else – a measure of national character. Its place in the national imagination seems to keep on growing.”

Joy says any war is, of course, just appalling and being prepared to give one’s life in it is an incredible sacrifice. “But it is disappointing that this endeavour (5000 Poppies) does not look at some of the hard reality of it after all the details and research. But they are not in it for those reasons.”

Marg, however, believes making the poppies offered the chance to pay a personal tribute to all who suffered the impact of war. “I think the thing is that people hate the effect that war has on everybody and it is not just the service people. There would be no family anywhere in the world I think that has not been affected some way by a war and people want to pay tribute and remember those that were in the front line and this project meant they could make a personal tribute, it is not just buying a poppy.

“If they have got any crafting ability of any sort – and if they have not, we can teach them – it only takes half an hour to make a poppy and they can make it very personal. Because of that the whole project, when people see all the poppies together and think every single one of those has been handmade …” It’s a powerful tribute, she believes.

As well, the 100 year anniversary offered “a point in history where people can really reflect”. She recalls a volunteer working on the nets who said: “’To me this is more like a peace movement, it has got people to reflect on war’ and I had never thought of it that way. It has resonated with the wider community and some people have taken it on enormously and some people have made only one poppy.”

Marg tells of a woman who came to the Federation Square Atrium exhibition wanting to find her poppy. “She was crying and lost her husband within the last year or two.” It was an impossible task, Marg thought. So many poppies and to find just one. But, there it was, on the edge of the display. “Is it coincidence or is there something?” asks Marg, an agnostic but deeply affected by the incident. “I believe there is the power of someone out there looking over us.”

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Not so Secret Women’s Business Women By mid-2017 plans for the project’s 2018 AWM Remembrance Day grand finale to commemorate the end of World War I were made public. More poppy-making groups sprang up around the country. They met in yarn stores, at schools, libraries, cafes and at the War Memorial, with knitters posting Facebook progress reports as they churned them out.

By then, this was about much more than war commemoration for many participants, with the project’s Facebook page the focus for the large and supportive community of women it had engendered. For some, it was an actual community that gathered to knit and attach the poppies to the nets; for some it was a virtual community, with social media linking them to women they had never met. The online connections with knitters from as far afield as China, Malta and the Orkney Islands, were integral.

There is evidence for the benefits of this, as there is for knitting. In Making Is Connecting David Gauntlett writes of “clear evidence that having friendly social connections and communication, and working together with people on shared projects, is not merely pleasant-but-optional ‘icing on the cake’ of individual lives, but is absolutely essential for both personal well-being and for a healthy, secure, trustworthy society”.

Lynn says that having seen unpleasant, even cruel comments posted on other Facebook pages on seemingly innocent topics, she is thrilled the 5000 Poppies group has not faced that. “People are working towards a cause and are joyful and connected.”

Meredith agrees: “I ‘knew’ a lot of women who were very much like me but very different to me and we contributed to this community. I knew them through Facebook, we were having conversations from all round the country on Facebook … we would talk about the people we had met and the incredible stories, so it was growing so many other layers.”

She is keen to see a beautiful book produced as a lasting record. “It has been the most significant domestic commemoration of the First World War and it had nothing to do with government which is fascinating. It has been a grass-roots, mostly women-driven project that has had worldwide ripples. People have made the poppies from all round the world including Japan and Turkey. They were our enemies in some of these conflicts and the women there are reaching out to us.”

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Marg, too, cites the amazing friendships among the volunteers who have worked such long hours together as a key legacy – these will endure, she believes. Existing community groups participated and new ones formed. “People who were feeling a bit isolated and lonely, it is that sense of community, it is an important part of what this project is.”

She believes the chance to make something with their hands, together with others, is also important for many. She recalls hosting a Christmas lunch for several poppy-makers at the end of 2016 and, as they sat and chatted afterwards, all were stitching or crafting. “It’s just such a delightful thing to do, to have something in your hands. You can do it and still socialise. It’s a lovely social thing to do and that’s why communities have come together and are sharing skills. Being handmade and slowly made, it’s not automated – though you get into a rhythm with it and it becomes like a meditation. It also makes the thing that you are making unique.”

David Gauntlett writes of how invaluable creative projects are for human happiness “especially when either online, or off-line but linked via online platforms … Making things shows us that we are powerful, creative agents … Making things is about transforming materials into something new, but it is also about transforming one’s own sense of self.” Where “making is connecting” we are not only happy and creative, we build community resilience “so that we can face future challenges with confidence and originality”.

That resilience was demonstrated by the 20 volunteers from Melbourne who set up the Chelsea display, most paying their own way to London. Lynn wipes away tears as she describes the extent of this undertaking and the commitment of the women who crammed into her lounge room day after day to work on the installation.

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Working on the poppy nets in Lynn Berry’s lounge room; Lynn Berry (left) and Marg Knight with one of the nets. Photographs: Sue Green.

Earlier, during frantic preparations for the show, she had looked around that room, crowded with women and dogs and containers of all kinds crammed with poppies, at the long, sturdy tables made by her brother, topped by a 10-metre length of netting – number 54 of 80. The women who worked in rotation six hours a day, three days a week, leaned over it, reattaching poppies with plastic retail tag guns, cleaned and repaired after their Melbourne Anzac Day drenching.

By Anzac Day 2015 they had contributed the equivalent of one person working seven days a week for 16 years to the project, Lynn estimates. After 25 April they then turned around and did it all again, spending a year repairing the damage done by the Anzac Day rain and readying the poppies for Chelsea. “For some it was about their mothers who kept the home fires burning.” She believes that effort is comparable in some ways with the wartime contribution of those women who staffed the munitions factories and provided other essential services.

The dedications, too, acknowledged the women: those at home who had to ‘make do and mend’; the fiancees who waited for men who never came back; and the nurses and nursing orderlies who worked tirelessly on horrendous injuries. “It was not how it was conceived, but in many ways it echoes what happened,” says Lynn. “It’s not only women who knitted and crocheted, but it kind of echoes that whole secret women’s business thing. Many of those women were probably feminists and would never have known it ... never have couched it in those terms.”

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There is an irony here: “Perhaps it is predictable that female veterans are set apart from the Anzac legend,” writes James Brown. “Though I doubt it has happened consciously, every effort to focus on the military of a century ago drives a wedge between modern female veterans and the military legend their nation holds so dear.”

In her 2013 article ‘Trauma and the reinvigoration of Anzac’ Monash University Professor of History Christina Twomey wrote about the controversial feminist protests about rape in war in the late 1970s-‘80s. Their presence at Anzac Day marches led to arrests and “a wave of misogyny directed at the women who participated in the feminist protests”. She believes this actually contributed to renewed support for Anzac Day, which had been waning, the feminist activists unwittingly helping to reinvigorate it.

“Feminists gave new space and voice to understandings of war as a cause of suffering and trauma,” she wrote. “By opposing the feminist critique, male veterans both literally and metaphorically claimed for themselves the right to be the centre of Anzac Day activities… Trauma attracted an audience back to Anzac … The feminist protests were the most visible and public expression of new understandings about the traumatising effects of war and a focus on its victims.”

Joy Damousi describes knitting as a “quintessential historically feminine activity” and says of the project: “Women’s labour of knitting is part of the story.” As well, knitting is a universal, but a personal touch derives from the individual stories and dedications. “Women did the work of mourning; the way women and mourning have been so connected in world wars, women around the globe mourned for their men, it works on a whole range of levels.”

The 5000 Poppies project could be seen as a nice 21st century take on the selling of poppies after World War I, Joy believes. It could almost be seen as a continuum of that story, drawing on an early 20th century symbol. “But at the same time there is a discontinuity because in this latest iteration of that story it is a women’s narrative, a women’s activity. So women have rewritten the narrative around a quiet, domestic task of knitting. There is a continuity and a discontinuity which really gets to the heart of commemoration. It starts in one way and re-conceptualises over time.”

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A Sea of Red The daffodil, symbol of the Cancer Council, had seemed the obvious flower to “plant” for Lynn and Marg’s art project opposite a cancer centre. For an act of war remembrance, the delicate red poppy, Papaver rhoeas, sold by leading gardening products company Yates as Poppy Flanders Red, “a beautiful rich, red flower with dark blotches”, seemed an obvious choice.

“During the First World War, red poppies were among the first plants to spring up in the devastated battlefields of northern France and Belgium. In soldiers’ folklore, the vivid red of the poppy came from the blood of their comrades soaking the ground,” the Australian War Memorial website notes. It and numerous other websites and books devoted to the history of the poppy and its role in remembrance, recount the story of Canadian doctor Lieutenant-Colonel John McRae, so moved by the sight of poppies on the battlefield in Ypres in 1915 that he wrote the poem In Flanders Fields.

“The power of the poppy is a symbol that speaks across every culture, every language. So I guess it is quite a brilliant idea because it is a shorthand, the poppy symbol. It is sort of a global language,” says Joy Damousi.

In 1921 the British Legion, set up to promote the interests of ex-servicemen and their dependents, sold poppies as a fundraiser on Remembrance Day, 11 November, almost immediately selling out the 9 million it had ordered. The website of the Victoria Park RSL Sub Branch in Western Australian RSL records that the Returned Sailors and Soldiers of Australia joined in asking people to wear the poppy: “Firstly in memory of our sacred dead who rest in Flanders' Fields; secondly to keep alive the memories of the sacred cause for which they laid down their lives; and thirdly as a bond of esteem and affection between the soldiers of all Allied nations and in respect for France, our common battle ground.”

In her 2008 article ‘In remembrance: The Flanders poppy’ for the journal Mortality, Jennifer Isles writes: “The poppy stands for a wealth of ideas and feelings ranging from war, militarism, blood, grief and suffering to remembrance, peace, heroic sacrifice, hope, veterans, freedom, patriotism, and national identity. The motif stands for them all at once and condenses them. As a summarizing sacred symbol, it is able to synthesize a mass of complex ideas and feelings, and encourage an all-or-nothing emotional allegiance to the whole package.”

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The poppy, she concludes, has the ability “to encourage people to reflect on the past and to search for meaning about themselves, their times, and their society”. Certainly that was the case for so many of those contributing to the 5000 Poppies project.

Meredith’s mother Kath Schroder was well aware of the poppy’s symbolism when a young man wearing a beautiful, handknitted one walked past her during Canberra’s 2014 Anzac Day parade at the Australian War Memorial. Not one to miss an opportunity, the 83-year-old asked him about it and was told his mother from Cooma, New South Wales, had made it. “He said he would get in touch with his mother and she would send the pattern and she did,” she recalls. Kath’s group of 25 knitters embraced the project, making more than 80 poppies. “I think that everyone of my vintage is very involved with the First World War.

“I cannot express exactly why I loved doing it, it caught on and everyone got very enthusiastic, there is just something about the First World War,” she says. “I decided that once all the ladies had made poppies I would like to commemorate it.” So she contacted her son, Commander Andrew Schroder, naval attache at the Australian Embassy in Washington, and a talk by a senior naval officer was arranged for their service on Remembrance Day 2015.

Daughter Meredith was thrilled to find there was also a crochet pattern. She made one poppy, made another, and was hooked. In 2016, her brothers, Andrew and Murray, went to Gallipoli for the anniversary of their grandfather’s landing. “They had a small wreath (of crochet poppies) that I had made and mum had made a couple of smaller poppies for them to wear.” When her children, diehard Carlton Football Club supporters, went to Wellington for the 2016 Anzac Day match against St Kilda, she sent with them 10 poppies which they gave to the cheer squad. “They gave one to Mick Malthouse who wore it, not just for training but for the match.”

Meredith was well aware of the role knitted and crocheted poppies were playing in the remembrance. She has visited the battlefields in France three times, twice since being involved with 5000 Poppies. On her second trip to the Australian cemeteries and memorials in 2014 she noticed that “everywhere we went there were knitted and crocheted poppies”. By 2016 there were many more: “They were all over the place, on graves and on monuments. I am aware of people who could not make the poppies so they asked on the Facebook page, could someone make them for them to take.”

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Before she went Meredith, who teaches at Canberra’s St John Paul II College where children of defence personnel study, spoke about the project there, After being asked by the defence liaison officer to teach them to make poppies, she took their contribution to Fromelles and Pozieres. She had dedications written by staff and the defence students laminated, attaching them to poppies she ‘planted’ at the battlefield sites. “Some were quite personal, in memory of someone who passed away. A Year 9 boy impressed me with his understanding of it. He said: ‘In memory of those who died, who did not come home, the lost potential for our country’.”

Selling the Myth? Despite the goodwill surrounding the 5000 Poppies project it has not been without its tricky moments. From the outset Lynn and Marg pledged not to sell poppies made for it. But its success led them to realise that may have been an opportunity missed to raise funds for a worthwhile cause. Hence that call for another 50,000 poppies for the Victorian Returned Services League in 2018. But making those poppies to sell as lapel pins divided Kath Schroeder’s craft group, with one member particularly opposed. “She said: How can you put a price on them because people put so much effort into it, they are priceless’.” So Kath quietly made some, but no longer as a group project.

In Anzac’s Long Shadow James Brown writes of problems besetting the sector providing charitable help to returning veterans. He calls for a review of the veterans’ charities sector. He draws attention to the “extraordinarily privileged position” occupied by RSL clubs in Australian society, their massive revenue and their separateness from Returned and Services League branches – it’s a common misconception that they are the same thing. “From the rivers of gold that flow into the clubs, barely a trickle reaches the veterans,” he writes.

Meredith, too, has been reluctantly caught up in the issue of commercialising the project. Having seen poppies made to Lynn’s pattern for sale at $40 each in the Australian War Memorial shop, she raised this on the Facebook page. A member immediately contacted AWM director Brendan Nelson, who had been at Chelsea and had thrown his support behind the 2018 AWM installation. “He was most apologetic, he agreed not to take any more, he was very good about it,” says Meredith.

Marg notes, without getting into specifics, that there have been issues she and Lynn – Lynn in particular – have had to deal with. “It does occasionally feel a little bit out of control in that some 219

people want to commercialise it and that is something Lynn has had to deal with, especially if they are using patterns designed by her.

“We always consider where and how we want to use the poppies and where we want the project to be heading. It has always got to be as part of the tribute to the people who served the country during wartime. It could be the grandmother who was knitting the socks for the soldiers. Just because they were not the sort of person who went or could go to the frontline does not mean they were not affected.”

Many of those involved in the project believe this careful planning, non-exploitative attitude and care for its image are central to its success. That has given it the power to draw in people such as Ted Baillieu, who helped with everything from obtaining a $200,000 Victorian Government grant to arranging the lone piper who played each day in Chelsea. He and his wife Robyn not only accompanied the group to Chelsea, they were up with the sparrows daily to help with the backbreaking work of installing the poppy-laden nets. Every morning as they did, one of the group read a story of the original Anzacs.

In the lush lawns of the 17th-century Royal Chelsea Hospital, a British Army veterans’ retirement home, the volunteers planted 26,500 stemmed poppies – creating a meadow not unlike those in France where many Australian fighters fell. Ted and Robyn spent their days amongst the crowds who queued to see it, handing out brochures and talking to them about it. Among them were Australians who had contributed. “They were saying, one of these is mine.” It was, says Ted, a moving experience. “The fact that we took them to Chelsea gave them an extra depth because it was what the boys did, they left Australia and went to Europe. Widows of veterans came, families came, a VC winner came and sat among the poppies.”

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Setting up the 5000 Poppies project at the Chelsea Flower Show. Photograph: Marilyn Healy

The renowned Melbourne garden designer Phillip Johnson, 2013 Best in Show winner at Chelsea, was involved as the designer. A $200,000 Victorian Government grant made the installation possible, along with $50,000 from the Returned Services League and sponsors’ help. Phillip’s simple, elegant design included 4 metre wide strips of mounted poppies laid along each side for 100 metres. Philip, whose involvement had begun with the poppies installation at the Melbourne International Flower and Garden show in 2015, later worked with Lynn and Marg on the AWM installation.

The afternoon before the opening, the Queen and Prince Philip, Princess Anne, Prince Andrew and his daughters Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Harry and the Countess of Wessex all visited, talking animatedly to Lynn and other members of the team, entranced by the display. “I spoke with Princess Anne for ages, she was very gracious.” In a Hello! illustrated feature on the show, the Queen, who was presented with a beautiful beaded poppy made by Marilyn Healy, reportedly described the installation as “a marvellous sight”.

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Marg Knight (left) and Lynn Berry (in black) present the Queen with a beaded poppy made by Marilyn Healy. Photograph: Marilyn Healy.

Two months later, Lynn and a team of 12 Australians plus helpers from the local Rotary club, the Australian military and many passers-by were planting the stemmed poppies on a 300 square metre plot of land at Fromelles, France, at what was the German front line in World War I. There, 90 years earlier, on 19 July 1916, Australia had suffered what the Australian War Memorial website describes as “the worst 24 hours in Australia's entire history” – 5533 casualties in one night, from a country of about 4.9 million people. “The Australian toll at Fromelles was equivalent to the total Australian casualties in the Boer War, Korean War and Vietnam War put together,” it says.

“Fromelles was really emotional for me and in some ways tougher than anything we had done. It was a small installation, but it was really intense,” says Lynn, whose eyes fill as she tells how local French people joined them to talk about the war and their appreciation of the Australian sacrifice.

Among the dignitaries visiting the installation were Federal Veterans Affairs Minister Dan Tehan and senior army officers. “It was very emotional for them, and it was very emotional for us. From the point of view of coming to terms with what you have done and achieved to have had the head of the army (Lieutenant General Angus Campbell) respond by saying, 'I cannot thank you enough'.” 222

That these installations – Fromelles, Chelsea, Federation Square – organised from a Melbourne suburban lounge room and created by teams of women volunteers, could engage and move hundreds of thousands of people speaks volumes not only for the project itself, but the power of what Joy Damousi calls the Anzac myth. In 2009, Johanna Stott-Williams, South Australian winner of the Simpson Prize, a national essay competition for Year 9 and 10 students on the significance of Anzac Day, wrote: “We should acknowledge how through terrible conflict Australia was united as a nation and a national identity forged through the tragedy.”

This argument for identity building is addressed in What’s Wrong with Anzac?, with Mark McKenna writing: “Australians have embraced the Anzac legend as their most powerful myth of nationhood.” Co-editors Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds write in their introduction that with repudiation of the White Australia policy “a vacuum opened up at the heart of the national story. There was a longing for a proud national history, which would be duly met by the revivification of the myth of Anzac.”

Mark McKenna questions whether, after last century’s war horrors, modern Australia wants “to cling to a 19th century concept of nationhood: the belief that a nation can only be truly born through the spilling of the sacrificial blood of its young?” In his 2007 article ANZAC: The sacred in the secular, Graham Seal writes of the investing of Anzac with the power of the sacred “through the concept of nation rather than through religion”. He says: “Anzac therefore becomes another, yet the single most powerful, manifestation of an ambivalence lies at the heart of our sense of national identity.”

For the poppy-makers who turned out the flowers at such an astonishing rate driven, as Lynn Berry has said, by varying circumstances and goals, the 5000 Poppies project went beyond remembrance and acknowledgement. Rather than tackling topics of national identity – as Joy Damousi points out, in-depth debate about the issues was never part of this – it became about the individual and the local. Says Lynn: “What it has become, and for me what it’s all about now … is community and connection.

“For the many people who were involved in this project, it is the same. The fact that many of our contributors have gone on to create their own poppy projects locally or have stayed together as groups to continue their connection through charity knitting or creating local art projects, is an added bonus.” 223

On July 26 Lynn posted on Facebook from France: “Il est finis” and wrote of leaving poppies with the new Rotary friends in France, with love. But, while some poppies were left there, it wasn’t finished. Plans for the AWM installation – “these incredibly important last steps on our journey” – were already underway, as were numerous local projects, and she was promising ways would be found to use the poppies overflow from the 62,000 target.

Yes, there would be an exit strategy; the remaining poppies would go to appropriate homes. “But the project will live on through all those countless organisations and individuals who are making poppy projects for their local areas.”

Meredith believes that when all the extra displays in places such as nursing homes, craft groups and RSLs are added to those made for the major project the number produced totals many hundreds of thousands. That raises the question: where to now for all those who have put their heart and soul into this?

“I know that a lot of people have formed their own craft groups to make poppies, but I know that once that finishes they will find something else (to make),” she says, citing the example of those who make winter woollies for homeless people. She believes the supportive community will continue. “It may not be as big and may not be as well-connected because the Facebook thing might finish.”

In her blog post calling a halt to the poppy making Lynn wrote: “Marg and I always knew when we started 5000 Poppies, that it was very special … because for us it was and is about our dads. And the response from crafters across the nation and beyond has been so very, very powerful, and now, instead of being just about our dads, it’s about our collective stories … fathers and mothers, grandfathers and grandmothers, great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, uncles and aunts, friends, colleagues.

“I can honestly say, this is THE most important WORK I have ever done in my life … and I think many of you will feel the same.”

Further Reading https://5000poppies.wordpress.com/ Brown, J 2014, Anzac’s long shadow, Redback, Melbourne. 224

Carlyon, P 2003, The Gallipoli story, revised edn, Allen & Unwin, Sydney. Lake, M & Reynolds, H (eds) 2010, What’s wrong with Anzac? New South, Sydney. Saunders, N 2013, The poppy, Oneworld, London.

Chapter ends, sidebar to be inserted in text at design stage follows

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A Poppy Maker’s Journey Marilyn Healy followed the poppies’ journey through the lens of her camera. From Lynn Berry’s Melbourne living room to Federation Square, the Carlton Gardens to the battlefields of France she recorded the 5000 Poppies project for posterity, her tally of pictures well into the thousands.

A self-taught photographer, she describes the view of the expanse of poppies through the lens as “a strong visual statement of respect and honour and acknowledgement of our service men and women”. Marilyn paid most of her own costs to accompany the poppies to the Chelsea Flower Show, staying in the UK for a month, and later Fromelles and Poziere, where she stayed for a fortnight. “I couldn’t have not gone,” she says emphatically. “It’s such a momentous thing, such a huge thing. This is something that is once in a lifetime and I was not going to sit at home.”

An Australian poppy at Tyne Cot Cemetery, Belgium, the world’s largest Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery. Photograph: Marilyn Healy.

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Marilyn experienced both the thrill of Chelsea – “it was huge and exciting and wonderful and people were just going bananas for it” – and the “much smaller and quieter and deeper” battlefield commemorations. Her contribution was acknowledged with an invitation to a reception for the poppies team at Australia House in London.

But her involvement was not just as photographer. An expert knitter who learned from her aunt at about age 16, Marilyn began making poppies early in the project. She met Lynn when both contributed to the Melbourne arm of the crochet Coral Reef Project, begun in 2005 as a homage to the Great Barrier Reef – another project which went global. Since joining in in 2013 she knitted poppies, made I-cord for their stems, attached poppies to stems and to the nets, and captured it all on camera. For that first Anzac Day tribute in 2015, she stayed overnight in the city rather than return to her outer Melbourne home, ready to rise at 4am to join in setting up and recording it all with her trusty camera.

The poppy brooch made by Marilyn Healy for the Queen. Photograph: Marilyn Healy.

As well, it was Marilyn, whose work includes tiny, delicate beaded purses knitted in fine crochet cotton, who made the beaded poppy that was presented to the Queen. “I was there when the Queen came, I got some good photographs because my camera had a good zoom. There was a special poppy that was made and presented to her, which I made,” she says in her self-effacing way.

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“The fabric looks like solid beads. I came across a pattern for a beaded poppy and I made one for Lynn and Marg and (co-organiser) Kate (Maloney) and then they asked me to make one for the Queen. It was presented to her in a lovely wooden box, and I have a photo of her with the box in her hand. It was an absolute privilege. It was amazing. It was overwhelming.”

Marilyn has devoted hundreds of hours to the project – in fact, a good chunk of her life for more than three years and a good chunk of her own funds. She carries a newly-purchased bag in a beautiful poppy fabric – like many of those involved in the project she has become captivated by the red flower, and the group’s Facebook pages regularly feature poppy merchandise discovered by its followers.

Yet because the project works at so many levels Marilyn struggles to explain precisely what has drawn her in to such an extent. “It’s a number of things, it’s a number of things all jumbled together. It’s so big, it encompasses so much, but then it is also the very small details as well. In my thinking, every single one of those 300,000-approximately poppies is different even though it might be knitted to the same pattern by the same person. Just as every single service person is an individual.”

The emphasis on the service personnel is no accident; Marilyn’s grandfather John Healy was a stretcher bearer during World War I – “that is all I know, he never spoke about it” – her father, John, was Army ground staff in New Guinea during World War II and her uncle Terence was based in Darwin. She made a special poppy to honour each.

Marilyn reflects on the wartime roles of her father, uncle and grandfather; Poppies she “planted” for them at Chelsea. Photographs supplied by Marilyn Healy.

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But for Marilyn, as for many others, this project has not just been about honouring service people and an enjoyable, widely embraced craft project. “It has been wonderful for people who were shut-in, who are isolated, who are shy, who find being in company difficult. They have a common purpose to talk about, it’s that aspect to it. I know of one particular lady who has had a lot of grief in her life and it has been wonderful for her.”

And for her? “I fit into some of what I had said there. I am by nature a loner and it has been good for me.”

It can be challenging, but she has developed techniques to cope with being in a large group. “Sometimes if I am in a big group for an extended period of time I will step away for a few minutes, just for a brain break. The best thing for me is that I don’t consider myself to be there as me, I consider myself to be there as a person involved in the project – in my mind that difference is what enables me to do it. The shared sense of purpose, that’s what makes it possible for me.” 229

Chapter 7 Knitting in Mind

“Knitting is the thing that fills the cracks in the day. It occupies that part of my brain, I need to do something that is creative because my work is pretty dry and also it reduces anxiety.” Adrienne Morton, who suffered PTSD after witnessing a murder

Witnessing a murder almost outside the front door is a trauma few of us would emerge from unscathed, especially after providing evidence which helped the police find the killer. That was the horror faced by Tasmanian lawyer Adrienne Morton in 2014. “I chased down the defendant. He tried to break into my car and I photographed him and because I photographed him the police were able to catch him,” she recalls. But that frightening day, the subsequent court proceedings and sentencing took their toll: “I was really not good again until 2015.”

Adrienne was at home on sick leave, so it could not have come at a better time for her when a friend took over the knitting group at North Hobart’s State Cinema café in early 2015. Adrienne was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, a form of anxiety disorder. “The knitting group was great for me because I would get out of the house and was also doing a lot of knitting to try to deal with the issues of PTSD.”

Sane Australia says those affected by PTSD can believe they’ve recovered until they’re confronted with a reminder. Longer term problems, including depression and other anxiety disorders, may then develop. Adrienne’s symptoms were re-triggered in 2016 after the murder of the proprietor of the North Hobart shop where she bought her milk and newspaper. The knitting group became even more important. With a colleague taking her life that same year, she credits her knitting with helping her get through. “I knit in the car, in front of the telly, at Stitch and Bitch, at the doctor’s, if I’m going to lectures or talks.”

While Adrienne’s reasons for seeking out her knitting group’s support were exceptional, turning to the craft for its mental health and wellbeing benefits is not. The benefits of supportive knitting groups are, like the psychological benefits of knitting itself, now well documented. Researchers report that even those knitters who don’t take it up specifically for its wellness impacts experience these, as did many of the 5000 Poppies participants, supported and nurtured by that 230

community of women. As well, knitting has been found to enhance self-image, even to empower knitters, with mutual support creating pride in their own achievements.

“Crafts had elements that enhanced the participants’ well-being. Furthermore, it seems that telling and thinking about crafts were also connected to well-being,” Finnish researcher Professor Sinikka Pollanen found. “The analysis revealed that feelings of agony or pain could be pushed away and turned into bodily activity or symbolic imagery by hand work.”

Knitting’s Feel-good Factor Adrienne, who had knitted at primary school but took it up seriously years later, is one of several women that the Saturday afternoon knitting group has helped jump life’s hurdles. “We have a couple of members who are widows and have talked about losing their husbands. Most members have something going on, it’s very supportive like that,” she says. “People generally have a bit of space to talk about what is going on.”

She now co-organises the group with friend Robyne Conway. It has been weekly since May 2017 and she goes most weeks, knitting lots of socks, sometimes taking five-year-old daughter Harriet, who draws pictures for everyone. “It’s part of my rhythm.”

Luckily her PTSD has not left long-term problems: “I have no long-lasting incapacity, my ability to use my brain for my work has not been impacted.” In fact, after studying law as a mature age student Adrienne has become president of the Tasmanian Women Lawyers Association.

Such are knitting’s benefits that some psychologists prescribe it for their patients. Meredith Fuller, a Melbourne-based expert on workplace stress and author of Working with Bitches, says its soothing and meditative qualities are well known. “Society is too busy, busy; knitting is an acceptable reason to take that space.”

In The Mindfulness in Knitting: Meditations on Craft and Calm, one of a raft of books spruiking knitting’s meditative qualities, UK knitting activist and textile artist Rachel Matthews sums it up this way: “Even on the days when you feel utterly useless or overwhelmed, the act of knitting proves that you are switched on, advantageous and in control.”

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Melbourne psychologist Meredith Fuller Photograph: Joanne McGarry.

Meredith herself never learned to knit. Like many left-handed kids she was treated as a pariah when trying to learn crafts and never mastered any. But she not only knows knitting’s benefits, she had a close personal connection with it as a child. Raised in a single-parent family where money was tight, she did her part as a child model – including for knitting patterns.

Meredith Fuller never mastered knitting, but modelled for knitting patterns as a child. 232

It’s a therapeutic activity, she says. “We need to balance our brains and there is something about using both of your hands, doing a rhythmic task. Knitting is very soothing for people. A lot of people have got a lot of anxiety, and if we’re doing something like knitting it is purposeful ‘movement’ that uses that extra adrenaline that needs an outlet. As well we can focus on the rhythmic activity and release that worry into busily doing something.”

Betsan Corkhill’s 2014 book Knit for Health & Wellness is intended to help readers tap into these therapeutic benefits. She writes: “Knitting is an activity which many people find they CAN do even when they feel unable to do anything else. The benefit of being successful at something is very powerful …” Quiet knitting provides you with a tool to manage your day-to-day well-being, to ride the flow of life’s inevitable challenges and change.”

People knit in different ways, Meredith points out. “Some people in a soothing way, others in a fury and it’s challenging, it’s another way of discharging strong emotion.” She finds it amusing that some men have seen knitting as a “meek and mild thing”, particularly given its more violent historical connections with the French Revolution and the guillotine.

She is excited about the number of young men, particularly aged 18-25, breaking traditional gender moulds – raising their children, for instance. Her long-time husband, psychologist Brian Walsh, researches male anger and violence and Meredith says learning to knit offers men much more than simply gaining a skill: “Better to make a jumper than punch someone in the face.” It keeps hands busy, is creative rather than destructive and engages the brain.

“There should not be gender bias that prevents us doing things that are useful and interesting, and help deal with depression,” she insists. “You can knit in the sun which is very good for depression. The portability and mobility of projects is something you can pick up and put down, you might put it down for years, it has got that ageless, timeless quality to it.”

Knitting as a prescription for better mental health worked for Tasmanian Robyne Conway, Adrienne’s friend and Meetup knitting group co-organiser. More than 30 years of chronic health problems meant life held more than its fair share of challenges for her. Add retirement from managing large IT projects and consulting around the world, and she faced a difficult adjustment to home-based life without responsibility and a clear sense of purpose.

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Robyne lived most of her life in Melbourne, but fell in love with Hobart on a visit at age 18 and vowed to return, moving there in 1999 when she was in her forties. But it has not worked out quite as she envisaged: “Once your career ends you have to work hard at making friends and meeting new people and I did not realise that really. The whole way of living changes,” she explains.

Robyne Conway’s knitting has helped her cope with depression and chronic health problems. Photograph: Robyne Conway.

“I had never heard of Meetup when my psychologist showed it to me at a time when I was suffering from severe depression and feeling very isolated.” Although Robyne edits and proofreads theses and has undertaken a Master’s degree in philosophy and another in history in the past 10 years, health issues often kept her housebound until the knitting group.

“It has changed my life really, in terms of managing my depression and my sense of isolation. I also have a lot of other physical health issues and there are often weeks when the only motivation I can find to get out of the house is my Meetup group.”

Before then Robyne had not knitted without a pattern. “I have discovered a creativity that I never knew I had. I have now discovered that I can start with a pattern and then experiment by knitting all sorts of variations. I have even discovered that I can make up patterns. I can happily spend an afternoon trying out stitches for what I’m going to do for my next scarf or for a trim round a little girl’s cardigan. 234

“I am also conscious of the fact that knitting is very meditative, not so much in the group because there is too much talking and laughing, but at home my breathing slows right down. I can feel my normal levels of anxiety and stress dissipating as I knit. That’s really important. I find there are so many reasons to knit.”

Robyne knows “a surprising number of women” whose psychologists have recommended a knitting group to help with depression or post-traumatic stress. Others attend because they’re sick of starting projects and never finishing them.

“We even had a Meetup on Christmas Eve last year. To my amazement about 14 women turned up, including married young women who I think were quite keen to escape from the family drama and have a couple of hours’ time out from the kids.”

Unlike Robyne, Shay Zhang did not take up knitting specifically to help her through tough times, but it was there for her when they came knocking. Shay, a thoughtful 27-year-old optometrist, was taught by her mum and grandma in China and remembers making a horrible scarf with big holes. The mid-winter temperature in their home city of Shenyang, two hours from the North Korean border, can drop to almost -30°C so winter woollies are essential. “They would have come from a time of real frugality, scarcity,” Shay says of her family. “Every winter because we kept growing we would undo the old jumpers, I would help my grandmother unwind it and she would re-knit it.”

After moving to Melbourne at age 10 she knitted very little until turning to knitting for comfort after a relationship break-up one winter. “I found myself really alone, it was winter and cold and all my shared network was gone. I had just graduated and just started work. I needed to do something to keep my hands busy. It was very therapeutic, it helped me to reflect a lot.”

Shay does yoga and meditates; knitting’s meditative qualities complement her lifestyle. “I feel in our generation you have this urge to keep busy, busyness is worn like a badge,” she says, telling how her girlfriends asked to learn, but did not follow through. In fact, most people her age, while supportive, are surprised to hear she is a keen knitter. “I think they are surprised because it is a lost skill and in the culture of instant gratification people don’t look to it. I think that’s why my friends did not get into it.

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“It (the busyness) makes you almost feel guilty because you are not doing and knitting is a bridge between doing and just being. It was very difficult for me to stay still, knitting has been very therapeutic for me.”

Shay Zhang admires the yarns in Melbourne yarn store Morris & Sons. Photograph: Sue Green.

In 2016 and 2017 Shay went to rural Sri Lanka to manage a yoga retreat – four weeks off the grid in an eco-retreat that she first visited as a guest in 2015 – a break from her stressful visual rehabilitation job. After her second stay there she quit her job and instead works as a locum optometrist three or four days a week – a less stressful routine offering more time for herself.

That’s allowed her the challenge of learning new knitting skills – the tubular hat she’s wearing, learned from a YouTube video, for example. She knits alone, completing each project before embarking on the next. “In a way it’s making a commitment, I don’t like the idea of starting something and leaving it. I always finish it. I’m quite a minimalist in the way that I live,” she says, while admitting to a small stash of irresistible yarns bought on sale.

Shay makes scarves, beanies and snoods but lacks the confidence to make larger garments such as jumpers for herself. “I went through a stage because I knitted so much I did not know what 236

to do with the stuff. A friend cuts hair for the homeless and I gave it to him.” Although there is pride in wearing items she has made, “it’s not a very big factor. I love doing things with my hands, repetitive things with my hands. It really is more about the process than the product.”

While some knitters such as Adrienne and Robyne actively seek out knitting’s mental health benefits or, like Shay, turn to it for comfort, others discover these when they take it up. Ruth Power, a Melbourne primary school teacher, knits at night, often in front of the television when her toddler daughter Alexandra is in bed. “I do find it meditative. I was telling my husband recently it is good for my mental health if I get some knitting time,” she said while on maternity leave as a full-time mum.

Ruth, who grew up in the Victorian regional township of Toolangi, recalls her mum teaching her to knit when she was eight or nine, “doing one of those scarves that is just a bit wobbly and with odd tension”. Her sisters – one older, one younger – also learned, though she’s not so sure about her brother. Then, at age 14, learning a skill was required for her Duke of Edinburgh award and Ruth immediately thought of knitting. The end result was a “terrible” purple cropped jacket (this was the mid-1990s) which she regrets found its way to an op shop. Knitting has been important in her life ever since.

Unlike some teenagers, Ruth never stopped knitting, although she recalls: “I have been quite a closet knitter. At uni I would knit in my room. I think it’s become more trendy – or maybe I have become more self-confident, so that I would not care what people would think.

“I think it is good for everyone to have an outlet – to express myself. My older sister has not continued to knit. I worry when people do not have a creative outlet.”

Younger sister Margo also no longer knits, although she crochets abstract works. Margo is disabled and Ruth has recently taken a voluntary board position with a not-for-profit disability organisation. With a toddler, it makes for a busy life and Ruth, an impatient knitter who hates unpulling, often spots mistakes in her finished garments. Even so, that slowness is part of the attraction: “I like the time that you are investing into the item because we live in such a throwaway society – despite me throwing away my purple jacket. That’s also a thoughtful process.”

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Hunter Valley-based Cynthia Mulholland is another who experiences knitting’s boost to wellbeing and believes most knitters feel this. “Even if you don’t know it – the average knitter isn’t analysing why they knit,” she says. “Everything that the scientists are saying about knitting is true, that is no news to us, we already knew that.”

Cynthia Mulholland finds knitting helps her lead a balanced life. Photograph: supplied by Cynthia Mulholland.

President of the 850-strong Knitters’ Guild NSW, Cynthia gets “a bit twitchy and a little tetchy” if she has not knitted for a few days. It’s an important part of maintaining equilibrium when juggling guild commitments, working three day a week managing the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Singleton and running a household with two teenage sons. Even knitting a row or two is enough to bring a sigh of satisfaction. “I find that if I have got a lot on at work or other things that always seem to happen all at once, it is a great calmer.”

This calm is the focus of many of the dozens of books extolling knitting’s benefits pumped out since the 1990s resurgence. One of the first was the ground-breaking The Knitting Sutra, subtitled ‘Craft as Spiritual Practice’ by feminist writer and founding Rolling Stone editor Susan Gordon Lydon. In this very personal 1993 book she told of her drug addiction and knitting as her “secret weapon” as she battled cancer. Lydon wrote: “Knitting, like drumming, is the simplest 238

and most ordinary of activities, yet somehow it mystically contains within itself the potential for expanding our conscious awareness.”

Its sequel, Knitting Heaven and Earth, about healing the heart through craft, was published just months before her death in 2005 and was inspirational for many knitters. An obituary published in The Telegraph (UK) In July that year noted: “She described how women could raise their consciousness, overcome disappointment and knit, crochet and weave their way to Nirvana.”

Bernadette Murphy also explored the links between knitting and spirituality in Zen and the Art of Knitting (2002), while in Mindful Knitting (2004) Tara John Manning, the daughter of Buddhists, encouraged knitters to treat their craft as a meditation tool. Subtitled ‘Inviting Contemplative Practice to the Craft’, her book aimed to guide readers towards “a mindful and compassionate life”.

From inspirational stories and quotations to self-discovery guides and books about connecting with knitting’s heritage, they kept coming. The Knit Lit anthologies of short writing about knitting focused on its camaraderie and connections – central for many knitters. New titles attempt to tap the zeitgeist; Slow Knitting, for instance, brought together by Hannah Thiessen, a social media marketing consultant specialising in knitting businesses, plugs into the tenets of the slow food movement.

Comfort and Joy Knitting’s ability to promote social connections is for many knitters an antidote to the loneliness and isolation of contemporary life. Mary Lee Potter, a Texas nurse studying for her PhD, wrote of her knitting group research in her 2017 article ‘Knitting: A Craft and a Connection’: “A knitting group possesses shared experiences, shared interests, and shared language. She concluded: “The findings revealed that knitting served as a catalyst to bring a group of participants together not only to share in a common craft but to create bonds between people.”

Joanna Forteath, a Ballarat nurse specialising in organ donation, put this into action to promote organ donation during the annual DonateLife Week in 2015. She had noticed the fun her community had had knitting poppies for 5000 Poppies. From that grew a project with a humble goal – asking nursing home residents to knit 117 hearts representing the 117 organ donors who saved the lives of 352 people in Victoria in 2014. So enthused was the Ballarat Base Hospital community more than 400 hearts were created. 239

Jo was inspired by the global Little Yellow Duck Project; knitted ducks are left in public places with tags asking finders to register on a website encouraging organ donation – a random act of kindness that highlights the life-saving kindness of donors. She thought, why not magenta hearts, the logo of the DonateLife Network.

“One of our many aims is to get the community talking about organ donation so it is more accepted and not a taboo subject,” she explains. When Jo publicised her project in the hospital newsletter enthusiasm spread, with more than 35 craft groups and individuals, including nurses and hospital volunteers making the small, plump, cushion-like filled hearts. “Some people put their own little slants on it, some put little diamantes on them.

Hearts for life. Photograph: Joanna Forteath.

“When people saw them knitting and asked why they were doing it, they said, ‘for organ donation‘, and they would have this conversation.” Media coverage followed and when the hearts were displayed in a main hospital corridor organ donation information there were volunteers on hand to explain the issue. The hearts were also hung in the Ballarat Library, Jo says, and the project, embraced for its enjoyment and purpose by the craft groups taking part, encouraged people to have that important conversation with their families about organ donation and their wishes. 240

Knitting’s benefits were measured by a worldwide online study of more than 3500 knitters, published in 2013. It was carried out by Cardiff occupational therapists Jill Riley and Claire Morris, plus former senior physiotherapist Betsan Corkhill and reported in the British Journal of Occupational Therapy. The milestone study concluded: “Knitting has significant psychological and social benefits, which can contribute to well-being and quality of life.” Among them: “Relaxation and relief from stress, together with therapeutic and meditative qualities, which were related to its rhythmic and repetitive nature … Frequent knitters, especially those who knitted more than three times per week, were more likely to report feeling calm after knitting.”

Participants suffering from depression reported “a significant association” between belonging to a knitting group and feeling happier and better about themselves. Other benefits included helping forget problems, organising thoughts, improving problem-solving, short-term memory and concentration as well as helping focus on other activities – watching television, for example.

“Despite being an individual pursuit, the potential of knitting to promote social inclusion was strongly evident from the survey,” the researchers wrote. Those who knitted in a group felt it had helped them to learn new skills – and not just knitting skills. It also made for better social contact and communication and greater happiness.

As a result, Betsan founded stitchlinks.com. Its aim: “A global support network for those who enjoy the therapeutic benefits of crafts, particularly knitting” and to use knitting to complement medical treatment for long-term health problems.

Other studies have supported these findings. UK researcher Alison Mayne studied knitters’ feelings of isolation through her Facebook group study. She found: “The most powerful impact on well-being expressed by participants was the personal gratification and self-soothing experience of making with yarn – as a guard against anxiety or as the simple joy in creativity.”

Brain Food Knitting’s therapeutic role can be so significant that Dr Karen Yair of Crafts Council UK has written: “Absorption in making can be particularly beneficial for young people with severe learning difficulties, who often lack opportunities to focus, to achieve and to control their immediate environment.” 241

Certainly brain health was front of mind for participants at knit-ins across Australia in 2015 as they turned out thousands of unrecognisably strange woolly creations, while hearing experts discuss topics such as dementia, depression and brain injury. Those knitters, some new to it, were following a simple pattern to create neurons, the brain cells that receive and transmit information and form the basis of thought. This collaborative art/science project, Neural Knitworks, was developed for National Science Week the previous year by textile artist Pat Pillai, “to promote brain health messages to communities across Australia and beyond”. By 2018 it had spread to the UK and Singapore, with participants urged to “calm your mind and craft your own brain health”.

Tasmanian Lise Chambers is one who understands knitting’s power to heal, and the connection between body and mind health. For Lise, who lives in Sorell, signing the consent to tell her story here was an exciting moment: for the first time in seven years she neatly wrote her own name.

Knitted helped Lise Chambers recovered from a very rare illness. Photograph: Patrick Chambers

All her life Lise had knitted, sewed, tatted and crocheted, after learning in childhood from her mother in rural Denmark. Now 69, she had knitted ever since – until the day she woke up unable to move.

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That moment is etched on her mind: “The seventh of January 2010, I went to have a nap in the afternoon and when I woke up I could not move; it was like having a stroke. All I could do was talk, I could not sit up, I could not walk to the toilet.”

With her beloved husband of 23 years Patrick tending to her every need, Lise was in and out of hospital. But there were no answers. “They did not know what was wrong with me. They started putting me through all kinds of tests, they even tried to reverse the flow of my blood. I was put through the mill for seven-and-a-half months.”

It wasn’t until leading neurologist Professor Bruce Taylor began talking to her that he realised Lise had a combination of rare neurological disorders, opsoclonus and myoclonus syndrome, caused by a virus. “One in 10 million get it. There is no cure and another doctor told my husband, ‘she will never get better, she will only get worse and then she will die’. My poor husband nearly collapsed.”

But Lise never gave up. She had come to Australia in 1960 to marry her first husband with whom she had two now-adult daughters, but the marriage ended. After two more unhappy partnerships, she says of her fourth marriage, “we have the happiest marriage two people could have.” She also has two granddaughters and Patrick has four children and three grandsons. She had no intention of abandoning them all by dying.

Lise spent four months in a repatriation hospital but says all that could be done was physiotherapy to avoid muscle wasting. She was discharged. “I thought, well nobody is going to make me better except me, so I set to work and I did two hours every night of yoga and ballet exercises on the bed. I was strengthening my muscles because I knew that that was the key.”

Having previously studied both, she kept up that regime for more than two years, and began going to day care where she was helped by hydrotherapy. “I went from a wheelchair to a wheelie walker to Nordic poles.”

All this time the handicrafts she loved were beyond her. Her fine motor skills had disappeared. But five years after that day in 2010 when her illness struck “like lightning, from the clear sky”, she made an exciting discovery: “I discovered that my fine motor skills had come back and I started spinning. I said, ‘if I can spin I can knit’ and I picked up my knitting needles and I said to Patrick, ‘I can knit!’. I have been knitting for the last three years.” 243

Lise, who now goes twice weekly to Dodges Ferry fitness centre Healthy Horizons for aerobics, weight training and a massage, says knitting has been an important part of her recovery. It has helped not only physically, for her fine motor skills, but mentally.

“If you sit in a wheelchair or a chair all the time with your hands in your lap you get bored. At first I was a bit clumsy, a little bit, but once I got into the swing of it, it just went like a breeze. My skills came back as though they had never left me. “I was lucky.”

And relieved? “You bet!”

North American researchers Yoshi Iwasaki and Ingrid Schneider reported that leisure activities such as craft could offer a way forward, “new meanings and directions in life”, for those to whom bad things – even traumatic events – had happened. “Feelings of empowerment generated through leisure may equip people to possess positive attitudes towards life and strong resources to effectively cope with constraints and challenges experienced in life.”

So it is for Lise. She is now so confident that her ability to knit and spin has fully returned, she and Patrick have launched a small commission business. Clients choose from her wide range of patterns, the pair blend alpaca with merino wool washed, carded and wound by Patrick. Lise then spins and knits it. After years of helplessness with Patrick as her full-time carer, this work and the chance to contribute to the couple’s income is exciting. “I just love making things, I love creating things.

“When I started at Healthy Horizons I could hardly move the exercise bike pedals and now I am at level 20. I have got to the point now with my exercise program that I am able to help him and do a few things round the house. I can walk unaided round the house and when I go out I walk with my Nordic poles.” Partly, that is thanks to knitting, she says. “They are very impressed at Healthy Horizons, they call me superwoman.”

Knitting Together Unlike Lise, many knitters lack family support to learn to knit, says Valerie Elliott, who joined Victoria’s Handknitters Guild three years after it began in 1988 and has been secretary for 15 years. Her contribution has included running regular knitting classes for those with no one to teach them. “Most of them could get the hang of it,” she says. “A lot of people say that they find 244

knitting relaxing. Someone had only done about two rows when she said, ‘oh, I find this so relaxing’.”

A retired primary school teacher, now a volunteer tutor with disability groups, Valerie has found some have no teacher. Others find that when they do learn, their hobby is dismissed or even derided. It’s a gap filled by knitting with others at the guild’s monthly Sit and Knits, and other knitting groups.

“It is the encouragement of their friends who say, ‘what are you doing?’, ‘aren’t you doing well’. They mightn’t be getting encouraged at home. They might be told, ‘why don’t you go and buy one?’,” says 86-year-old Valerie, an expert knitter who still upgrades her own skills.

She didn’t lack encouragement to knit. Taught by her mother, she practised at school where it was part of the curriculum. Aged seven at the outbreak of World War II, she knitted for the soldiers with her classmates and with her mum at home in Blackburn, in Melbourne’s east, using wool provided by the Red Cross. She recalls knitting a balaclava as young as Grade 3.

The social contact and encouragement are the main motivators for most people attending the get-togethers, along with skills improvement and access to the 1500-book library, for which Valerie is a buyer. “Most of them are looking for opportunities to knit, opportunities to improve their knitting and opportunities to sit and socialise.”

Candace Gibson agrees. Her WA guild is committed to upgrading and sharing skills; its tutors run classes across the state. “The distances here are ridiculous,” she says of her home state, but she wants to ensure the guild is supportive and inclusive, a source of encouragement and well-being.

A former recruitment executive in her mid-40s who returned to Perth in 2005 after 12 years in Europe, she joined the guild in 2012 and finds satisfaction in overseeing its reinvigoration. She wants to increase the membership and chances for members to upgrade their skills, but also to help knitting shed its “slightly Victorian image problem – as though there is no knowledge or skill involved”.

This was borne out by Stanford University sociologist Corey Fields’ research, focused on a young, urban knitting group in an unnamed US midwestern city. Although carried out in 2002, its conclusions hold today. It found: “On a practical level, group meetings gave members a chance 245

to share ideas and seek assistance on projects, but group meetings were also an opportunity for the knitters to knit with other people who had similar self-concepts and shared the same expectation of the knitter role … The group itself is proof that the stereotype of knitters is inaccurate.”

For Candace, knitting was initially all about the product. Her mother taught her to knit the British way, but she soon gave up. Decades later, coveting the beautiful Russian and Shetland shawls she saw in European markets, she taught herself to knit Continental style from a book. Rather than see it, want it, buy it – we’ve all done that – she decided to make what she wanted.

Now, though, her knitting is about so much more. Guardian to her ailing father and with stressful duties such as preparing his house for sale, it helps her unwind, challenge herself by modifying patterns and creating her own and is the source of valued friendships. “It is one of the things I use to slow down and relax.”

Candace, who lives with husband Laurie Cranston, makes space for her knitting and spinning her own yarns despite the demands on her time. Evening stitch and bitch sessions with guild members offer welcome downtime. “I catch up with friends, I have a lot of friends who are part of the knitting and guild side of things, people that I would not have known otherwise.”

These benefits are backed up by the science, explains psychologist Meredith Fuller. Solitary knitting provides time alone yet results in a finished product – good news for those finding others don’t understand their need for solitude. But it also offers a great excuse to get together and gives busy people a chance to rest. “It is a task that we can do with great dexterity while we interact with other people.

“One of the things that is striking about doing something like knitting is that you are encouraged to talk about things that matter. You can be with a group of people and feel like you are heard.”

Meredith recalls with some outrage that in the 1970s university equal opportunity officers told women they should not knit, and to avoid such a gendered pastime. “What have we done to these women over the decades when we insist they not do anything that was traditionally feminine?” she asks. “Knitting is an opportunity to be with people where you can talk through issues. We lost that.

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“It is legitimate because you do get the outcome and it is something that people can understand. It is almost an essential activity whereas if someone wants to sit and stare at the clouds for a couple of hours, others can be quite judgemental and suggest we’re wasting time. So we may not allow ourselves to do that, but we may happily have a languid knit.”

The Feelgood Factor Knitters can be a generous bunch too. From toy donkeys for a donkey refuge, to tiny garments for premature babies and warm clothes for the homeless, knitting for others is a popular motivation for picking up the needles. Huge numbers of charity knits are churned out across Australia and around the world every week. For some this is a sideline to their main event knitting – the result of a special appeal, an annual charity knitting day or an occasional charitable impulse. For others, such as retired accountant Barbara Schembri, knitting to help others is a daily event.

Charity knitting was even the subject of a 2006 book, Knitting for Peace by Betty Christiansen, with tips on how to start a charity knitting program, suitable patterns, inspirations and stories about those helping the needy. In it she wrote: “We knitters work a powerful magic when we knit for others. By doing so … we can build bridges between warring nations, helped to heal deep wounds, offer a primal sort of comfort, and create peace – however small, and in whatever way that may be – for others and ourselves.”

Perth executive assistant Kirrin Lill began knitting in 2009 because she wanted to support a friend’s charity knitting event to make baby blankets for new mothers at the King Edward Memorial Hospital. That meant returning to the craft she had learned from her grandmother as an eight-year-old but hadn’t touched for more than 20 years. “It was not so much that I wanted to get back into knitting, but I wanted to help out with that project. I would go and do a bit of knitting, take a bit home and do a bit. I still have a bunch of squares here that I am supposed to be working on.”

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Kirrin Lill casts on a garter stitch scarf for her niece. Photograph: supplied by Kirrin Lill.

That event, now annual, was organised in conjunction with the Country Women’s Association young women’s group CWA Perth Belles and inspired by London’s Shoreditch Sisters, who describe themselves as “the new wave” of the Women’s Institute. It began small, so Jo’s grandmother and a few of the older CWA knitters helped Kirrin and the other newbies. For her, that initial charitable impulse has led to a long-term hobby she is sticking with.

Now the goal is making her own clothes, from fleece to fabric. A member of the Handweaver’s, Spinner’s and Dyer’s Guild of Western Australia, she is mastering her spinning wheel and drawing on the expertise of the guild’s knitters. “I see knitted items that I would like to make and I know that it would be very satisfying to do it. I’m more conscious about buying fast, cheap fashion. If you can say, ‘I made this myself’ and other people compliment you on it, hopefully they will become interested in doing it themselves.”

Some knitters, unlike relative beginner Kirrin, reach saturation point. How many scarves does one knitter need? That was the question exercising the mind of Ros Roger’s daughter Joanna, back in the particularly cold Melbourne winter of 2004. Surely some of the excess could help warm the homeless – an idea that spurred her and her mum to action. By year’s end they had collected 180 scarves from friends and family, distributing them to Emerald Hill Mission in South Melbourne. So thrilled were the mission administrators, they asked for beanies. 248

That charitable gesture marked the beginning of what is now an Australia-wide not-for-profit organisation. It built gradually – 2000 a year, then 3000 – but fast forward more than a decade and the numbers are staggering. In 2016 KOGO – Knit One Give One – distributed more than 70,000 handknitted adult, children’s and babies’ garments as well as toys, through 250 community partners.

Partners include crisis accommodation, food distribution vans, women’s refuges, homelessness services, those dealing with children at risk and emergency relief. It also provides gift bags to disadvantaged new mums and Christmas gifts to children in difficult circumstances – 3000 in 2016. The following year Ros, who coordinates KOGO and its estimated 5000 knitters, was awarded the Order of Australia Medal in the 2017 Australia Day honours.

It’s easy to assume KOGO’S knitters are mostly elderly, retired women. Women, yes, says Ros, herself a passionate knitter from a young age, but they are a diverse bunch, from around Australia, one even in Singapore. “The youngest I ever had was an 11-year-old girl. It is an amazing story. I put out the word to our knitters to make toys. I got hers with a letter from her foster mother and it said she had been given a knitted toy herself; she knew how much it meant to her and wanted to make one to help another child.

“The oldest was 103. Five days before she died her daughter, also one of our knitters, sent in her last lot that she had made. There was a woman who was 87 who used to knit little ducks. She sent a letter to say she could not knit any more ducks. Then I got a letter from her daughter to say she had passed away and how much knitting for KOGO had meant to her. We have a lot of beautiful stories.”

Even more striking than the quantity is the quality of garments knitters make for people they have never met. Ros and up to 40 volunteers, including four delivery drivers, ‘oooh’ and ‘aaaah’ as they open the boxes brought in to KOGO’s rented warehouse from drop-off points. They label every item with a swing tag so the recipient knows a KOGO knitter has made it with love for them.

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KOGO founder Ros Rogers with some of the thousands of garments and toys donated to the charity. Photograph: supplied by KOGO.

“We are astounded and humbled every week when we see the stuff that comes in. I think they are people who care so they only want to give away what they would want, and also they just love making something beautiful, it is a creative outlet for them,” says Ros. “They are helping someone else – I think that is a really big motivating factor.”

At the annual KOGO launch she meets some of them. “The most common thing is people who will say, ‘I love knitting and I don’t have anyone to knit for now because they are grown up’.”

Supported mostly by corporate and trust fund donors, KOGO receives few community grants; nearly all knitters supply their own yarn and even make cash donations. For those who can’t afford to, there are many local schemes to help out. “I just find that knitters are very compassionate people, especially my knitters because they are knitting purely with the thought of giving away, so you have to be a caring sort of person. They are putting love into every stitch, you could say.”

The Why of Knitting Meredith believes it is important to think about knitters’ motivations and for knitters to gain insight into their own. She agrees with Ros about the importance of love. “There are so many things we don’t know how to do with the change in our families since the 1960s,” she says, 250

comparing this with the renewed interest in cooking. “We are bringing back these older skills that are practical, but serving a purpose now while we are in a situation where we don’t have as much income. It is helping us learn new skills and encouraging us to mix with a broader range of new friends and mentors.

“We have to ask what is behind some of this and I feel there is a lot of yearning, almost as if there is an archetypal longing for what those things represented. I think a lot of people don’t feel seen anymore, they don’t feel loved. All of these ancient, slower things represent some kind of love and a sense of community that we have somehow lost.

“Organisations are not treating people with respect. We are longing to feel loved and uniqueness of the handmade being produced represents the love that has gone into it.”

Robyne Conway agrees. She recalls her mother making children’s clothes because home-made clothes were more affordable. As a young woman Robyne, too, made clothes to economise. Her great-nieces’ mothers don’t see it that way. “Now the mothers of little girls look on the clothes I make for their kids as luxury items and something special. In the past, store bought clothes were expensive and special but now it’s the handknitted things, made with lovely yarn and often sold at up-market shops, that are not affordable for a lot of people.”

A recent surge of interest in Robyne’s knitting group has membership topping 60. Each get- together is restricted to 12 so they don’t hog all the cafe chairs, and often there is a waiting list. “It’s not just our group, there seems to be a huge amount of interest in Hobart at the moment.” Robyne knows of two other groups meeting in Hobart cafes, one at the State Library and at least three run by wool and craft shops. “Some travel three-quarters of an hour to get here – from a significant distance out of town – and that is a big deal in Tassie.”

There’s a wide age range, mostly working women including a scientist, teachers, lawyers, a librarian and an event coordinator. Many are studying and working. All are women, although men are not banned. “I think we kind of like it. I don’t think there is any harm in having a place where women can talk freely and express opinions that they might not express in front of men – and that happens,” says Robyne.

Many knitters say they enjoy this community of women, and for Robyne this brings to mind the 1987 Dale Spender and Sally Cline book Reflecting Men at Twice Their Natural Size: “They found 251

that the average man would consider that if a woman he was talking with had more than about 30 per cent of the talking time he would view her as dominating the conversation.

“We did not set out to be a women’s group but we are. We get to know each other and it is supportive. I find it supportive and I know other people do too. We don’t bitch and we don’t allow people to bitch. We want all the conversation to be friendly and supportive.”

Cynthia says NSW guild knitters have a variety of motivations, often more than one. For some it is about learning: “They are learning new techniques, ways of doing things, cheats, the latest fads; (there are) people who it does not matter whether they knit because it is all about the social side. Really they only pick up their knitting when they are with us. It’s the opportunity to come together and share their craft in a safe and supportive environment.”

Members can visit other groups and can attend a branch event twice before committing to join. “It’s a very welcoming, friendly environment. It does not matter what you do for a living, what your background is, whether you come from money or are on the poverty line, it does not matter because you were all talking about knitting. All judgements are put aside, I find.”

She has made a wide variety of knitting friends. “I met people, we hit it off, lovely friends, we talk knitting and have a great laugh and talk about family and I think well, I am in a room with someone who works for Google, a Crown prosecutor, a person who manages all the backstage area of the Opera House (all) at the same time, and a woman in her 70s who manages a beef farm, an ex-Army officer who was the first woman in Afghanistan – I would never meet these people if it was not for knitting.”

As well, there are those for whom knitting is a lifesaver: an elderly Maitland member lost her husband a few years ago and told Cynthia, “if I did not have my knitting and these ladies, I don’t know if I could get through the day.” Cynthia was struck by that power of knitting and says: “She is not the only one, (there are) people who talk about their experience of it, not only the actual knitting but it is the social side, it gets them out and interacting and the physical contact because we all do hug.

“It’s a great leveller, knitting, I have to say.”

Further Reading 252

Corkhill, B 2014, Knit for health & wellness, FlatBear Publishing, Bath, UK. Lydon, S 1997, The knitting sutra: Craft as a spiritual practice, HarperSan Francisco, New York. Manning, TJ 2004, Mindful knitting, Tuttle Publishing, Boston. Matthews, R 2016, The Mindfulness in knitting, Laping Hare Press, Brighton. Roghaar, L & Wolfe, M (eds) 2002, Knit lit, Three Rivers Press, New York. http://knittedknockersaustralia.com

Chapter ends, sidebars for to be inserted in text at design stage follow 253

An Appetite for Knitting

Fiona Wright (right) and close friend Susan Wijngaarden. Photograph: supplied by Fiona Wright.

Award-winning Sydney poet and essayist Fiona Wright’s life is a resource to be mined in her writing. Yet for many years, and despite her doctors’ encouragement, she resisted writing about the illness which has dominated it since she was a teenager: anorexia.

When she finally felt ready to explore such a personal and stigmatised struggle in her work, the result, the slender 10-essay collection Small Acts of Disappearance, won the 2016 $30,000 Kibble Literary Award for women’s life writing and was shortlisted for the Stella prize. With such celebrity came the need for Fiona, now 33, to talk publicly about her eating disorder, exposing herself to writers festival audiences and media interviews at which the focus was inevitably on it as much as her writing. Café interviews offered journalists irresistible opportunities to comment on everything from her attitude to the menu to signs on the wall about food.

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“It was terrifying at first but it also gets much easier the more you do it,” she recalls. “I certainly think it is important to. The less we talk about things like this the more people think it is shameful. I could not admit it for a long time, I could not admit it to myself even though it was blatantly obvious to other people.”

Fiona’s constant companion on this journey has been her knitting. Not only has she embraced its soothing qualities, it has played an important role in helping her force herself to eat: “I do think it was really important in the early stages to get me to sit down and be still, especially at dinner which has always been my hardest meal. Particularly in the early days I always had knitting on hand so that I was stimulated by other things than the plates of food that I would have to get inside me. I eat very slowly. It helps to get more in over a long period of time. I still have knitting on hand at dinner.”

While she still cannot bring herself to go out to dinner, Fiona does go out for other meals, not something she could manage at the height of her illness. “I would not do anything like that, I would not even go out for a coffee really. It’s slow. I sort of think that some parts of it are going to be with me forever.” She has become more accepting of that. “Writing is my means of making sense of the world.”

Fiona – actually Dr Wright as she has a PhD in poetry from the University of Western Sydney – has undertaken cognitive behaviour therapy as part of her treatment. She sees a connection between this and her knitting, now “one more tool in the toolbox”, she says, also using the metaphor of arrows in a quiver. “One of the skills they talk about is building mastery to cope with intense emotions – something that makes you feel masterful or in control. I always thought that craft is really good at that.”

Preferring to make items that don’t require counting, she often knits while doing something else – watching Netflix or hanging out with friends, for instance. “The more basic things calm me,” she says, also admitting that she learned fast that basic knitting is best when you’re knitting in bars.

Fiona recalls her grandmother as “an incredible knitter” who continued making babies’ clothes and jumpers from memory until her death in June 2017, despite macular degeneration. “She would give them to my mother or me to sew the buttons on because that was the only thing she couldn’t do.” 255

Her mother knits, but it was Fiona’s father who taught her while she was still at primary school. “His dad taught him; my grandfather learned it in the Army or just before he joined the Army and believed that every man should know how to darn and sew on a button. He did a lot of beautiful embroidery too when he was in the Army.”

As so many young knitters do, Fiona began with garter stitch scarves. Although she continued knitting as a teenager, it was when she was in her mid-20s that she took to knitting with a vengeance. “It was while I was sick and just starting to get treatment and I had a lot of trouble being still. Part of it is general, standard anxiety and part of it is that anxiety that comes with eating disorders. You always want to be moving and doing something, which is the worst possible thing you can be doing if you are not getting enough nutrition.

“I brainstormed with my doctors, I could not sit still for the length of a movie.” It was a doctor who knitted who suggested it as a source of stillness. It helped. “I always thought that part of it is that it is repetitive and rhythmic and gets your brain into a meditative state.”

Knitting with her housemate led to a stitch and bitch group and the flexibility of freelance and home-based work made possible regular social knitting with girlfriends – a vital source of support. “The women friendship aspect of it has been really important.”

Fiona initiated the social knitting group: “We could sit in the park and spend the morning making things together. The first was just at the start of spring and to be sitting in the sun with my girlfriends was a lovely thing to do.”

Most of what she makes is for other people – jumpers, hats and scarves and, in particular, babies’ clothes. “I love making a pair of booties whenever my friends first tell me they are pregnant, and often it is one of the first things they get. I always post them so it is a surprise and I think there is something about getting this tiny pair of shoes that makes it real.”

Fiona’s best friend, university administrator Susan Wijngaarden, suffers from anxiety. Fiona taught her to knit and when Susan quit her job the pair’s developing close friendship revolved around regular knitting, coffee and cake meet-ups. In early 2017 they talked about this friendship – and their knitting – in the Good Weekend magazine’s popular Two of Us feature.

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Although both are competent knitters, Fiona believes their knitting mistakes have been therapeutic. Dropped stitches stay dropped, flaws in lace remain uncorrected. “I think – Susan and I talked about this a lot – that I know it has helped both of us with perfectionism, that kind of making things and keeping mistakes in them was one of the ways that we both worked on that,” says Fiona.

Knitters will empathise when she says: “The first couple of times it was absolutely maddening.” But for many it will come as a surprise that she does give gifts with mistakes, comparing this to proof reading a book and the inevitability of errors no matter how many times it is read.

“I do it without thinking now. I only correct it if it is a terrible, horrible one that is going to make a mess of the pattern.” It is about accepting that “it does not matter if you make a mistake – something where a mistake does not have any consequences – and living with it. I am very good at leaving mistakes in things now. I see it as like the Persian carpets where mistakes are put in to make it individual and unique.” 257

Knocker-knitting Nomad from the North

Dawn Toomey knits a Knocker on the Nullarbor. Photograph: Ray Toomey.

Dawn Toomey’s bath is filled with Knitted Knockers. She calls it a kind of McDonald’s for handknitted breast prostheses, full of breast-shaped balls of colourful knitted cotton, each complete with knitted nipple, all packaged up, ready for distribution.

“My bath is full of Knockers. I distribute them from home and I have stock of each different size; each pair is sealed in a zip lock bag,” says Dawn, who lives in an over-50s resort in Deception Bay, north of Brisbane. “They live in my bath because in our house we just have this bath we never use so it was the ideal place to store all these Knockers.”

Some were made by 73-year-old Dawn, who learned to knit from her mum as a child in Camperdown, Victoria. But many were made by women in the local Knitted Knockers Australia group she founded and coordinates after her round-Australia Knocker knitting effort made media headlines.

Dawn’s group is one of more than 30 set up nationwide since the community project, begun in the US, was brought to Australia by cancer survivor Cheryl Webster in 2013. Melbourne-based Cheryl says that by mid-2017 it had distributed more than 7500 pairs of the cotton prostheses and attributes this to the team effort by its 12,200 registered knitters. 258

Knocker Knitting at Gloucester National Park, Pemberton, WA. Photograph: Ray Toomey.

Dawn and Ray, her retired-plumber husband of 53 years, are grey nomads extraordinaire, having made numerous driving trips around Australia and overseas, even in Alaska, since retiring in 2000. In 2014, as they drove across the Nullarbor and around Western Australia, Dawn knitted 128 Knockers. A great communicator, she raised awareness for the community project as she went. “It’s just passing the word on because everybody knows somebody who has lost a breast to cancer.”

Since retiring Dawn had belonged to a charity quilting group. But she realised her materials were too bulky to take on the WA trip. When daughter Kim spotted a call out for Knocker knitters in a magazine, she thought of her mum. “Kim read out the article: ‘Knitted Knockers are soft, 100 per cent cotton knitted prostheses provided free for women who have had a mastectomy and who do not want or cannot afford reconstructive surgery’,” Dawn recorded in the journal she keeps of every trip.

Dawn called Cheryl. “She told me: ‘Silicon prostheses are expensive, heavy, hot and hard to maintain at a good level of hygiene, especially for women living in the warmer areas of Australia – Knitted Knockers are a wonderful alternative’.” Dawn was sent a kit including yarn, pattern and fill and quickly knitted a pair she sent to Melbourne for quality checking.

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Cheryl says this is necessary because the prostheses are being worn by people who have had recent surgery and are distributed in hospitals. Health Department approvals are in place and all her knitters are insured. For this reason, Knitted Knockers sends its knitters kits.

Dawn was sent 10 balls of cotton – enough to knit about 20 Knockers. She would mail them back to head office in Melbourne, where a volunteer would fill them so she did not have to carry the bulky stuffing. “I’m going to be the Knocker Knitting Nomad from the North,” she told Kim.

The journal begins: Dawn at her first stop, Brunswick Heads. Photograph: Ray Toomey.

As Dawn travelled, bags of cotton would be sent ahead to campgrounds. As usual, she put together a travel book – this time, with a new idea for holiday snaps. Sitting by the beach at their first stop, Brunswick Heads, she pulled out her knitting and asked Ray to take a photo. So began her knitting Knocker travelogue, and pictures with everything from an iron ore truck on the road to Port Hedland, to a monk at New Norcia Monastery. Just to be sure she didn’t miss an opportunity, Dawn travelled with a prop in her handbag, half a Knitted Knocker on a spare set of needles.

“I put together a little book on my knitting round Australia and if I go and do a talk somewhere about Knitted Knockers I take it with me and people can flip through it.” It was an effort which 260

turned Dawn into a media celebrity, with an ABC Brisbane interview, then a feature in Take5 magazine.

For Dawn, the importance of what she and her small group are doing was brought home by her very first client – her friend Brenda. Soon after Brenda’s second mastectomy Dawn asked if she would like to try out a Knocker. After popping into her bedroom to fit them, Brenda returned in tears to hug Dawn – the softness and comfort of the prostheses was something she hadn’t experienced before.

Back in Brisbane Dawn coordinates orders and distributes to hospitals such as the Holy Spirit Hospital oncology ward. With Australian women facing a one-in-eight risk of being diagnosed with breast cancer by age 85 and new cases in 2017 expected to top 17,700, according to Cancer Australia, demand is unlikely to slow. “So many people have heard about them now, but the orders keep coming in,” says Dawn.

She has no plans to retire from charity work and now, with a group based at her local library, knits beanies and socks for children at the local women’s refuge, blankets and tiny caps for premature babies at a local hospital. “We meet weekly on Monday for a couple of hours – often knitting and, of course, talking and chatting.” Always looking for a new adventure, she has a cute beanie pattern to try out: “We try not to make them more boring. If a woman or a child needs to go to a charity to get a beanie it is nice to give them a colourful one.” 261

Recovery in Process

Susan McDougall, wearing a Wingspan design shawl she knitted. Photograph: Susan McDougall.

Susan McDougall didn’t take to knitting until she was in her early 40s, and although she’s a perfectly competent knitter she is the first to admit that her colourful projects are nothing fancy. Complex challenges are not what it’s about for her. Rather, she says with no hint of exaggeration, “knitting has given me a new life.”

Susan’s eyes fill as she tells of the many new and supportive friends knitting has brought her, face-to-face and across Australia through social media. As well, there have been enriching experiences such as travelling to the Chelsea Flower Show in London with the 5000 Poppies project in 2016 – experiences she did not dare hope would be possible again after her mental health broke down just over a decade ago.

In 2006 Sydney-born Susan, who has a library science degree from UTS, was raising her then 15- year-old son Iain and in a demanding job as library manager at the University of Melbourne’s Hawthorn campus. A perfectionist, always very demanding of herself, she had already drained her energy reserves as a volunteer at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games that year when a relationship breakdown proved the last straw. “I did not have the energy to get out of bed and 262

have a shower. I did take to my bed for a while; then with good psychiatric care and medication I gradually got a bit better and I used knitting as a sort of meditative, contemplative tool. It was not the production; it was the process.”

As a child, although her aunt and sister both knitted, Susan hadn’t really bothered with it. Reading was and is her great love, although she did sew and embroider. She also had a family connection with textiles – her parents ran a rug shop in the harbourside Sydney suburb of Mossman – and in her early 40s she startled her knitting girlfriends by asking them to teach her. “I started with a scarf and then knitted something for Iain, my son – a scarf and beanie,” she recalls. “It was something to do with my hands while Iain was at cricket and soccer and go- karting, so I would spend my time knitting. I knitted while I waited for the bus to go to work, I made stuff for everyone I managed.”

These days it offers a different kind of solace. “I knit increasingly less complicated things – it’s meditation,” Susan explains. “Keeping busy is part of it. I know if I sit at home and do nothing being alone with your thoughts is often not very pleasant – the ‘not good enough’, which is a constant refrain. It is really easy to believe the doubting voice because sometimes they can be very, very loud. Being alone with my knitting is okay – I have to concentrate.”

Depression changed hard-working and competent Susan into someone she hardly recognised. “I was on sick leave and then resigned and have been frightened ever since of taking on anything of responsibility,” she admits, her fingers anxiously working her knitting needles as she tells her story.

She struggled, too, with a lack of self-worth, feeling useless and lacking purpose. Ten years on, 5000 Poppies, her involvement with Victoria’s Handknitters Guild, in particular its library, and with yarn bombing group the GLAD Rappers have changed all that.

“Getting into the Poppies has been absolutely fantastic, it has opened up my circle of friends, my understanding of my capacity to be of value to the community. One of the things I struggle with is being useful rather than useless. There has been a lot of joy in joining in community things.

“I started on the poppies soon after they began, just by walking past. I became part of the crew, the inner team, and I helped count and open mail and do those sorts of things and helped with 263

the installation in Federation Square. I became like a team guide. That gave me a great sense of self-worth.”

When the Chelsea trip was confirmed, a goal of 20,000 poppies on stems for the lawns was set. “I was in charge of the stick-to-stem project. We had teams all round Victoria and I went round to all the teams. And I had the privilege of going to Chelsea which was absolutely brilliant.

“From the 5000 Poppies I was invited to join the (yarn bombing group) GLAD Rappers.” Her contributions have included knitting a rainbow-coloured curtain for the Christmas 2016 exhibition at Melbourne’s Johnston Collection decorative arts museum. “I also became a steward at the Royal Melbourne. I have been a real-life museum exhibit at the Royal Historical Society Victoria.” Within a week of joining the Handknitters Guild in 2014 Susan had volunteered for the library, doing everything from customer service to assisting higher degree students with research; she was then asked to join the committee. “I have been able to get my librarian’s hat back on.”

At the Red Cross she is now involved with emergency services and heritage and special projects. Volunteer work with the archive and heritage collection in the lead-up to its 2014 centenary led to more volunteer work and a paid part-time research and accessions position.

A decade after her major breakdown Susan still has occasional small, depressive episodes. So what may sound straightforward hasn’t been easy. For example, the noise and crush of 100 knitters gathering at the monthly Sit and Knits can be challenging. “I have driven myself to go out there, and being able to say, ‘what can I do?’, or just doing it or not even saying, ‘what can I do?’. Just doing it.”

“I liked to challenge myself a little bit. I took to it (knitting), to the point it was an obsession for a little while. I was on the cusp of having a serious depressive episode, but I did not know that. One of the staff was having a baby and I knitted her this never-ending blanket, it would have filled a double bed, it was like a sanity lifeline. Then I did have a severe depressive episode and did not knit.”

As she returned to knitting, a process begun with a Better Homes and Gardens rug project, she felt herself returning to life – a different life. “I have morphed into someone different through experience,” says an emotional Susan. She has also become a prolific social media user. Her 264

several hundred Facebook friends receive a fascinating variety of very regular posts not only about knitting and textiles, but her own life including the adventures of dog Milo and adventurous kitten Teddy.

“Knitting, it has given me a new life and such a beautiful, beautiful collection of friends and acquaintances and people that I never met in real life who are my friends on Facebook,” Susan says. “I look at my knitting as a thread of communication.

“There is a balance between actual participation or being quiet in a group. I do sit down and just blob now, but it is a healthy blob and I know the difference.” 265

Going to Extremes

Thinking big: Jac Fink is dwarfed by her own extreme knitting. Photograph: supplied by Jac Fink.

The knitting at the heart of Jac Fink’s extreme knitting business, Little Dandelion, looks simple enough: take giant yarn and humongous needles, cast on, knit a few rows, cast off. But for her it is so much more.

“This came from a place of great trauma. It was a very spiritual experience for me, it is very mindful for me,” she says, dabbing her eyes. “Knitting involves an incredible ritual and rhythm between the mind and body and soul. It’s a powerful healer. It has been in my case – this has absolutely freed me up from years of pain, depression and anxiety.”

Tears flow as Jac, a teased overweight child who escaped into knitting, tells how big knitting turned her life around after years of medication and daunting family health challenges. She recounts this story at the beginning of the workshops where she teaches others to manipulate the extreme knitting yarn and 100 millimetre needles that are her stock in trade. Those 266

workshops are “an emotional journey”, encouraging participants to heal their own hurt through the knitting.

“I want these people to walk away knowing that this is very meaningful work for me. I have changed my life through knitting,” says Jac. “In my story people recognise their own struggles and connect. I want people to realise that if I have been able to overcome these really hideous things in my life, they can too. I get emails all the time from women who have read my story, have heard my story, have connected and say my sharing of the work has gone on to change their life.”

That work is basically knitting simple shapes such as throws and scarves in K1S1, the thick pre- felted yarn made from unspun long fibre wool which Jac spent two years researching, sourcing and developing with a specialist mill in New Zealand. “Most people connect with it really quickly,” she says, but some experienced knitters used to small needles find her fence-post variety tricky. “Sometimes they get really irritated. Because of the scale and size of the material it becomes extremely physical. I liken it to crocodile wrangling, and if you are struggling to get your needles through the yarn it is too tight. I encourage people to relax.”

Little Dandelion K1 S1 Extreme throw in grey. Photograph supplied by Jac Fink.

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It’s this size and scale that leads to the mental health benefits Jac finds so healing. Not someone who relaxes easily, she says: “You have to concentrate so hard… that mindfulness comes in without you realising.”

She was taught to knit by her mum at about age nine, growing up in northern New South Wales. “Mum is always knitting, she is a great knitter and I used to always notice as a child that my mum would sit in a corner, she would be happy, calm and quiet. I thought, there is something in that. I knew as a child that knitting made me feel calm and good. I knew I could get home and pick up a project of Mum’s – she would always let me work on whatever she was knitting, even if I made a mess of it.”

Jac studied law at Bond University on the Gold Coast and briefly practiced corporate law in Sydney after following her now-husband Eric Fink there in 1994. She hated it. Quitting to manage one of Eric’s Hugo Boss stores, she then had three children in four years, suffering post-natal depression after each birth and turning to counselling and antidepressants.

After the birth of her third child at age 35, years of going through the motions without addressing the cause of her mental health problems caught up with her. Pneumonia followed by acute, unexplained abdominal pain left her unable to get out of bed some days. Then, in 2006, her mum was diagnosed with a terminal lung disease and given three years, at most, to live.

During those three years Jac and her mother had many “pragmatic conversations” as her mum planned for her death and funeral. But one stood out: “Mum was 59, she said her only regret was that she never fulfilled her true potential. Those words were like a knife to my heart. I thought, those words are not going to be spoken in vain. I realised I had opted out of taking responsibility for enjoyment in my own life.”

As Jac began her search for a home-based creative business, her mother cheated death with a lung transplant at the eleventh hour, as her family gathered to say their goodbyes. “I was still on antidepressants but was in a light-filled space full of gratitude,” Jac remembers. “I just really felt that I was in another realm and one night I am asleep and a big loud voice says to me, ‘you have to knit and it needs to be big’. I woke up terrified because it was incredibly loud. I woke up and thought, I have asked for that guidance for so long I am going to listen to it.”

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From that point in January 2010 she began researching and developing her business, beginning with wooden and PVC pipe knitting needles made by her dad and hand felting woollen tops in her home shower. She had no qualms about telling her family that she was acting on a vision. “I have had some experiences like that in the past and they were used to hearing things like that from me.” Others are less understanding: “I can see some eyes rolling and I am like, this is what happened to me and I don’t care if you think I am a mad woman.”

More difficulties lay ahead. In 2011 Eric developed Bell’s palsy so severe that at first it was thought to be a stroke. While the family lived on the proceeds of selling their stores and as Eric gradually recovered, Jac posted four photographs of her big knitting on Instagram and began taking commissions, felting each piece in the shower.

Gradually, orders for finished homewares and the yarn balls she sells on her website grew, as did recognition; what began in a corner of her home has become a global trend. At the same time, she began creating large scale art installations. “I started dabbling with creative art pieces on the side but never had them out in the world.” In 2013 she exhibited at The School, a Sydney creative arts centre run by stylist Megan Morton in Rosebery. It was immensely rewarding: “The knitting is my mental health plan. The fact that I had to try to make a business out of it always kind of irked me,” Jac says. “These artworks are such an indulgence for me, they are so satisfying, for the first time in my life I am finally passionate about something.”

Knitting huge wall hangings is Jac Fink’s “indulgence”. Photograph: supplied by Jac Fink.

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The art side of her business is growing; private commissions for her hand-felted installations have her knitting eight hours straight to produce them, using the giant needles like oars with her legs bearing the weight. In 2016 she produced a 3 metre by 6 metre 200 kilogram work for the Dubai Opera House. Sounds obsessive? The knitting has become an addiction, she admits.

“I trust my creative ability implicitly now. I don’t create to please anyone, I create purely to please myself, I create without any agenda to sell it, I know eventually it will find a home,” she says of her art pieces. “I am so determined to see where I can take this now.”

Despite this success Jac’s business is still not breaking even; it’s a frustration. “I never went into it with the expectation of making a living from it. That was a big mistake.” It’s one she is trying to correct, increasing her margins and undertaking government-funded projects, including one with farmers struggling with mental health issues in western NSW.

Jac has heard it said that the big knitting craze will disappear quickly, but she disagrees. This is not only her mental health plan, it is a way of encouraging her workshop participants, including some men, to set themselves free – as she has done. These days she has a life coach and the antidepressants are in the bin. It has been an amazing journey: “Yeah, it’s pretty bonkers.” 270

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Chapter 8 Blurring the Boundaries

“I don’t want to be the tall corn in the poppy field. I just want to be one of them and that’s where gender bias against male knitters is really odd.” Bluey Little, member, Sydney Inner-City Knitters Guild

Gauntlet-style vintage design gloves knitted by Bluey Little. Photograph: Bluey Little.

Bluey Little’s magenta gloves with a touch of bling at the wrist are attracting plenty of compliments. With one completed and the other still on the needles, he is racing to finish this gift for his Swedish mother-in-law before he and his husband Daniel Skold fly out to Sweden for a family visit. The gloves in a luscious New Zealand possum fur and wool yarn are quirky and fun, gauntlet style with a sparkly chequerboard at the wrist and impeccably knitted. Perhaps that’s why they’re attracting so much attention in this room full of talented knitters. Or perhaps not.

Low-key in a zip-fronted grey knit hoodie he made, Bluey, quietly knitting and chatting, is one of only two men at this monthly get-together of the Sydney Inner-City Knitters’ Guild. Tucked into 272

the end of a long table in a room of 40-odd women at the top of the stairs in Redfern Town Hall, he has no interest in the “fake celebrity” so often accompanying a man’s entry into a traditional women’s space – think stay-at-home dads or male nurses.

“The women often say, ‘come on Bluey, show us what you are doing because you always have something interesting on the needles’. They don’t seem to say that to others,” he observes. “Every time I knit something or am working on it at the guild, to me they seem a bit over the top.” Bluey has been called a perfectionist and an over-achiever by one member and concedes there may be some truth in that – each of his projects is intended to be more interesting and challenging than the last. “Maybe people are actually gushing because they are impressed.” But he is doubtful that’s why.

“In the knitting community, female knitters expressed strong support and encouragement of men who knit,” American sociologist Maura Kelly writes in her article ‘Knitting as a feminist project?’. She interviewed knitters about links between knitting and feminism and found some women “connect men’s knitting to a larger shift in gender roles”. She notes: “Male knitters generally attract more attention than women in public spaces and some male knitters express pleasure in doing so.”

Not all enjoy the attention. Sociable Northern Territory-based knitter Peter Jobson often finds himself the only man at knitting events and knows all about unsought, excessive attention and the over-praising of achievements. Peter, the NT Government Botanist who runs the herbarium in Alice Springs, says: “Bluey is right, you do often get into this minor celebrity thing – ‘oh come and have a look at this, isn’t he amazing’. You feel like a performing seal.

“I have had the boring comments: ‘I have never seen a guy knit before’. They do ask me who taught me to knit, I often make up names. Women are rarely asked this same question by strangers. We do all suffer this; you end up with, if nothing else, minor celebrity status.”

For male knitters this “status” is just one of the issues arising from pursuing what’s stereotyped as a women’s craft. Added to that list are social isolation, assumptions about sexuality and even the possibility of homophobic aggression.

Art knitter Jude Skeers reckons he’s been treated as an oddity for most of his 70 years. However he found an upside and used it to his advantage. In 1988 Jude, also an exhibition curator, writer 273

and teacher, co-curated a Men Knitting exhibition, part of Australia’s Bicentenary celebrations in conjunction with the Australian Wool Corporation. Two boys and 53 men were chosen from 120 male knitters tracked down Australia-wide. “We had one piece of knitting for each person then a really large board for each of the men with their photo and their story and, on a frame, that one piece of knitting. They wrote their own story,” Jude recalls. “People would look at it and they were saying, ‘that’s fantastic’, and they were really saying, ‘isn’t that fantastic for a man’ and I would say, ‘yes it is, but I know 100 women who are better knitters’.”

Men Knitting catalogue cover – Jude Skeers’ 1988 exhibition

Little has changed since, says Jude, who lives most of the year in the Blue Mountains. He was taught to knit by his mother as a child in Junee, New South Wales, and, unusually, stuck with it. Now the Society of Arts and Crafts of NSW vice-president, he asserts: “There is always this weird thing with the knitting, everyone is fascinated by it. I sit in Craft NSW (knitting) and everyone thinks it is a real oddity. If it was a woman no one would take any notice. I deliberately rode on that, I deliberately made a big thing about men knitting, it was pure sexism but that’s how you get the publicity.”

The male knitters’ novelty value ensured that the exhibition, shown Australia-wide, attracted attention; Jude’s pile of yellowing cuttings would be the envy of many curators. “We had no trouble getting on TV with it. I rode it a lot of the time, have to admit, I used it to promote the 274

exhibition. Since the ‘80s I’ve been involved with exhibitions and I made use of it, being a man in textiles, to do that.”

In a three-page Good Weekend magazine spread devoted to the “purly kings” of Jude’s exhibition, journalist Geoff Maslen called them “members of the freemasonry of knitters”. They included Queensland miner John Kelly who knitted at the end of his shifts and Gippsland fire spotter Dick Noble who knitted in his tower as he watched for smoke. With many of their stories dating back to World War II, there is no mention of masculinity undermined nor of homophobia, although the topic is touched on obliquely by then-66-year-old Melbourne barber Eric Gouldthorp, a knitter since age eight and a former soldier: “I used to worry about customers coming into the shop and seeing me sitting there knitting. People used to say it was sissy. Now, I don’t give a bugger.”

Maslen wrote: “Though all the male knitters have received curious stares, rude comments and sometimes laughter when they take out their needles in public, most believe there is a growing acceptance of the practice.”

Their optimism was misplaced. More than 25 years on, media coverage of male knitters clings to the same stereotypes, with the focus firmly on novelty value. For instance, in 2015 the late Alfie Date, then aged 109 and Australia’s oldest man, attracted considerable attention by knitting jumpers for Phillip Island penguins affected by an oil spill. Alfie had been knitting for more than 80 years.

Knitting -related gender issues do now receive some attention. A January 2015 report in The Advertiser headed ‘Real men knit’ included an interview with Adelaide knitter and gay activist Llewellyn Jones who was working on a knitting art project “aimed at prompting conversations about the constructs of gender”. A July 2014 ABC report about men knitting an Anzac commemoration wall hanging noted that many men have tried knitting, “contrary to popular belief”. But, said project coordinator Kaye Healy, “they’re a bit shy in coming forward”.

Real Men Don’t Knit Certainly most knitters are women and knitting is commonly pigeonholed as a women’s hobby. Along with other crafts and tasks associated with women – quilting and housework, for example – it is often demeaned, the butt of jokes and sneers. In her 2012 article ‘Here Comes the Knitting Men’, Canadian academic Alla Myzelev writes: “Craft in general, and knitting in particular, has 275

had gendered connotations from at least the early twentieth century… Thus, knitting was perceived as unworthy of the status of a ‘real man’s pursuit’.”

American researcher Kristina Medford, author of I Knit Therefore I Am, about knitting and gender identity, notes: “For men who knit, the lack of inclusion can lead to questions about their masculine identity. Masculinity is defined negatively as that which is not feminine …”

Canadian Kristof Avramsson has personal experience of this. Having learned to knit and finding it extremely therapeutic when being treated for cancer, he decided to write his PhD about men knitting. Published in 2016, this project was prompted by a “provocative moment” years earlier: the sight of an elderly man at a bus stop hunched over his bright pink handknitting. Kristof still clearly recalls how awkward he felt and how embarrassed he later was about feeling awkward. “The events sparked within me an attentiveness to the rebellious quality of a man knitting … A man knitting, acutely breaches deep-rooted stereotypes of appropriate and legitimate (gendered) activities. His performance troubles masculinity and boundaries of what is acceptable and what remains largely out of bounds.”

He writes of his work as “haunted by the everyday, by the mundane spectre of a male knitting. It hazards the unexpected discovery of his performance, rendering it dangerous. Troubling because it challenges certainties of what things should look like; who is included, or more to the point, who gets left out.”

Bluey Little knows all about being left out. Growing up on a farm in Gippsland, Victoria, he was fascinated by his mum’s knitting. He was dying to learn. But, as he revealed on his Ravelry profile, “I was told, ‘no I won’t teach you because only girls knit’.” He recalls waiting until his parents went shopping – a two hour round trip – then grabbing his mother’s knitting books, spare yarn and two cow insemination rods as stand-in needles to figure out how to make purl and plain stitches.

Lex Randolph had no such trouble. That came later. Like so many girls, he was taught to knit by his mum and grandma. He took to it enthusiastically, later adding crochet to his repertoire and he has been making things ever since. But in 2000 Lex, a full-time Perth artist, began undergoing gender transition. As his gender changed from female to male, so did the attitudes of family, friends and society at large to his knitting.

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“There was an expectation that when I transitioned that I would stop doing these girlie things and start watching football,” says Lex, now 38, who has studied music, anthropology and arts management and is not a football-watching kind of guy. When he turned up at knitting groups, he felt unwelcome.

These days he works in community arts projects and disability arts, combining that with his personal art practice. In early 2017 the reaction of those unwelcoming knitters fed into his work in his first solo exhibition, Human Becomings. A museum of real and imaginary body parts, some in specimen jars, it focused on gender and the body.

“I have never had any bullying or anything offensive said, but I have not felt comfortable in those stitch and bitch groups identifying as a trans-man. I have felt that when I am in a queer space it is totally fine. I understand the need for women’s spaces, but I have definitely felt uncomfortable.”

This also happens at his yarn bombing workshops: “Traditional women and usually older women, they are a bit taken aback that there is a man there,” he says. “In physical appearance I pass pretty well. But I am open about being trans. People ask, especially speaking to people on the phone. I have never had anyone say, ‘what are you doing here? Piss off’. But I have felt that people were a bit hesitant, especially in skill building, especially older women who think, what could I have to offer them about knitting.”

When Lex began transitioning he continued with crafts because he had always done them. “Then as I started to get a reaction it was, ‘well I am going to make this because guys are allowed to do this’ even though it did not start out like that. I still feel that way in terms of the textile arts; it is a very female, domestic space. It’s definitely seen historically as very feminine.”

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A Lex Randolph selfie with yarn bomb, in Launceston 2012 Photograph: Lex Randolph.

Most men are not open about their knitting because of this historical perception, Lex believes. When transitioning he researched other male knitters and textile artists and had trouble finding many in Australia, although he believes there are likely many more than we realise. When he recently joined an all-male choir he chatted about his knitting and crochet. “One of the wives said, ‘you would be surprised, most of these guys are knitters as well’ and I would have had no idea.”

Research shows such attitudes are learned early, at home, with what happens at school often reinforcing traditional views. Finnish researcher Sirpa Kokko found that the craft skills learned by the male teacher trainees she studied were part of learning to be a man. “In early childhood, the boys had taken part in their mothers’ and grandmothers’ craft activities but when they got older, this stopped. Craft activities therefore appeared to get segregated by gender as part of the boys maturing, the boys having been guided to practice the type of crafts belonging to culturally masculine spheres.”

In Finland, where craft education is compulsory, the boys focused on wood and metal work, the girls on textiles. For a boy to have chosen textiles would have exposed him to the risk of 278

homophobia: “Being involved in such an anti-male sphere would have meant a risk to the boys’ masculine reputations. Studying textiles would have been considered as a sign of girlishness, which obviously should be avoided,” Sirpa concluded.

Such stereotypes prevail in Australia too. Bluey tells of arriving at the New South Wales guild’s biannual 2015 knitting camp, which attracts about 200 people, to find “the other guy had pulled out. It was a bit intimidating. It was very strange being the only guy.” An international troubleshooting IT consultant, he often attends business meetings where there is a lone woman and suddenly had new insight. “I had an inkling of what it must be like to be the only woman,” Bluey recalls.

“Every workshop or breakout session they said, ‘so, ladies’, and it was really loud. I was often given a task like, ‘can you help move the chairs?’” The reason? “Because I was the boy or no one realised that I was part of the group, and walking around the corridors no one would say hello to me because they assumed I was working there. I was the handyman; I was again invisible.”

Bluey at first thought he was being ignored because he was intruding on the women’s space. “I decided to think it was because they thought I was the janitor; perhaps it was a bit of both.” Eventually a mixed age group from Newcastle was friendly to him. “So I found a club; I am still friends with them – as much as you can be with people three hours away.”

Finding a club can be challenging for male knitters and often leads to seeking a sense of community online, as previously discussed. When Canberra knitter Stephen Lawton set up the Ravelry and Facebook groups for Australian men who knit, he was a solitary knitter. After his university failed to renew his research methods tutoring contract, he was spending considerable time at home. It was thanks to “a mad knitter” former work colleague he discovered Ravelry, which led him to the Queanbeyan branch of the Knitters’ Guild, NSW.

When Stephen walked into a meeting in 2015, the only man in the room then and still, he was welcomed and has gone ever since. “I learned about lace knitting through the guild, made a small shawl for my sister-in-law and for my mum an enormous stole. I put it in the Canberra show as a beginner and got a first and championship ribbon, that really emboldened me and gave me more confidence.”

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Since then he has knitted in a cafe with a mid-week group – “their conversations are dominated by, ‘my husband’ and ‘my children’ – and continues to tackle new projects, including initiating a Canberra pussyhat-knitting project to raise funds for a local domestic violence service.

Stephen Lawton makes (and wears) a fundraising pink pussyhat. Photograph: Antoinette Buchanan

“I have had women whose body language has been very cut off, who have not engaged with me if I happen to be sitting next to them,” he says. “I get the impression, and I am mind reading a bit here, that (they think) I am a bit strange.” But he has developed friendships with women in the Queanbeyan group, posts pictures of his work on Facebook and after initially buying his yarn from Spotlight and Big W, has discovered exciting independent yarn dyers. “I now have this stash that takes up my spare room. Four years ago I did not even know about a stash and yarn addiction.”

Yes, reactions to a man knitting are predictable, Stephen notes. “There is always that initial surprise and a bit of shock.” He hasn’t faced negative comments, though he has knitted little in public. But a Melbourne yarn store staffer, rather than approach him with the usual, “can I help you?” as he browsed the sock yarn, demanded: “Do you know what you’re doing?”. The big 280

surprise: The staff member was a man. “Not only was this poor customer service but I did feel patronised as well.”

Stephen still feels the isolation of the male knitter and is disappointed that he has yet to connect with other Canberra men who knit. But, thanks to social media, he has linked with others around Australia. He holds onto his dream that one day they’ll all meet at a men’s retreat.

Unlike many male knitters, Melbourne transgender artist and musician darcy t gunk who knits every day is not bothered by knitting’s ‘women’s work’ image. “For me, I am not a man or a woman,” darcy says frankly. Knitting does not feel like a particular statement about gender, it is just something that I do.”

Spot darcy from a distance and you notice a slender, seemingly feminine figure sporting a long plait. But draw closer and you become aware of the heavy tattooing – part of darcy’s visual arts practice – and the beard. Over coffee in an inner-northern suburbs cafe darcy, no doubt well- used to attracting curiosity, appears oblivious to the occasional curious glance.

A “white, queer, non-binary transgender” artist, curator and community facilitator, darcy explains that identity and embodiment – that is, what it means to have a body – are topics central to their daily life (darcy prefers the gender-neutral pronoun they) and their knitting. Inevitably, these issues inform darcy’s art – most of it knitted and mixed-media textile works that blur the lines between function and art.

Perth-born darcy studied classical music at university, then settled on an honours degree in gender, sexuality and diversity studies at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. “These are things that I think about a lot, so it’s always going to come into my art.”

Taught to knit as a child by mum, it was after creating a knitted work as part of high school Year 12 art that knitting became central to darcy’s artwork. “I knitted a lot of uteruses in different sizes, real sized, some quite large. My idea in my mid-to late-teens was that I wanted to knit a really enormous one that you could get inside of.” It was part of thinking about “what it means to have a body and certain kinds of body parts – or not have them. I also made a few hats that were uterus shaped and gave them to people. It (knitting) has been such a personal practice and self-care for me.”

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You’re Knitting, You're so Gay In her study of knitting’s role in gender identity Kristina Medford wrote: “Though knitting need not be linked to one gender because both men and women can and have knitted throughout history, it has gained the connotation of women’s work, which is not a neutral observation. When something is deemed women’s work, there is an assumption that while it may be a necessary task, it is menial, and thus too insignificant a task for a man to do.”

Women are challenging such gender stereotypes. Yet while their impact on male knitters attract less attention, the consequences for them can be significant. It’s not an exaggeration to say homophobia means they can even be life-threatening.

Kristina Medford sums it up thus: “Knitting poses a challenge for men as they negotiate the cultural pressure to be masculine while engaging in a feminine activity. Men who knit are often perceived as an affront to the ‘natural’ system where men do masculine activities and women do feminine activities.” Such perceptions expose those men to the possibility of homophobic attack – a threat no interviewee had experienced, but which several were constantly alert to and took steps to avoid.

For Bluey Little occasional train trips to Gosford, 90 minutes north of Sydney, bring the risk of homophobic aggression. “It’s a fantastic opportunity to do a sleeve and I (sometimes) look around and go, no, I will just listen to music on this one. You get drunk people on those trains; whether straight or gay, you would be a target if you are a man knitting.

“We all have safety measures, triggers. I might see somebody come up the stairs and just lower the knitting. I should not have to but that is life in the city. It’s easy for people to say, you are being paranoid. No, that’s life.”

Fortunately, his worst fears have not been realised: “For all my paranoia I have never seen anyone’s lip curl, I have never had anything happen.”

Bluey has knitted on long haul business flights since 2013, when a visiting Californian colleague reintroduced him to the craft. But gender stereotypes mean that every time he takes his seat there is a decision to be made, just as there is on public transport or in a cafe: to knit or not to knit: “Every time I get on a train I think, will I knit? Every time I get on a plane I think, will I knit?

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“Knitting on a plane, if I sit next to a guy they totally ignore me – I seem suddenly not to exist; if next to a woman they always comment. Generally the staff will say, ‘oh how amazing’ too loudly and I shrink down. I still as a man find it really uncomfortable and I know I shouldn’t. I want a T- shirt saying, ‘I’m knitting, get over it, I did’.”

But Bluey hasn’t got over it and finds himself unable to. The stigma brings discomfort and dismay at the unfairness of it. He recalls an anecdote recounted on a knitting podcast; a Shanghai taxi driver had told the presenter his mother and sisters knitted and was asked whether he did too. “He said no, if you were a boy knitting you were a sissy.” Bluey doesn’t want to be that sissy. Despite the occasional over-praising of his work, the guild feels a safe and supportive space. “People are just normal people, but to me they don’t mind that I am knitting but they are just talking to me like another person.”

Luke Shilson-Hughes, who knits during the 90 minute train ride into Sydney from the Blue Mountains most days, hasn’t had negative reactions to his knitting – or at least, “not in a way where I have ever felt unsafe”. Like Bluey, he makes choices about where he knits, mindful of his safety. “I am conscious of that. Being a gay man, of course a lot of activities you choose to do or not to do in public places based on where you are, what time of night you are travelling.

“There are times when I have had the option of knitting and have chosen not to because I have thought, that might be a little risky. But in terms of the way my life is structured it is not an issue.”

Bluey resents the emphasis on male knitters’ sexuality. He describes himself as a member of an extreme minority – few straight men knit, and it seems that most of the male knitters on Ravelry are gay, he says. “I don’t know what the percentage is of male knitters, it must be tiny. In some ways I did not want to focus on the gay side of knitting, but it is really annoying that straight men don’t knit. I don’t want to wear my heart on my sleeve about it.”

So he keeps knitting, with yarn stores and the guild and yarn stores giving “a human face” to the knitting community. “This online community of invisible people, even though they are real, is a bit artificial. I started to be fearful that it was too virtual.”

Peter Jobson also likes to keep it real despite his knitting having gone global by the mid-1990s. At the same time as joining online groups, he and Mary-Helen Ward started SSK Sydney (a play 283

on the US knitting abbreviation slip, slip, knit), which he says was probably Australia’s first cafe knitting group. “We were part of an international gay, lesbian, queer knitters’ group and discovered that a group of Americans were going to meet up in a cafe in Washington DC. Mary- Helen suggested we do the same thing so we did.”

It broke the mould for knitting groups: Not only were they knitting in public but members were young, professional women (again, no other men) at a time when the Knitters’ Guild NSW was “this moribund, old-fashioned, granny thing”, he says.

Peter’s a very social knitter and knows some men find it uncomfortable even to see him knitting in public but doesn’t care. He does feel sorry for some well-known male knitters and designers for the attention they have thrust on them. Designer, teacher and illustrator Franklin Habit, for example, was denounced on Facebook as “creepy” for making clothes for his vintage porcelain dolls. He responded by revealing that when he was a small boy members of his extended family forced him to smash one of his dolls because they considered it so inappropriate, says Peter.

“One of the things that has morphed in the last few years is the number of male designers who are out there,” he says, mentioning former New York City police officer Lars Rains, noted for his Icelandic sweater patterns. “I just like the fact that it is becoming more unisex, about being involved, when beforehand when I was a youngster it was women only and men had to be shy and quiet about their knitting skills – a bit like a woman becoming a motor mechanic.”

Interestingly, one of the designers and teachers most influential in handknitting worldwide including in Australia for the past 30-plus years is a man – American in London Kaffe Fassett, whose landmark book Glorious Knitting was published in 1985. His elaborate, multi-coloured designs, some with more than 20 colours, threw the rulebook out the window.

“I would say that when my first book came out people took a huge step forward, they responded to the book and I could reach a lot more people than through teaching 30 people each workshop,” he recalled in an interview during a recent visit to Australia. “I saw a big development, people would turn up in amazing garments at my lectures and that was when I was able to see the effect I was having.”

He began using several hundred colours in some of his one-off designs: “Nobody, I don’t think, has been prepared to use as much colour as I do.” 284

Kaffe Fassett: still gloriously knitting and passionate about colour. Photograph: Kaffe Fassett Studio.

Kaffe has toured Australia regularly since just after that first book came out and still maintains a punishing touring schedule with his long-time partner and studio manager Brandon Mably, now a noted designer in his own right. The pair celebrated a civil marriage in June 2017, six months before Kaffe’s 80th birthday.

At first Kaffe found Australia’s knitters intimidated by colour, but over the years they have become more adventurous. “I think that there is a kind of progressive education and stepping up to the mark, that people seem to get better and better and understand more each time I come around. They might be using bright colours but use three and not 20 which is what I required in my workshops.”

At age 28 Kaffe, who was then and still is a painter, discovered amazing multi-coloured knitting yarns on a trip to Scotland. As he has so often recounted since, he persuaded a fellow passenger to teach him to knit on the train back to London. Since then he has embraced needlepoint and 285

patchwork, fabric, interior and costume design as well as knitting and has published several dozen books. Still fit, vivacious and passionate about colour, he invites knitters to “paint with colour” at his workshops, which sell out rapidly – but with very few men taking part.

Although male knitters are still a minority, Peter believes more feel comfortable about revealing their hobby: “The other cool thing is the amount of straight men coming out into these men’s groups on Ravelry and saying, things like ‘I made this for my daughter’s prom’ and people going, ‘isn’t that great’.

“There will be times when the gay knitters step overboard and assume that everyone is gay. They assume the knitting group is also a gay hook-up group. This can be confrontational to the straight male knitters.”

Maura Kelly’s research findings back this up. “Male knitters, particularly straight men, regularly use references to masculinity and heterosexuality as a way to counteract the stigma of knitting. In Ravelry posts, men joke that knitting is a great way to attract women. While the statements may be playful, it seems that these references also serve to shore up the masculinity and heterosexuality that is challenged when men knit.”

The impact of assumptions that ‘a man knitting equals gay’ can be seen in knitting book and pattern publishers’ careful avoidance of any hint of homosexuality, the better to avoid offending straight male knitters and women knitting for men. Even pattern book Son of Stitch’n’Bitch from the groundbreaking Debbie Stoller is subtitled ‘45 Projects to Knit & Crochet for Men’, not by men. Alla Myzelev maintains: “Contemporary knitting literature attempts to establish masculinity as predominantly straight and traditional or retrosexual to establish a clear definition of knitting as a manly pursuit that seemingly has nothing to do with homosexuality.”

Both she and Kristof Avramsson note the use of what he calls the “hypermasculine” to counter perceptions of knitting as effeminate. So the men pictured in knitting patterns are undertaking ‘manly’ pursuits such as golf and fishing; media coverage of men who knit either identifies them as gay or associates them with traditionally masculine hobbies and occupations, as if to emphasise their straightness to those suspecting they are not. “This literature misses the audience that is really interested in knitting, namely gay men,” writes Alla.

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Even newcomers to the market still fall into that old trap. US-based Rib magazine was set up in 2016 by two male knitters frustrated by the lack of great men’s knitting patterns. Catering to “men and those who knit for them”, their aim was to encourage more men to knit. So why were all four designers in Rib’s mid-2017 spotlight series women?

In her landmark book The Culture of Knitting Joanne Turney gives considerable attention to the portrayal of men in knitting patterns and says that “camp styling” along with “the coupling of two male models seemingly enjoying each others’ company, creates a homosexual sub-text”. But times are changing: “As more men pick up needles and start to knit, gender boundaries and stereotypes continue to be re-addressed and challenged.”

Peter Jobson also sees changes with men’s knitting groups. They are, fortunately, “becoming more and more inclusive”. Sydney knitter David Reidy, who, like Luke, knits on the Blue Mountains train, is upbeat too. For him, being in the knitting minority is no big deal. He has never had insults or nasty comments – although 90 per cent of those in his train carriage each day are the same people. “The only comments I ever got on the train were positive. But only from women. It is a good way to get a seat by yourself because you were the last anyone will sit next to. That might not work if you are a woman knitting on the train but it does if you are a man.”

David, a high school teacher, wears his knitting to school and anyone assuming teenage boys would make fun of their knitting teacher would be wrong. His Waverley College students know he knits and not only have they not made smart remarks, a few have even asked to learn “It’s not a negative thing to be the teacher who knits.”

To KNIP or not to KNIP For male knitters, whether or not to knit in public (KNIP) is a big decision. In his 2006 book Knitting with Balls: A Hands-on Guide to Knitting for the Modern Man Michael del Vecchio advocates it as a “way to attract other male knitters” – a learner looking for a group, or a knitter (implied: female) whose boyfriend knits and wants company, for example. But men such as Bluey Little and Luke Shilson-Hughes who do so, particularly alone, face safety concerns and all men taking out their knitting needles under the public gaze open themselves to scrutiny about their sexuality, whether they intend to or not.

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Maura Kelly contends some gay men may also avoid knitting in public so they don’t pander to assumptions about knitting and gays. After all, in their 2013 book Queer Style Adam Geczy and Vicki Karaminas write of “the masculinizing of gay identity” and quote fashion designer Julien McDonald as saying “younger gay guys just want to blend in”.

“What we are seeing is a society in which acceptance is more widespread and visible gayness is more a matter of choice than of a political mission,” they write.

For some men such a political mission has no relevance to their decision to knit. “Men who may not aim to make a political statement may unintentionally do so by defying gender norms in public,” notes Maura. “Some men experience negative reactions to knitting in public, which center around assumptions about men’s masculinity and sexuality. While members of the knitting community know that many heterosexual men knit, male knitters (are) often perceived as gay by non-knitters.”

Worldwide Knit in Public Day was started in 2005 as a way for knitters to enjoy each others’ company and is billed as the largest knitter-run event in the world; its website registers locally organised events. The Sydney Inner-City Knitters Guild’s 10 June 10 2017 meeting coincided with WWKIPD and that coincidence was a wake-up call for Bluey Little. “It reminded me when I woke up this morning that I am still not comfortable knitting in public,” he said later that day.

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Knitting in (almost) public: Bluey Little at Bondi Beach, Sydney. Photograph: Daniel Skold.

But while some male knitters such as Bluey and Stephen struggle with knitting in public and others such as Kevin Richards (see page 298) simply don’t, for Peter Muir this isn’t an issue. When he first learned to knit from his mother and grandmother while a teenager in Burnie, Tasmania, he enjoyed novelty knitting – ducks’ feet slippers for example, projects he kept for home. Now, focusing on making beautiful garments from the luscious fibre spun by his partner of 27 years, Janet Buick, he’s a prolific knitter who knits while reading and watching television and in public – cafes, trains and even on Melbourne trams where it is a conversation starter.

“I suppose it is not that common, people are generally interested in what I am doing. It probably does have something to do with being a man and knitting but their questions are about what I’m doing and knitting and related to the knitting, not about me. I don’t feel I’m an object of curiosity.”

Peter, a former RMIT University academic who took redundancy to move to part-time IT work, has never faced negative comments about his enjoyment of knitting. But he has noticed it can change the nature of conversation in a room: “It creates quite a different dynamic to any normal conversation while you are knitting and it is the same with spinning. It is a meditative thing but 289

it also seems to free up conversation in a way that you don’t expect and doesn’t happen when you don’t have that activity.”

This has happened at spinning and knitting groups with Janet. “I found it very interesting the way these mostly elderly women, the way they talk and the topics they would talk about. There was something about having your attention focused on the spinning or the knitting that created quite a different dynamic in the conversation.”

Peter Muir in a jumper he knitted from merino wool spun by his partner Janet Buick (left). Photograph: Victoria Cattoni.

Peter also knits during get-togethers with friends. There the freeing up of conversation is less noticeable because they know each other so well. “In the past we’ve had large groups of people that were acquaintances of, or who have been brought along by acquaintances. But these are people we’ve known for a long time – we know all their skeletons,” he laughs.

Subverting the Stereotypes – or Not Fifty years ago the answer to this question, ‘why knit?’, was simple: to make garments and save money. Today, with knitting a jumper often more expensive than buying one, the answer is more complex. Reasons range from knitting’s meditative qualities and documented mental health benefits to conveying political messages. For some men challenging gender stereotypes adds further motivation. 290

“For male knitters, knitting can be a site of contestation through challenging traditional definitions of masculinity. Just as some women seek to redefine knitting as part of an empowered femininity, some men seek to reclaim knitting as a masculine pursuit,” writes Maura Kelly.

In Knitting with Balls Michael del Vecchio issues a call to arms to male knitters, describing the book’s purpose as “to prove those people wrong who talk about knitting not being a proper hobby for boys”. Despite this, he seems intent on emphasising the heterosexuality of his target knitters. The young man swigging a beer encased in a handknitted beer cosy is pictured snuggling up to a young woman, as is the wearer of the felted military belts, while the model in fisherman’s cap and scarf is also pictured with a woman. The only illustration featuring two men shows them on a couch a discreet distance apart, their body language screaming ‘non-sexual relationship’.

Some male knitters are more upfront about the gender-related nature of their work, artists Lex Randolph and Brett Alexander among them. For Brett, whose work is influenced by homophobia and his sense of isolation, knitting is a means of getting across messages about how we view gender.

Says Lex: “My solo exhibition was all about the intersection of gender, body and identity.” Although his work is conceptual, the process of making it is very meditative, he notes. “I like to have something to do with my hands and always have a project on my knee when I’m watching television. It’s one of the things that always comes up in conversation whenever I have facilitated any kind of textile arts – people talk about finding it relaxing.”

Transgender artist darcy t gunk is another for whom knitting is a way of conveying messages. darcy’s work in the Convergent Pathologies exhibition, part of Melbourne’s 2017 Midsumma Festival in early 2017 included a large, round lace shawl-like piece displayed rippling over a wire structure. Its making over several months represented a journey through the fluctuations of darcy’s mental health. A spaghetti yarn cocoon was suspended from the ceiling around a wire structure, its sparkly fabric interior “giving a sense of the infinite but also very protective and contemplative and a sense of things being hidden, too”. darcy wears many hats including solo musician and band member, composer and creator of immersive theatre performances. darcy is also a part-time disability support worker and project 291

manager and exhibition curator with myriad collective, which creates chances for transgender and gender diverse artists to perform and exhibit their work. Knitting also serves multiple purposes, with making knitted art and gifts for loved ones providing a creative outlet.

“It would be really hard for me to sustain all that if I did not have some sort of creative practice that I could fall back on. Knitting is really that for me. It supports me to be able to do that other work,” explains darcy. “I make art, usually knitted stuff. I very rarely exhibit that. Mostly this is a gift to people, that is my main focus with that – making these pieces that sometimes are wearable items and sometimes art items or something in between.”

Some of darcy’s early knitted works were gifts of hats for friends. But these were no ordinary hats: “I made a few hats that were uterus shaped and gave them to people. It (knitting) has been such a personal practice and self-care for me.”

Those gifts are about community connectedness – they create links to friends and loved ones for someone whose physical and mental health issues mean getting out of bed can be a daily challenge. “When I feel too unwell to do anything else I can knit,” darcy explains. “I can pretty much always manage to knit. I can sit there and it is quite meditative. My knitting bag is always right next to my bed.”

Many male knitters knit because they like it. It’s creative, it’s relaxing and all this gender baggage is a nuisance. “I really like it,” says Bluey, who describes himself as passionate about knitting and its variety, rather than obsessed. Each new project brings a challenge and more techniques to master.

While for Kaffe Fassett colour was, and remains the spur – he has rarely ventured past stocking stitch – David Reidy simply wanted to fill in train time because his hobby, painting miniature figures, was incompatible with the two-hour journey between Sydney and Wentworth Falls.

“I was wondering what to do. I thought, I can knit,” David recalls. He had taken classes at Sacred Heart Primary School in Sydney’s Mosman, although he never mastered casting on – his mum taught him that. “We all learned, it was a coeducational school, the school was run by women. I stopped three or four years later … I lost interest in it. I had not done anything more complicated than a scarf.”

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He turned to YouTube and several videos later, plunged in at the deep end: “The first thing I knitted was a jumper and it was terrible.” But while some knitters improve incrementally, he went from terrible to winning second prize at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show with his second jumper, Scottish designer Alice Starmore’s extremely complex fair isle Henry VIII in Shetland wool.

“You are doing something useful that has a tangible outcome,” David says. “You end up with some nice clothes that are always a good talking point. It is very exacting – that is possibly why I like fair isle and Aran, it is like a computer program, you have got to get it right. It has creativity, but confined, there are the rules you have to follow. There’s a lot about maths and numbers in there.”

With his renewed enthusiasm for knitting he began listening to podcasts, then in their infancy. “I was listening to Cast On podcast (produced by Brenda Dayne in West Wales). I’m a computer person, I thought, ‘I can do this’, so I started podcasting,” he says matter-of-factly. “Originally there was not much of a format. I thought, half an hour is long enough. I started doing it from home. I quickly thought I needed to buy some equipment.”

That plan was derailed by a $4000 vet bill, thanks to his Burmese cat Tiger‘s broken leg. Things looked up when he was able to afford quality editing equipment. Sunday became podcasting day and Sticks & String, “a podcast by an Australian bloke who knits”, amassed a following and even, for the final 80 shows, sponsors. Mentions on Cast On and US podcasts drew an international audience to the free weekly show, leading knitwear designers such as Kaffe Fassett agreed to be interviewed and from the time David began in 2006 until winding up with Show 182 six years later, Sticks & String had been downloaded more than 2 million times – usually about 10,000 per episode.

A mix of yarn and book reviews, music, an essay David scripted, and occasional interviews, it also had the personal touch with news of Tiger and his other Burmese cat Tikka, of his mum’s health, his bushwalking, school camps, several “bloke focused” shows and even occasional coverage of Australian politics, including then-Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous Australians. “It was fun and I met lots of interesting people,” he recalls.

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David developed thyroid cancer, but mostly he gave up the podcast because “I had sort of run out of things to say”. But before he did he organised a knitting camp at the Jenolan Caves in the Blue Mountains. With only men applying, it became a men’s knitting camp.

Peter Muir asked for knitting lessons when a teenager because he thought “it would be a cool thing to do” and he still does. For him a big motivation is making beautiful garments for other people. That’s especially so as he works with the alpaca, silk and fine merino fibre spun by partner Janet rather than commercial yarn. “There is something special about making something for somebody else. I generally don’t do the complicated pattern thing.”

Rather than receive a potentially unwanted surprise, those he’s knitting for choose a design from his pattern collection. He and Janet also design beanies and he knits for 16-year-old son Angus. Pausing to ask non-knitter Angus whether he has any issue with his dad being a knitter, he is rewarded with a resounding, “no”.

Peter has made Angus a jumper based on one he knitted for himself. “There is a great pleasure in wearing garments that you have knitted yourself. Certainly that is a big part of that I think. The alpaca and silk scarves that I knit and Janet knits are quite striking really. Lots of people say, ‘where did you get your scarf, who made it?’.

Peter’s work in an academic development role at a university was stressful. Since taking redundancy he’s enjoying more knitting time. “I would not say that knitting was a big part of my stress management strategy. However, I have had depression for as long as I have been knitting, I have had it since my late teens so perhaps there is something there in terms of using knitting to manage anxiety and depression. I do find it relaxing, so to that degree it would be a positive in terms of dealing with anxiety and depression.”

Bluey persists with his knitting despite the stigma, usually with at least two projects on the go. He makes garments and accessories for his “extremely proud and supportive” husband Daniel, a hairdresser he met eight years ago and married in 2015 in New Zealand. In 2017 he produced pink pussyhats for friends and daughter Alexandra, for whom he makes everything from dolls to clothes.

“My daughter is extremely proud that I knit, she tells everyone, ‘my daddy knitted this’. She is part of my gateway to the world,” says Bluey. “People talk about product versus process knitters; 294

I am both.” He failed to master both meditation and yoga and doesn’t find knitting restful either. “I can’t sit still for five minutes. But I can sit and knit for seven hours straight on a plane and it is the only way you will ever get me to sit still. I don’t do it to zone out or meditate.”

Bluey’s IT brain also engages with the maths of knitting. “Even though it is two sticks and a loop and nothing else, the combination is still, for me, unlimited. The phrase I use is, the book of knitting has no back page.”

Further Reading Avramsson, K 2016, Men knitting: a queer pedagogy, PhD thesis, University of Ottawa, Ottawa. Del Vecchio, 2006, Knitting with balls: a hands-on guide to knitting for the modern man, DK, New York. Kelly, M 2014, ’Knitting as a feminist project?’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 44, pp. 133-144. Myzelev, A 2009, ‘Whip Your Hobby into Shape: Knitting, Feminism and the Construction of Gender’, Textile, vol. 7, no. 2, pp. 148-163. Rib Magazine: https://ribmag.com

Chapter ends. Breakouts to be inserted throughout chapter at design stage follow 295

A Private Pleasure When Kevin Richards was a schoolboy in wartime Melbourne he had no qualms about whipping out his knitting on the train. Shopping trips to the city with his mum were a chance to work a few rows on a khaki scarf or balaclava to be sent to the soldiers at the front. He was doing his bit for the war effort. “And I was too young to be shy,” he remembers.

But when he left school at 14 and began his first job as a hand weaver at eClarte weaving mills in downtown King Street and later in Dandenong, Kevin’s knitting was relegated to family knitting time on Sunday afternoons. Then, as now, not even that 40-minute train journey from his home in outer suburban Noble Park to the city was incentive enough for him to knit in public.

“I have never known a man to knit on the train,” he says. “I would knit at home in my spare time.”

Kevin Richards learned to knit as a boy and at 88 still does, despite arthritis. Photograph: Amber Wooles.

Kevin, who lives in Tatura, in Victoria’s Goulburn Valley, is an active 88-year-old who plays golf twice a week. He has knitted ever since those pre-war lessons, recently making a beanie for himself because he could not buy one which fitted. But he never knits in public. 296

He was taught to knit at age six or seven by his elder sister Valma who, along with his other sister Aileen, had her own motives for keeping him busy. “I suppose I got in their hair,” he muses. Not particularly enthusiastic about this new skill at first, Kevin’s attitude changed when World War II broke out. The war was a grim reality in his household, his father serving in Darwin and Valma in the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Service.

“I did not really do much until the war came along. Then what we knitted was sent to the school to pass on to the soldiers,” he recalls. “But I did not make socks – I had only ever been taught to knit on two needles. When I first started I knitted squares, then scarves, a very straightforward balaclava – that was a bit more complicated – when I had a bit more experience. I had a lot of help from my sister if I got into trouble.”

After marrying his wife Sunny, Kevin knitted for their daughters Amber and Cherie and made his own jumpers and some for his busy working sister. “She prefers crochet so she was happy to leave it to me and I was happy to do it.” But it was Sunny, not Kevin, who taught their daughters to knit.

A ski jumper knitted by Kevin in the 1980s for daughter Amber Photo: Amber Wooles.

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Daughter Amber Wooles, herself a keen knitter, spinner and weaver, has fond memories of the garments her dad whipped up for her. “We had beautiful layettes as babies, fair isle jumpers as children, and any number of school jumpers and later in our lives, ski jumpers, fingerless gloves for me and for all my plant nursery staff in the ’80s.” Amber still has the ski jumper her dad knitted her: “Both my husband and I had matching ones – we looked a sight!”

So why has Kevin spent so much time knitting? For relaxation? “No, I did it because I was interested in it and never gave much thought to why I did it.” But he enjoyed it and still does, occasionally ignoring the aches in his arthritic hands to pick up his needles and spend half an hour on his lifelong hobby. 298

Hold the Stereotypes – It’s all about the Knitting

Luke Shilson-Hughes beats the chill at home in the Blue Mountains in his Building Blocks shawl. Photograph: Luke Shilson-Hughes.

Luke Shilson-Hughes strolls down Sydney’s Broadway wearing Building Blocks, a complex, modular shawl designed by flamboyant, boundary-pushing American designer Stephen West. Amsterdam-based Stephen favours neon colours and matching eye shadow, but Luke’s creation, tucked scarf-style into the neck of his coat, is in subtle, thoughtfully-chosen hues, mostly created by the independent Australian yarn dyers he likes to support.

Yes, he’s a gay male knitter wearing a design by a male handknitting designer, but Luke is used to defying traditional notions of masculinity. He knits for enjoyment and because it challenges him, not to make political or gender-busting statements.

“I have always been conscious of those stereotypes, but not conscious of them in a way that I feel like I have to challenge them. I’m knitting despite the stereotypes and not to spite them,” he explains. “I think being conscious of the stereotypes around knitting in terms of gender makes 299

it easier to discard the stereotype if it doesn’t fit with you. Generally, the stereotypes around what masculine is and what feminine is – being a gay man butts up against all of this.

“The stereotypes about what you need to do in society to be a man – coming to terms with being gay is saying that those stereotypes exist and it is okay for them not to apply to me. It’s an important part of being okay with your sexuality – and it takes a long time – but having gone through that process for that stereotype makes it easier to ignore other stereotypes.”

Luke notes that historically knitting was a male enterprise. “Then, with the Industrial Revolution, there stopped being money in handknitting and the men stopped doing it.”

In 2016 he quit working long hours as an assistant editor with Endemol Shine audience favourite Gogglebox Australia, and returned to university as a mature age student. Aiming to use his computing skills in a more public service role, he is studying for a Bachelor of Health Science in digital health and analytics at UTS in downtown Sydney – and believes that a similar combination of analytics and creativity applies to knitting.

“You can think about knitting as being a very analytic craft, but there is the application of creativity working within the constraints of the pattern – yarn choice, colours, for example,” explains Luke, who says solutions to both software design and knitting problems can be elegant. “I can see how you can think of knitting as being an analytical thing. I do think of it a little bit that way, but for me software development can also be a very creative process. I think of the two aspects as being complementary.”

It’s a view shared by other knitters who work in computing, including IT consultant Bluey Little and software developer and high school teacher David Reidy. Software developer Kris Howard, previously with Google and now director of developer relations with YOW!Australia, has even developed this as a conference talk, Knit One, Compute One. She delivered it as a 2016 TedxMelbourne talk, Granny Was a Hacker now on YouTube. Kris addresses similarities between knitting – “essentially binary” – and computer code. Coded messages can be hidden in knitting, she says, referencing World War II Belgian knitters who hid messages about German train movements in code in their knitting.

Luke hails from a family of crafters. He got as far as a scarf for his toy rabbit (having begun with human-sized intentions) when his mother, now a woodworker, taught him to knit. Although he 300

revisited knitting as a teenager, it wasn’t until 2014, when he and his now-husband Greg were checking out wedding venues in Arrowtown, New Zealand, that the knitting bug really bit. Seduced by ocean coloured alpaca yarn in a local store, he took it home and made a seed stitch scarf.

Luke Shilson-Hughes’ first knitting project modelled by the rabbit he has owned since birth; the yarn that sent him back to knitting. Photographs: Luke Shilson-Hughes.

“I then looked up some patterns and it was the first time I used the Internet to look at knitting. Then I found Ravelry.” It was a revelation: “It started as just knit and purl, but there were all these other possibilities that you could do and it just sort of snowballed from there.”

After knitting himself a Honey Cowl – a honeycomb stitch neck cowl, one of Ravelry’s most popular patterns – Luke discovered Stephen West and joined his mystery knitalong (MKAL), the popular Doodler shawl design. Wearing his to work one cool November day, Luke, who also made it for his sister, was stopped by a woman as he got off the bus. “I really love your Doodler,” the stranger said. He didn’t know it then, but this was his introduction to the Knitters’ Guild NSW and knitting’s social side.

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Luke’s much-admired Doodler, the result of a mystery knitalong by designer Stephen West. Photograph: Luke Shilson-Hughes.

This knitting admirer tracked him down via Ravelry where he had posted a profile picture and one of his creations – “there were not many men with blue hair doing it,” he laughs. She invited Luke, his locks now back to blonde, to the Blue Mountains knitting guild branch. “It was the start of a beautiful friendship.

“The social aspect has become part of it. When I started exploring Ravelry and started making a few things I did not know anyone else who was doing it.” Now a co-worker and some local friends have taken up knitting, he has connected with other Blue Mountains knitters and heads to social events such as Friday night dinner, drinks and knitting at the local sports club.

After knitting The Doodler Luke trusted Stephen West enough to invest time and money in another mystery knitalong. It turned out to be his meticulously knitted Building Blocks, finished in March 2017. “When doing a mystery knitalong you know what kind of garment it is; I try to pick colours that I know will go well together regardless of what the construction is.”

He plans a cowl for a friend next, perhaps from his yarn stash, because although he’s been knitting seriously for only a few years, Luke already worries about SABLE (an acronym well- known to die-hard knitter: Stash Acquisition Beyond Life Expectancy). Some will also be used on crochet projects – his Ravelry pages feature a pair of fantastic crochet baby blankets, including one in the shape of a peacock, just finished for friends. Meanwhile, he is working on a “simple” two colour brioche scarf after the complications of the blankets. “I don’t knit a lot of mindless 302

things. I do like to challenge myself. It is sometimes quite an active thing rather than relaxing. I seek out designs that are not usual.

“I think with knitting there is that perception that it is quite an old person hobby, and that what you make is sweaters and scarves, and it has so much more potential than that. It’s not for any exhibition reasons, it is for my own satisfaction in what I have made. Having people notice it is nice but I think I would value the opinions of knitters over people who aren’t. They appreciate the complexities.” 303

The Comfort of a Healthy Obsession For Wolf Graf knitting is sanity. This constant companion, always at his side in his knitting bag and pulled out at every spare moment, is a soothing riposte to his skirmishes with depression and anxiety.

“I would say it keeps me sane,” admits Wolf, an exceptionally skilled knitter who learned from his grandma in his German hometown of Bad Mergentheim. “It is extremely helpful with depression and anxiety. Knitting is a way to deal with unmanageable emotions, it gives me a sense of worth and of being able to accomplish something.”

Expert knitter Wolf Graf always has yarn and needles on hand. Photograph: Sue Green.

To other knitters Wolf’s accomplishments are breathtaking. Passers-by stop him in the street to admire his scarves, strangers approach for a closer look at the Sanquhar gloves in traditional black and white Scottish stranded colourwork he labours over on the train for his mum and stepdad. He tells of an elderly woman and her husband who sat beside him: “He turned round with this lovely Scottish accent and said, ‘young chap is this fair isle I see there?’ I told him about 304

Sanquhar gloves. Both he and his wife were knitters, he knitted through wartime and after that he knitted for beer for anybody in the pub in Scotland. He had learned from his father.”

It’s the kind of story Wolf enjoys, passing on a little history of the craft he has pursued all his life. He nods and laughs his agreement as his partner David Westlake, a non-knitter despite Wolf’s best efforts, describes it as an obsession.

Not for Wolf the peaceful rhythm of simple knits. Always good at maths, he researches knitting’s past in pursuit of interesting historic patterns to try out and modify. He enjoys the most complicated designs posted on Ravelry and as if to prove the point arrives wearing a Null Hypothesis scarf, an almost 2 metre, elaborate non-repeating double-knit design with a mad scientist theme by Seattle designer Katrina Elsaesser. He lifts a trouser leg to reveal a hint of green sock – Cataphyll, a highly complex Hunter Hammerson design of lace and twists, a favourite combo.

It’s inevitable that a man knitting so publicly and wearing the results with such pride and more than a hint of flamboyance draws stares and comments – not all favourable. Wolf takes it in his stride: “I have a lot of jumpers; people comment, they always cannot believe that I knitted them.” Because he is a man or because they are complicated? “Both probably”.

As for the nasty comments, he shrugs them off: “For me it is just if they are so insecure with their ‘manlyhood’ or machismo, sorry but I don’t have to be. I don’t see anything gender-related in it because (with) my upbringing in Europe, it is known for having a lot of male knitters.”

Wolf is not reclaiming knitting for men or making political statements. “For me it’s just something that I love and I have seen so many men knitting in my life that it is not any anything special anymore, so I don’t know where this political stuff comes from.”

He “took to it from the start” when his grandmother showed him how to knit, sew and embroider after she caught him playing with her out-of-bounds old treadle sewing machine. He made jumpers and scarves for himself, and she introduced him to a professional tailor friend, so he learned about pattern making. Later this would become his career, as he studied fashion design and did his apprenticeship with a small manufacturing company making production model garment for French designer Louis Feraud in the city of Lauda. “It was really exciting.”

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His grandma was an expert knitter who specialised in textured knitting, not colour work. His own foray into multicoloured knits came later, in Berlin, where he started his own garment company. “Unfortunately I had discovered acrylics, which was what was mostly available,” he says with embarrassment. “I moved to Berlin in the mid-1980s and discovered better quality yarns.” His company produced fabric garments but knitting remained his number one relaxation, and he designed his own intarsia garments, his interest piqued by fashion magazines and on trend big jumpers.

Wolf’s fortunes rose, he obtained a business visa to New York through a client in the entertainment industry for whom he made costumes, then won a green card in the lottery. Staying in the Gershwin Hotel on East 27th Street, he discovered its artist in residence program and became a designer there.

But in the mid-1990s, genetics caught up with him. The osteoarthritis in his family combined with repetitive strain injury forced a major change: “Knitting came to a screeching halt because of the arthritis. I had to stop both knitting and sewing and work with people who did the work.” Then came a complete career change — he studied business administration and health science and in 2009 moved to Australia to study, going back and forth to New York with his business. He became an Australian permanent resident in 2011.

Wolf’s hands became worse; eventually the problem was found to lie not in his fingers but in his spine. “I had a spinal fusion, that brought back my ability to knit.” Wolf says this casually, as though he simply bent over and picked up the knitting he had set aside. In fact the fusion brought improvement but no cure. “It took me back to a point where I can knit through pain, but I also know if I would not knit I would probably have lost the ability to move my hands. Knitting makes the pain worse, but it’s worth it.”

With his surgeon’s permission he re-taught himself, a unique and super-fast combo of the Continental and Portuguese knitting styles. He tensions the yarn between his painful fingers, using his knuckle to guide the yarn, directing it with the thumb. Having achieved that, and after five years when it was too painful to knit, he is determined to make the most of it. Bored by plain knitting, he challenges himself with increasingly difficult patterns and devises his own – for instance, a non-repeating double knit pattern with bicycles for a bike-mad friend, which he also hopes to sell on Ravelry. “I would rather go for quality than quantity.”

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His three or four simultaneous projects include one which he calls “vanilla socks”. Easy. That’s for when Wolf wants to knit but not have to think too hard about it. David, the lucky recipient, lifts a trouser leg to reveal a pair in a colourful self-patterning yarn.

Wolf knits every day; “if I don’t, something is missing,” he says. With that, he picks up his gloves, wraps his mad scientist scarf around his neck and tucks the two circular needles with complex shawls underway into his knitting bag – but not before working a few stitches on his 42nd and Lexington shawl, designed by Nathan Taylor who is known as Sockmatician, just to keep him going. 307

Chapter 9 I Know I like It – But Is It Art?

“In 2000 after a tragic family loss, my mother sat beside me and taught me to knit. In that moment, I understood knitting to be a powerful personal, political, poetic and narrative tool.” Kate Just, artist statement

“Do you want to see?” asks Kate Riley uncertainly, fishing around in a drawer in the warehouse studio she shares with Felix Oppen, her partner of 32 years, in the inner Sydney suburb of St Peters. Her hand emerges with the most delicate of sea creatures resting in its palm. But this gorgeous, ethereal creature has never swum in the ocean, nor washed ashore on a Sydney beach. Rather, it was created by Kate with her knitting needles.

Kate followed her dream by studying at the National Art School when her two daughters started school. She had long wanted to become an artist, despite having studied science and anthropology. “I had a misplaced sense of the importance of science. Both of my parents are doctors, both are very motivated by that idea of giving back to the community – using skills you have.”

She had been knitting since boarding school in the 1970s, but it was not until her fine art honours year that she realised its potential as an artist’s medium. While the other mothers knitted jumpers and beanies as they waited for their teenagers outside the yoga hall and the dance studio, Kate Riley had experimental sea creatures in stainless steel yarn on her needles. “It always amused the other parents,” she recalls.

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Skull (left) and Shells knitted in stainless steel yarn with found objects by Sydney artist Kate Riley. Photographs: Kate Riley.

Holding out several knitted sea creatures into which she has worked found objects, Kate says: “I had been making pieces for myself. I have a little bit of an obsession with bones, shells, things that you pick up as you walk along the beach. I guess I was playing round with the idea of giving the bones a second life.

“I would sometimes make up patterns, sometimes use (pre-existing) patterns, for example patterns for lace doilies. I enjoyed doing research into these kinds of gendered activities. I like looking for old knitting patterns and then seeing what happens when you take them for a walk.”

Kate started knitting abstract objects in her final year at art school “just for the love of making something that wasn’t wearable”. She also had experience of craft as art when she gave a lecture, with crocheted samples, on the crocheted coral reef project, a response to global warming which began in Los Angeles, then caught on in Australia.

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Kate Riley’s research on Victorian era women inspired her knitted art pieces. Photograph: Karen Hopwood @hausofhopwood.

With an interest in fibre since her childhood in Papua New Guinea where her parents were both doctors, she had learned to make string from natural fibres and explore natural dyeing techniques. There was “that sense of, you want to do it, just pick it up, you need yarn, make it.” So she was excited by the discovery, via Ravelry which she joined in 2010, of stainless steel, paper, bamboo and copper yarns.

“I picked up knitting because it was a nice way of expressing myself artistically and at that time I had no intention of exhibiting these or selling any of these. It was a medium I was comfortable with and with making mistakes and seeing where those mistakes would lead.”

An obvious next step would be exhibiting her innovative and beautiful work. But Kate has suffered badly with anxiety for many years. She has won awards and residencies while at art school, exhibited previously including in Korea, and been highly commended for a South Australian Museum science art prize in 2014. However, she found exhibiting at Sydney’s Sheffer Gallery in 2015 a massive mental health challenge, even though her sea creatures sold well. 310

Since then she has focused mainly on knitting for family and friends. But she has not abandoned her art and enjoys experimenting with unusual yarns, then adding colour with natural dyes. It’s a welcome change from her work editing the quarterly art and design publication Ligature Journal she and Felix produce in collaboration with students from Billy Blue College of Design.

“A lot of the art making I do is very precise, you have to have a pretty clear idea of where you are going when you start – the kind of printmaking I do, mezzotint, for example. That’s one of the reasons why I pick up my knitting, because it can be so spontaneous.

“I have a few art pieces on the needles. I’m still feeling my way through them,” she says, laying out a beautiful seed pod crocheted through with wire and several sea creatures. “I like to think of the knitting as like a sea creature; they grow up cell by cell, unit by unit. I love the organic nature of this kind of knitting, that you can build on it and it becomes something else. I hope to have another exhibition at some point.”

Urchin, knitted in stainless steel yarn by Kate Riley Photograph: Kate Riley.

Kate’s uncertainties notwithstanding, to question whether these little beauties are art works seems little short of insulting. Yet some would argue that because they are knitted rather than, for example, painted in oil on canvas, they are not art.

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Answering an Age-Old Question So what is art? Philosophers have disagreed about this for centuries. Even the ancient Greeks are in on the argument – what Plato meant in his writings about art has occupied thinkers since he explored the topic in mid-fourth century BC. More recently, what is art and what is craft has been hotly debated. Craft is frequently perceived as inferior, as noted commentator Glenn Adamson has pointed out. For artists such as Kate who work with knitting, this has important implications: Will their work be taken seriously? Will it be shown in galleries? Will it be recognised as art or pigeonholed as craft and therefore inferior?

In 1967 innovative knitter Mary Walker Phillips published her groundbreaking book Creative Knitting. In it she encouraged knitters to explore their craft, experiment, abandon the straitjacket of patterns and express their individuality through knitted structures. She drew on her own experiments with materials as varied as rope, asbestos (!) and plastic tubing.

Praising her as “a good artist” in the foreword, Cecil Lubell, then-editor of American Fabrics Magazine, emphasised the importance of words such as ‘skill’, ‘craft’ and ‘taste’ rather than ‘art’: “I grow dissatisfied with the word ‘art’,” he wrote.

“Depending on your age, your standards, or your life-style, the word has come to include more and more – or less and less. Nor can I any longer be reconciled to the separation between ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ art. At best it is now an artificial dividing line. At worst it is pretentious. And on both scores it is usually attached to a pricetag.”

In the 2004 book For the Love of Knitting: A Celebration of the Knitter’s Art innovative US designer Teva Durham wrote: “What is the stigma of handknitting that drags it down a notch? It’s not just that you wear the results – making it not pure, not art for art’s sake, not surreal, but utilitarian and mundane – or fashion designers wouldn’t be so esteemed. Could it be knitting is tainted by traditionally being Third World or woman’s work, ‘handiwork’, ‘craft’, and thus neither ‘art’ nor the modern, sleek, media-friendly term ‘design’?

“I feel we aren’t making the most of our opportunities and special places. Wouldn’t it be fabulous to speak of (knitting designer) Nora Gaughan with the same fervour given to (painter) Gauguin, to study the significance of (knitting designer) Kaffe Fassett as some do (artist) Faulkner, to discuss late into the night how a knitting pattern can be interpreted like sheet 312

music? Well, maybe there is a danger of changing knitting’s tranquil nature by imposing on it the pretence and hero-worship of the art world.”

For this very reason some artists deliberately choose knitting with all its accompanying gender stereotype baggage as a medium. Melbourne-based feminist artist Kate Just, for example, knits much of her work and it’s apposite that her internationally acclaimed Feminist Fan series, knitted portraits of artists who have inspired her, was created using skills often derided as a women’s hobby (see page 249).

Attitudes to women also had a role in the creation of Kate Riley’s sea creatures, inspired by her research on Victorian era women and seaweed albums. “Victorian women pressed seaweed as well as the more usual flowers. Botany was the only science that women could acceptably contribute to, so a lot of the early work in identifying seaweeds was done by women.

“One of the more famous women collectors, Margaret Gatty gave advice to women who were wanting to take up seaweed collecting. I was particularly amused by her tips on how to convince the men in your life to let you nature walk alone along a beach and how you could trick them by wearing men’s boots under your skirt and feeling that freedom of moving with strength through the landscape, but still appearing feminine in your crinolines and what not.

“It was the only way some of these women could experience the sublime in landscape because they did not have the social or economic freedom to climb mountains or explore glaciers, they had to find the sublime in the local landscape, in the miniature landscapes of the rock pool.”

Western Australian artist Ruth Halbert uses knitting in about half of her work, but not specifically to convey a feminist message. It’s a low-cost way of creating artworks of any size and she believes it can make more varied and interesting forms than any other textile. “I think that makes it open to lots of conceptual ideas.”

Knitted lace fragments, incorporated in her graduate show for her contemporary art degree, are now a recurring element in Ruth’s work and they will comprise her next exhibition. But there are downsides: “If you are thinking about art-generated income, to be an artist who uses knitting makes it difficult.”

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Castaway, 2017 (detail) by Ruth Halbert, is a mixed-media installation including knitted lace. Photograph: Ruth Halbert.

Making a living is tough. Ruth is a full-time artist based in Denmark, WA, a coastal town of about 5000, including numerous artists. She and her husband of 32 years mostly get by on one income. As well, she must cope with the stigma of working in a supposedly domestic craft. “I have experienced that from people who don’t really know much about art,” she laughs. “People expect knitting to be utilitarian; when people say, ‘what’s that for?’, it’s usually a good indication that you have made an art piece.”

Ask when she made the transition from craftsperson to art knitting and Ruth responds: “There is not a before and after. I still do knit jumpers and socks and hats and so on.” So would she describe any of her work as craft? “When I weave a tablecloth or knit my husband a jumper, yes. I think that informs my art practice.”

She rejects an arbitrary division of works into art or craft, however. This rejection of a binary approach is shared by American and cultural historian Dr Larry Shiner. In 2012 he wrote that talk of “blurred boundaries … suggests that the philosophy of art needs to rethink the concept of craft… I conclude that the boundary between art and craft conceived as a set of disciplines defined by materials and techniques has not become blurred, it has all but disappeared.” After all, some artists don’t make objects – their art is conceptual or performance. There is also a trend to outsource making. He sees an art-craft continuum and suggests “we should think of 314

craft, design, and (high) art as three overlapping rather than exclusive practices. Some practitioners moved comfortably among all three.”

Ruth is one such practitioner. Her knitting skill dates from her childhood in the small town of Wagin, in the WA wheat belt, where the only way to acquire a new jumper was to knit it. Her mum’s knitting was on top of the fridge, a row added every chance she got. An exceptional and prolific knitter, Ruth taught herself specialised techniques, even making complex colour work legwarmers while an agricultural science student in Perth. With improvised scenes of forests and trees they were the height of ‘80s chic (though Ruth wore them to bed in her freezing residential college). “I knitted every day, every evening, if I went for a walk I would often knit while walking, I knitted while reading, at the bank.”

Expressing her personality and creativity – and her isolation – through those improvised legwarmers were Ruth’s first tentative steps towards a career in art. Workshops at Fibreswest fuelled her interest. “That really exposed me to people who were artists and textiles were their medium. Because I sewed and knitted and had taught myself lots of other textile crafts and it was interesting to hear these textile artists talk about their art practice and I wanted to find out more.

“I went to study contemporary art at university because I was dissatisfied with what I was making; I wanted more than utilitarian. What I was looking for was that there was an idea that you could communicate with art and I sort of got a glimpse that was what people were doing.”

Why then, in her mid-40s and having taught knitting for five years, did she put down her needles? “I wanted to learn new art-making techniques because I was so proficient at knitting. My knowledge of art-making was so far behind my knowledge of knitting, so I kept using knitting to solve what were art problems, they were problems of content and communication,” she explains. “So for the first two years of art studies I did not do any knitting at all because I had all these ingrained proficiencies that kept overtaking. So I experimented with painting, printmaking and other kinds of textiles like stitch.”

The Poor Relation? As a mature age student Ruth felt fairly proficient in the rest of her life – happily married, raising a child, a good cook and gardener – and somewhat resistant to learning new things. So she was two years into her course at Edith Cowan University before she was ready to incorporate her old 315

friend knitting into her artwork. Then came a salutary lesson in the response of some in the art community to textile art.

“An academic who is a wonderful artist, I observed that he was almost viscerally repulsed by textiles. I found that out the hard way, I was in his class, for my research project I presented a textile piece. He could hardly bear to be in the room with it.”

Although this was traumatic, another academic’s response illustrated the subjectivity of such reactions: “Two other academics came in; one, her whole body moved towards the textile, she just engaged with it. I realised that (his response) was nothing to do with me.”

Equilateral, 2012, by Ruth Halbert, includes handspun, handknitted and stitched textiles. Photograph: Ruth Halbert.

Since then Ruth has shown in commercial, community and artist-run galleries and believes there is an elite in exhibiting in commercial galleries which favours “these big, blokey paintings or hyperreal paintings” over textiles. “I would say it is compounded by the fact that textiles is seen as female.”

Echoing the views of curator and art knitter Jude Skeers, she says: “One of the things that really pisses me off is that when a bloke starts using textile techniques everybody swoons about how expressive and daring it is. There would be dozens of female artists who make better work but they have been sidelined.”

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Jude couldn’t agree more. When the art establishment ranks art, knitting barely makes it onto the bottom rung, he believes. “Knitting as an art form is considered inferior to most other art forms. I don’t believe that will change. Fine art is controlled by the art market, which most young artists are desperately trying to break into.”

The prices the public expects to pay for textile art reflect this delineation, yet audiences at shows he curates do see the sculptural objects as art. “I have found textile art exhibitions, knitting included, to be very popular with the general public. I have not had a problem exhibiting my knitting as my work is about the message in the finished work rather than the actual knitting. With my latest exhibition I had to point out that the works were knitted as most visitors did not recognise it as such.

”My exhibition works have always been seen as art, (textile or visual art) not craft. I suspect that my works are not functional, that makes a big difference.”

Dodecahedron, a Jude Skeers knitted webs installation for a 2017 exhibition. Photograph: Jude Skeers.

Those include the knitted webs for which Jude has been best known for the past 30 years. Fifty were shown at the November-December 2017 exhibition, Something Nothing at the Braemar House gallery in Springwood, NSW. A collaboration with paper cut artist Michael Ripoll, it 317

explored light and dark, holes and solids and rotating images which appeared or disappeared, depending on the light. Jude used light reflecting yarn, ribbon, perspex and coated wire hoops to create two- and three-dimensional wall pieces and sculptures.

Visitors were invited to interact with the works. For Jude, this was the traditional craft of knitting redefined as art. “It was not overcrowded, it was beautifully made, it was valuing each piece,” he recalls. “The way it was presented gave it equal value to a painting that had been put on the wall. That said, ‘this textile work is of equal value to any other artwork that is in this place’.”

Leading Australian crafts commentator Dr Kevin Murray agrees there is elitism associated with deciding what is art and what is craft – an elitism closely aligned with money and class, exemplified by institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria. Many craftspeople’s work would therefore be seen as “hobbyist bling”, with institutions such as the NGV viewing such work as compromising its standards and unappealing to its audiences. “I think that’s very much to do with the politics, not to do with the reality of how the work presents itself,” he asserts.

Kevin, former artistic director of Craft Victoria, is an adjunct professor at RMIT University, a renowned independent curator and writer and managing editor of online craft publication Garland, a World Crafts Council - Australia publication. Explaining the distinction between art and craft, he is surprisingly straightforward: “I take the view that the difference between craft and art is a pragmatic one, that art is what you put into galleries and craft is what you put into shops. If you put something in an art gallery it becomes art. You might call it a craft gallery – I still think it is art.”

So could a unique knitted sculpture sitting on a shelf in a shop be redefined as art when hung in a gallery? “It can be the same object … once you put it into a gallery, it is art,” Kevin contends. “The true home of craft is in the market where people get to be face-to-face with the maker.”

Such a definition places decisions about what art is firmly in the hands of curators and those with power within art institutions, not those making the work. Unsurprisingly, it’s a position some reject. Ruth Halbert, for example, has no qualms about calling herself an artist. A passionate advocate for justice for asylum seekers and doing what she believes is right, she insists: “I decided early on at university I was not going to wait until I had someone else’s permission to call myself an artist. I just decided that because I called myself an artist, I was.

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When people ask me what I do I say, ‘I am an artist’. They say, ‘oh do you do painting?’. I say, ‘no I am a textile artist’ and they say, ‘do you make quilts?’ or ‘my mum sews’.”

Kevin’s definition, with context determining what is and is not art, sounds arbitrary. Not so, he says. “There are filters for determining what objects feature in the spaces.” Not just anything gets shown – that’s a decision moderated by gallery owners, curators and the audience.

“Essentially it means that you are producing unique works that often have a title, that you can put an artist statement on and the work does not have to have a function, whereas in the shop objects generally don’t have titles, they are more often functional and they can be multiples, they don’t have to be unique.”

He believes knitted work can be defined as art and shown in galleries – for example, the 2003 Close Knit Craft Victoria exhibition by Hong Kong-born, Australia-raised Renee So. A self- described “craft nut”, she included knitting, a medium she still works in. Giant knitted portraits were the centrepiece of her 2012 exhibition in London, where she is now based.

Being in a gallery does not automatically make art good, Kevin emphasises. In fact, it does not automatically make something art. Victoria’s Scarf Festival, for example, is now at the National Wool Museum in Geelong but was developed by Craft Victoria and hung in its galleries – as craft, not art. The works had a practical purpose and no titles; the festival simply used the galleries, the works were not curated nor based on an artistic concept.

Likewise the exhibition at the annual mid-year Alice Springs Beanie Festival, which Kevin has judged, includes unique works displayed in a gallery. The festival, in its 22nd year in 2018 and attracting almost 7000 beanies, includes an extensive program of workshops and competitions. But however quirky and creative the beanies in the Festival Exhibition, these too were not the result of an artistic project and accompanied by artist statements, he says.

Kevin acknowledges an alternative path to being defined as art: being included in an art publication. “Sometimes there are some practices that don’t find their way into a gallery, but if they can be the subject of an article in an art magazine that is an alternative way that they can be art.” Again there is a filter: an editor, the writer and readers who act as a kind of art police to ensure undeserving work does not slip in. Instagram artists don’t qualify because anyone can post work. Hence, no filters. 319

For some, the quality of art relates to the quality of the making. Not Kevin. He disagrees strongly with those who, like Jude Skeers, believe that galleries should show only the highest quality knitted art. Jude opposes decorating trees and lampposts with knitting and leaving it to rot for months. “That totally devalues the art,” he insists. “To me, if you don’t value your skill and your art whatever it is, how can you expect anyone else to value it? And if you are putting in something that is badly made and everybody can see that it is badly made, then don’t expect anyone to value it.”

While Jude admired the concept behind the widely exhibited sculptural room installation The Big Knit, curated by Caroline Love in the mid-2000s, he disliked its execution. Caroline saw its flaws as a celebration of the handmade, but not so Jude: “I always struggled with the fact that it was full of holes, it was not good knitting.”

Kevin’s view is the opposite. “Being badly knitted is more likely to make it a work of art because it is seen as risky and people would think it may be experimental and it would put a distance between the work and labour. It would indicate that you should not view this or value this in terms of its labour.”

Typically, the artist is involved in making textile art. “If the artist was not, then it would be more likely to be conceptual, because that would highlight the conceptual quality of the work rather than the skills of the maker,” says Kevin. “In terms of the elitist view, the further the distance of the artist from the scene of the making the better.” That’s because a capitalist society separates capital from making, so valuing art makes it independent of the labourer who makes it.

“The creativity, the passion, the imagination of the artist is celebrated as opposed to the work,” he says.

Sydney knitting art designer Jenny Kee is removed from the making; she cannot knit. Jenny doesn’t see her wearable knits as art, but Kevin believes they are more likely to be viewed that way because others knitted them. “She is trying to appeal to an elite, it’s important that they see it as art.”

However, with the recent growth in high quality craft markets and events where buyers can engage with makers, there is a counterpoint – “the hipster world”, Kevin calls it, which associates 320

authenticity with labour and values the making. “It sees that the sales of the product is something which supports the making so it’s not going via a middle person, a third party.”

Clearly gender plays a part in decisions about what qualifies as art. Knitting and other crafts traditionally seen as women’s work and hobbies are less likely to be seen as works of art for that reason. Kevin says his delineation of art and craft and the role of class cut across gender, but obviously it’s a factor.

He notes that feminism is supported within contemporary art. Kate Just’s ground-breaking work, made almost entirely in knitting, illustrates this. Her work is made in the traditional way with yarn and knitting needles, a process integral to it. The outcomes convey contemporary concepts, further disseminated through her large and supportive feminist social media network.

Kevin makes particular mention of the work of Melbourne-based artist Kathy Temin, who uses domestic textile crafts in her artwork, and Sarah CrowEST who has used hobbyist crafts in her video art. However young feminists’ denial of traditional ways of knitting, particularly third wave feminists in the mid-2000s, lead to yarn bombing rather than an explosion of knitting-based art, he asserts. “That, I think, took it out of the art scene in a way, it became associated with street art.”

Jude notes that knitting has been seen as a women’s hobby since men left textile work after the invention of the knitting and weaving machines. “When men were the master knitters and master weavers in the fourteenth century, there was a totally different attitude to knitting. Once these crafts lost their monetary value, once there was no income in it, it almost disappeared. It came back in Victorian times and became fancywork for women and the work of the wealthy, it then became purely women’s work.”

He sees a similar attitude towards wearable art. “Once it became functional or wearable it is not art – that’s the view that I have come across from working with textile people and being part of these exhibitions and curating.”

New Zealand’s internationally renowned World of WearableArt (WOW) shows are trying to break that down. “If you were to take the textile works that were part of WOW and hang them on the walls of the gallery, people would automatically see them as art. This is not automatically 321

the case when it is wearable. Textiles on the wall are seen as art textiles and art; straight wearables are not.”

Such attitudes must surely have frustrated Jude over his 40 years creating knitted art? “No. The best aspect of it to me is to be able to put your work in a place that is meant to be for paintings. Seeing my works hanging on gallery walls, seeing people appreciate the knitting art has been very rewarding.”

Vale of Tears – a Jude Skeers knitted webs installation for the 2017 exhibition Something, Nothing. Photograph: Jude Skeers.

All his work has come from his mastery of knitting. “I have limited design skills; it all grows out of the knitting. My knitted art has evolved from my lifetime learning about knitting.”

That was a sideline until he retired from full-time primary school teaching in 2007. Having mastered knitting without patterns, he was fascinated by how its techniques worked, particularly the maths of knitting.

Jude began exhibiting his experimental work in Adelaide in 1979. This included medallion-based structures developed from flattening tubes into circles. That way he created six, freestanding, 3D trees, each with a tubular trunk and a circular top, and up to 3 metres high with a 2 metre diameter top. In 1986 three of the larger trees were exhibited in the State Library of Victoria, then in Albury plus three Victorian regional galleries. He is still fired by that early curiosity. He has written more than 30 articles for Yarn and Embellish magazines and his focus is entirely artistic and experimental: “The last jumper I knited was for myself 30 years ago.” 322

Flash in the Dark – medallion knitting by Jude Skeers. Photograph: Jude Skeers.

Over the years Jude has called himself “fibre artist”, “textile artist”, “visual artist” or “artist” on his business cards – titles he thought enhanced his status. Not so now. “I want to help people to recognise that knitters have skills that should be valued and not put down. I started as a knitter, became an artist, now I am taking pride in being a knitter. I am trying to get people to accept knitting, a 2000-year-old craft, as an honoured profession.”

It’s Wearable – so is it Art? Irish-born Melburnian Roisin O’Dwyer is a painter and a talented knitter. She, however, doesn’t use textiles in her art work. For her, the two are separate: “There are artists and makers that are blurring the lines and not finding a departure between practices, but there is a distinction for me.”

Vishna Collins is at the other end of the continuum described by Larry Shiner; she has spent decades creating wearable knitted art and is emphatic that she is an artist. But if you ask Janet De Boer, former CEO of the Australian Forum for Textile Arts (TAFTA), whether knitting is art, she is likely to reply: it can be.

“With knitting there are a whole lot of other things going on that make it not quite so simple to categorise,” Roisin believes. Even if the knitter has created her own patterns or is knitting something non-utilitarian, that’s a different activity from making art. “Knitting design has certain parameters it needs to meet. 323

“Even if I am creating the pattern I think of knitting as being closer to design than it is to art because designers work on a set of problems and things they want to do. They work out how to achieve an outcome. With art it is virtually the opposite, you are not trying to arrive at a solution, you are trying to explore and unravel an idea based on things around you or more expressive things.”

Melbourne artist Louise Weaver uses textiles in her work but, says Roisin, would not describe herself as a textile artist. “She’s very highly skilled at knitting but I don’t think she knits for pleasure.”

Melbourne photographic artist Siri Hayes, whose recent exhibitions have included All You Knit Is Love, is another for whom knitting is a tool for artistic expression, Roisin says. For the Back to Nature Scene exhibition at Heide Museum of Modern Art in 2013, Siri hand-dyed yarn from plants grown in Heide’s renowned gardens, using it to craft objects which she photographed in those grounds. “In one of her photographs for that series she is pictured wearing a Sibella jumper she had knitted from a Ravelry pattern by Carrie Bostick Hoge.”

In the exhibition catalogue assistant curator Linda Short wrote of Siri’s craft skills learned at school and from her mother and grandmother, and noted: “In her quest to connect with nature Hayes re-purposes ways of the past so as to make them relevant to her art now. She uses time- honoured techniques that could soon be altogether forgotten in our technologically advanced world.”

Roisin, a part-time artist who has a degree in fine art from RMIT University and a Masters in art history from the University of Melbourne, has held an Australia Council residency in New York and another at Melbourne’s Gertrude Contemporary. She worked as a full-time artist until 1996.

She learned knitting from her mother as a child but did not take it up in earnest until her now- teenage son Flynn was born. Mostly using patterns designed by others, she can adjust them when needed.

“A lot of knitters do talk about knitting as making and making is a whole subject all on its own. I do think that art making is very different from how you go about doing things when you knit,” she says. “I don’t see them as the same.” 324

Janet believes the making can be intrinsic to the art, the process of knitting enabling contemporary artists to make powerful statements – American artist Adrienne Sloane, for example. “I regard her work very much as art.”

Adrienne works in knitting, often responding to issues such as war and climate change. In January 2018 she marked the first anniversary of the Trump administration and the women’s marches against it with Unraveling at the Fuller Craft Museum in Brockton, Massachusetts. There she began gradually unravelling a handknitted US flag placed in front of a copy of the US Constitution printed on fabric. In a work about a responsive process rather than end product, she will stop unravelling at the end of the administration; if it lasts its full four years there will be nothing left.

“I knit to rejoin the frayed and unravelled places around me,” she explains on her website. “By moving the context of knitting from clothing geometry to sculpture, this becomes a medium that links to a rich and complex fiber tradition with the power of history behind it.”

Janet lives her more than 30 year commitment to the textile arts, resplendent in brightly coloured handmade garments – knitted, sewn, felted and embroidered. Brisbane-based, she began the groundbreaking Textile Fibre Forum magazine in 1981. In 2004 she received the Medal of the Order of Australia for her services to the textile arts. However, despite her own passion for wearable art, whether or not it can be categorised as art is “a really vexed question”.

Is it art? “I absolutely think that WOW has taken us to an area where we have got to respect it on that level. I would consider their performances to be like being in a gallery.” Also, in an echo of Kevin’s point about the centrality of display in a gallery, Janet notes that WOW has a museum in Nelson showcasing works from past shows. They are frequently shown in New Zealand galleries, with some having toured internationally.

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Ever-colourful, Janet De Boer in a Lynne Johnson knitted vest, during a visit to TAFTA’s Geelong Textile Forum. Photograph supplied by Janet De Boer.

This high-level, contemporary wearable art appears more likely to be viewed as art than some early entries into this field – for example, the Art Knits exhibition initiated by the Crafts Council of Australia in 1988. This touring exhibition, funded by the NSW Bicentennial Council, is described in National Library of Australia records as exploring “the innovative and stylish use of the traditional craft of knitting by contemporary Australian designers”. Janet notes that it “brought some innovators to public attention”. But the exhibition’s subtitle, ‘Contemporary knitwear by Australian designers’ suggests experimental fashion rather than art.

Similarly, in the 1991 glossy hardcover Australian book The Art of Knitting author and embroiderer Jerry Rogers showcased the work of 25 Australian knitters. This could, however, have been more accurately described as The Knitting of Art with each knitter asked to interpret a leading Australian artist’s work, rather than drawing on personal inspirations. This was “taking the paintings off the gallery walls and out onto the streets” according to Rogers, who included patterns.

Although at the time these were milestones in the recognition of knitters’ skills, they had little to do with knitting as art, unlike the trend Janet notes for contemporary textile artists to combine traditional techniques and experimental materials. “People are using new materials 326

which seem to combine well with a lot of the stock skills that go with knitting.” Noteworthy Australian examples include Fiona Hall and Australian artist Helen Pynor. Helen, represented by galleries in Sydney and London, knits with human hair. “I don’t think she positions herself as a home knitter,” says Janet.

A biologist, Helen’s work includes knitting intricate replicas of human organs in single strands of hair. She lays coloured paper on her desk so she can see the contrasting fine stitches. Helen has described her work, exhibited internationally, as “an act of madness”. But she pointed out that knitting gave the fine hair strands an extra strength, creating a stable fabric.

The annual week-long Textile Forum conferences and workshops run by TAFTA under Janet’s leadership for more than 20 years initially aimed to improve craft skills. Increasingly they provided craftspeople, including knitters, with the opportunity to take their craft to the level of textile art.

US sculptor Karen Searle, a 2003 guest teacher, inspired hobbyists in her workshops to think about the artistic potential of their work. Karen works in knitting and crochet and in 1997 curated Breaking Patterns, an exhibition of contemporary handknitting in the US. While it featured wearable art knits, some works, including her own, went beyond the boundaries of garments. In the program she described her work as “blurring the boundaries between craft and art”. Now her home page at karensearle.com is less ambivalent: “Karen Searle: Works of Art”.

In 2008 Karen published Knitting Art: 150 Innovative Works from 18 Contemporary Artists. Few of these bore any relation to garments; those which did were distorted. The artists, all US-based, “approach knitting with a sense of curiosity and wonder”, Karen wrote. She noted that knitting, in existence for about 900 years, was rarely explored conceptually before the 1960s. For the subsequent 20 years more artists explored its potential – but slowly. More recent Internet-based projects had enabled knitters worldwide (including Australia) to participate in art projects – for example, designer Cat Mazza’s challenge to the use of sweatshop labour through microrevolt.org. She invited knitters to submit squares for a huge mural and has since posted a video, Knitoscope Testimonies, created using software that translates digital video into knitted animation.

“Knitting’s versatility appeals to artists who may use the craft to honour the history and tradition of women’s work or to raise questions about femininity, masculinity, and domesticity. A 327

conceptual work can evoke knitting’s associations with adornment and the body, memories of comfort and warmth, and expressions of love and caring. The repetitive and meditative process of knitting can be used ritually in performance as a form of healing. In a detailed, or large-scale work, knitting can raise questions about time and productivity and how these are valued in Western society,” Karen wrote.

While acknowledging textile arts are often viewed as inferior to fine arts, Janet believes outsourcing the making has no impact. “I think sometimes some artists get a big kick out of it (the making) and so what?” – a view shared by Jenny Kee who asks, “Why is it any different?”

Janet also agrees with Kevin that the highest technical skill may not yield art. “The skill level, whether clearly impressive, or minimal, has to form part of the artist’s intent,” she asserts. “What matters is if the method of making realises the transformative notion the artist strives for, or detracts from it.”

For Vishna Collins, that method is knitting. She creates art knits for exhibitions and fashion parades only and it rankles that because they are worn, they may not be seen as art. “I chose art knits as a creative outlet because I love knitting and working with Australian Merino wool and manipulating materials and techniques and knitted structures. You can actually wear my art knits but I did not see them just as a jumper, they are precious artworks to me. But from my experience both as a curator and art knits designer, my work is considered as women’s work, a hobbyist activity, more within the domestic domain.”

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Vishna Collins art knits: Shredded Threads, from recycled cotton sheets (left); Column 1: Lace as Architecture of Threads ensemble. Photographs: Vishna Collins.

Vishna’s Croatian grandmother toiled in the village fields wearing multicoloured handknitted socks along with traditional everyday clothing. Her knitting skills were passed down to her daughter Julka, who taught Vishna continental knitting at age 10. But while both her grandmother’s and Vishna’s knits can be worn, Vishna’s are created as works of art.

“Art knits is a decorative art form that transcends the traditional boundaries between art, craft and fashion and explores the broader aesthetics and expressive qualities associated with the visual arts,” she explains, upset that “the fine arts hierarchy” does not accept her work as art.

An avid handknitter, Vishna took it up seriously while a university student in the 1970s. She knitted and crocheted on long train journeys to the University of New South Wales’ Kensington campus, supplementing her income with commissioned projects. Having studied fashion design in the 1960s, she then trained as a high school visual arts teacher. In the early 1980s she began exhibiting her art knits in local community craft exhibitions.

Vishna clearly remembers her first gallery exhibition: the Twilight on the Harbour art knits collection, shown in the 1987 Open Fibre Art exhibition at Woolgoolga Art & Craft Gallery, on 329

the New South Wales mid-north coast. She made preliminary sketches, graphed the patterns and selected knitting yarns and colours. One of those who knitted the collection was master knitter Vida Tartakover, whom she met in 1990. The pair then worked collaboratively for 19 years. “She has left a legacy of art knits that won many national and international awards,” says Vishna of Vida.

Vishna began exhibiting in national and international museums and gallery shows. Despite achieving international recognition, with her work exhibited in the UK, US, Italy and Austria, “the perception is that it’s crafty. Craft activities, such as knitting, are regarded as women’s work and not worthy of exhibiting in museums and galleries,” she says. “I am a woman artist but knitting is perceived as women’s work. If I was a man my work would be revered like a sculpture, but I’m not carving something out of marble so my work is not perceived in the same way.”

Vishna Collins’ medal-winning garments: Space Odyssey (left) and Persephone, a handknitted lace tea gown. Photographs: Vishna Collins.

Vishna achieved international recognition for her art knits while teaching full-time and raising a family. In 2004 her Space Odyssey handknitted, metal wire wearable art collection which even included a conical head piece handknitted from kitchen grate cleaners, was awarded a Mozart Medal at the International Lace Biennale in Sensepolcro, Italy. Eight years later, Persephone, a handknitted lurex thread lace tea gown, was awarded a Silver Medal at the biennale. 330

Asked to curate a knitting exhibition that wasn’t just about knitted beanies, shawls and babies’ booties in 2004, Vishna was determined it would be cutting-edge international fashion. She targeted national and international visual arts practitioners and jewellery, textiles and knitwear designers to submit work. “It was a radical decision culminating in the cutting-edge exhibition, showcasing innovative knitting by a diverse group of designers who blurred the lines between art, craft and fashion and created a new language of fashion,” Vishna recalls. “I wanted the emphasis on design innovation. It had to be about knitting innovation.”

Thirty international designers were jury selected from 150 expressions of interest for Blurring the Boundaries: Fashion Design Innovation in Contemporary Knitting at Sydney’s Fairfield City Museum & Gallery in mid-2006. It exceeded expectations, the extension of its season to three months vindicating Vishna’s view that “knitting can be a legitimate art form in its own right. There is a difference between knitting a jumper at home for family and friends and creating art knits for exhibitions. It is an integration of art, craft and fashion.”

Now working on a Master’s thesis on Australian wearable art in the 1970s and 1980s, Vishna regrets that little has changed in the years since that ground-breaking exhibition. “It’s gender- based,” she says, noting that the work of Sydney-based designer Akira Isogawa and the late Alexander McQueen is celebrated as an art form, and exhibited in national and international museums and galleries.

In 2011 Vishna’s raffia needle lace Soul of a Nation was exhibited in Love Lace, the Powerhouse Museum’s International Lace Awards exhibition. “What I have noticed about this exhibition, which I’m very proud of, there were a lot of men in the exhibition – graphic designers, industrial designers, architects. I had my work exhibited with men. Finally, I have ‘made it’. It’s the first time in my life.”

It’s an exhibition John McDonald speaks highly of. After more than three decades as a respected art critic, he believes distinguishing between art and textile art is futile. “You go to any big contemporary art show, the range of materials, the range of approaches, it’s really hopeless to try to put it into a box,” he asserts. “If you start to make what I think are rather petty and arbitrary distinctions and say something can or can’t be art or can or can’t be taken seriously and liable to be shown in a proper art venue, then you’re limiting yourself.”

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Art critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and for noted international publications, a highly regarded lecturer and former head of Australian art at the National Gallery of Australia, he takes an open-minded approach: “I really believe in expanded definitions.“ That means defining textile art, including knitted art, as art.

John is unconcerned that not everyone in the art world shares this view: “There are a lot of people who write about art, and indeed curators and gallery directors who don’t want to consider textiles or clothing, fashion as art. But I think it’s narrow minded of anybody to dismiss the claim of garments and fashion as art, and that encompasses a great deal of knitting, woven work.” Some Japanese fashion was “almost like the most amazing sculptures you’ve ever seen”, he noted.

“To deny its claims of art would be I think to flatter a lot of very ordinary pedestrian art which doesn’t come close to it,” says John, who has reviewed “just about everything you can think of”, including shows incorporating weaving, embroidery and knitting.

Never Mind the Definition – is it any Good? To John the debate about what constitutes art is less important than the work’s worth. “When it comes to art there are as many definitions of art as there are works of art. One of the standard working definitions is that whatever is exhibited in galleries and called art generally speaking is art … it’s just a designation and it’s almost an arbitrary one.” What’s important to him as a critic is to make value judgements to distinguish whether art is good or bad, successful or unsuccessful.

That does not, however, restrict the definition of art to works in galleries. He says of New Zealand’s World of WearableArt: “I am quite willing to regard it as art. If the occasion arose when it was the most interesting thing, a thing which provided me with the most to write about, if it was going to be seen by a good number of people, I think it’s reviewable.”

So does this include knitted art garments? “I am certainly prepared to encompass that.”

John notes the acclaimed work of renowned Australian artist Fiona Hall incorporates knitting, yet is recognised as art. In particular, she knitted a chieftain’s cloak from aluminium Coca-Cola cans, then photographed her elderly father wearing it, and knitted body parts from videotape in her 1997 work Slash and Burn. 332

“It is a revelation to people who say they are knitters or who have that lifelong habit, they go and they find someone can create a work of art like that. That’s one of the things about Fiona’s work, she uses quite hands-on crafty skills to create things that are extraordinary.”

There are also especially fine examples of Aboriginal textiles such as fish traps and woven baskets which would be considered art, as could the Tjanpi desert weavers’ work, included in numerous art exhibitions. So, too, could fashion – despite the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ refusal to host fashion exhibitions “because they believe that fashion is somehow like a debased art form”, whereas the NGV has had great success with such shows, John notes.

He agrees the gendered nature of knitting and other textile crafts is a likely factor in the refusal by some people to acknowledge textile works as art: “Well I suppose it’s a stereotype that everybody tends to think of knitting and textile work as women’s work. Less so nowadays, the whole gender divide is starting to seriously break down.

“I am sure there are a lot of men out there who are feeling as though knitting or any kind of craft skill like that is a skill that it is probably desirable to learn. Lots of men these days are learning things just to subvert the idea of themselves, a masculine stereotype, that’s become a kind of artistic expression in its own right, that thing of trying to avoid the gender stereotype. In contemporary art people like to subvert this, that and everything else.”

Using such techniques could actually give women artists an edge, John points out. For instance, the almost 100 works in the Los Angeles exhibition Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947 – 2016, which he saw in 2016, included work made in so-called domestic craft techniques such as sewing and tapestry and from fabric, lace and fabric strips. “That was very interesting in the way women artists had worked in a way that men hadn’t explored so much.”

Paola Di Trocchio also spends little time on the debate about such distinctions. Ask whether knitted garments should be categorised as textiles, fashion, art or all three and she responds that these are not distinctions she spends much time pondering. Paola, the National Gallery of Victoria’s acting senior curator, fashion and textiles, is guardian of about 100 pieces of knitting by Australian makers in its collection. Such arbitrary definitions do not determine whether a knitted work finds its way into the gallery, which began collecting textiles in 1895 and fashion in the 1940s. 333

“I don’t really subscribe to those boundaries too much because of the context of the NGV and the context of the fashion and textiles collection in the NGV,” she explains. “Fashion and textiles is one of the mediums of art, design that we collect. Fashion is also regarded through the lens of the body, wearability, design principles, art principles, how it relates to visual culture at the time, art culture at the time. It’s art in a way because it is in the gallery.”

That view of the importance of context is shared by both Kevin and John, who gives the example of a film. “It’s to do with really breaking down the definitions that I think the whole modern art project has been devoted to,” John explains.

The NGV’s policy contrasts with the collecting policies of, for example, Adelaide’s Migration Museum where carefully preserved knitted objects form part of the South Australian story – the Queen Victoria dress made by Yarn bombers including Nonna Reckless, for example. “We have occasionally commissioned a piece, but pretty much all the knitting collection has been donated by people because it tells the story of part of their lives,” says curator Corinne Ball.

Mini life preservers – a celebration of migrant ancestors. Photograph: Migration Museum, Adelaide.

Mini life preservers, knitted by Lyndall Scott during the museum’s Fringe Festival Knit-off in February 2015, were embroidered with the names of the migrant ships on which her great-great grandparents travelled to Australia. Australia arrived in Adelaide from Hamburg in 1850, Rizini from Ireland to Melbourne in 1854. While displayed in the gallery with artworks and other precious objects, they are not, of themselves, art.

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Paola, on the NGV staff since February 2003, says director Tony Ellwood and gallery audiences are very supportive of fashion and textiles. So perceptions of this as an inferior art form have not been an issue there – not even with traditionally gendered work such as knitting. On the rare occasions she does encounter such views, she sees it as her job to explain the works’ importance. “Part of the role as curator is to educate people about the complexity and depth of fashion and textiles and the different ways it can be considered, as well as to show it and look after it and collect it.”

In 2016 Paola curated the NGV’s successful 200 Years of Australian Fashion exhibition, the first such major survey in Australia, bringing together more than 120 works. “We received some great acquisitions as a result of the 200 Years exhibition.”

One was the quirky and colourful 1978 handknitted Jenny Kee dress The Wattle, worn at the Park Follies Parade at Sydney’s Seymour Centre by designer Linda Jackson, Jenny’s creative collaborator. It’s one of the garments inspired by Jenny’s purchase of a handknitted jumper with knitted-in writing at London’s Chelsea Antique Market. Knitted into the front in the intarsia colour work technique are the words The Wattle. Showcasing the not entirely clean dress with matching peaked wattle hat, Paola notes it can’t be washed because the cotton yarn may not be colour fast.

“Designers are thinking about it in a different way, they are not always thinking about longevity,” she explains. “From the curator’s point of view, we take this into the state collection. This will be with us for eternity. This existed in the world, it was worn.”

Another Jenny Kee creation carefully laid out on the long metal tables in the NGV’s staff-only area by Paola, wearing white cotton gloves, is Didgeridoo Dolman. It also features Jenny’s trademark colour work, here inspired by her love of ethnic knits and Indigenous Australian culture. “Jenny acknowledged the knitters, she told the gallery their names,” Paola notes.

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Jenny Kee’s The Wattle dress (left); Acting senior curator Paola Di Trocchio with Colour Patches by Linda Jackson (front). Photographs: Sue Green.

The table is a riot of colour, with Linda Jackson’s 1978 Colour Patches knit ensemble – trousers, top and jacket – having come to the NGV from Linda’s archive. It shows the influence of French avant-garde artist and textile designer Sonia Delaunay. “My feeling about this piece is, it is an early Linda Jackson piece where she is experimenting with different techniques, different ways of bringing together fabrics,” Paola explains.

Beside it is a 1983 machine-knitted dress combining leather with the knitted fabric. It illustrates a factor some experts believe determines whether a textile work is defined as art: how it is displayed. The rainbow-coloured horizontal tucks of Maureen Fitzgerald’s experimental Motion in Colour lie flat. But when shown at an influential art/fashion event in Saint Kilda it was worn by a dancer and the tucks took on a life of their own. Using a mannequin in dance pose in 200 Years of Australian Fashion Paola replicated that sense of movement which brings the garment alive. “The difference with fashion and textiles is there are often multiple ways to display it. Fashion can be fashion and not art and it can be fashion and art.”

So, too, knitting can be knitting – a means of making a nice jumper or decorating the local bike racks. But it can also, as Kate Riley knows, be a medium with which to create fantastic art, its gendered history often as much a part of the process as the end result. “I do get a lot of pleasure out of using a technique that is seen as female, not of much value, utilitarian, domestic,” Kate 336

smiles. “I know a lot of people use it that way, using it as a tool to produce work that exists in another sphere.”

Further Reading Cornell, K (ed.) 2004, For the love of knitting: a celebration of the knitter’s art, Voyageur Press, Stillwater. Gschwandtner, S 2007, Knitknit: profiles+ projects from knitting's new wave, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York. Phillips, MW 1967, Creative knitting, Dos Tejedoras Fiber Art Publications, St Paul. Rogers, J 1991, The art of knitting. Angus & Robertson, Sydney. Searle, K 2008, Knitting art: 150 innovative works from 18 contemporary artists, Voyageur Press, Minneapolis.

Chapter ends. Sidebars for insertion in chapter at design stage follow

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Colour and style: Jenny Kee in Bendigo, October 2016. Photograph: Sue Green.

Jenny Kee’s name is synonymous with handknits. Vibrant, joyful and distinctively Australian, her multicoloured garments were a success as soon as they hit the racks in Flamingo Park, the iconic Sydney store she opened in August 1973. “I could never make them fast enough,” she recalls. “I’ve got that famous quote, ‘two weeks to knit, five minutes to sell’.”

In 1982 Princess Diana, seven months pregnant with Prince William, was pictured at a polo match wearing a Jenny Kee jumper featuring a koala on the front. It had been a wedding present from Kim Wran, daughter of then-New South Wales Premier Neville Wran. Such was the demand that Jenny created a similar “Blinki Di” pattern for The Australian Women’s Weekly. Showing a slide of the knit during a talk in 2016, Jenny said: “She was crazy about that knit. I went to dinner with her at the Governor General’s on the strength of that knit.”

It’s perhaps ironic that Jenny can’t knit – never learned, doesn’t want to. “I am not interested in the technical outcome of work. I’m interested in designing it and styling it, but it is not what I 338

am good at or it’s not what I think about. What I think about is getting the best people to do the complicated work that I do. And I did. In the heyday of Flamingo Park I had absolutely brilliant knitters. I attracted people who wanted to be pushed to the limit.”

Jenny’s designing for knitwear dates from the realisation that she needed to come up with garments for the Australian winter. Handknitting in pure wool seemed an obvious and Australian solution – particularly with her own imagery. “It was as spontaneous and unthought of as that.”

But her association with fabulous handknit garments dates back further – to London’s ‘60s heyday when girl-about-town Jenny worked at the Chelsea Antique Market and collected beautiful knitwear including fair isle garments, which were having a fashion moment. One jumper was to be particularly influential: the Richard Attenborough Fan Club jumper, bought for 50 pence. Into it, in intarsia colour work, was knitted not only Richard Attenborough’s signature, but the names of his films.

“It amazed me. I wore it, treasured, loved it, kept it with me because I loved it, because this was something special to me, because it had all this writing on,” Jenny recalls. “My Love dress has got all that writing on it. I was fascinated by that knitting because it was not like any of the fair isles that were being sold to the popstars, fashionistas in London at the time.”

Today Jenny Kee handknits are highly collectible, found in private collections and institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria and the National Gallery of Australia. They have been described as wearable art, textile art and, simply, art. But is that how she sees them?

In his 1991 study of Jenny’s ‘70s handknits Bill Gray, who interviewed her and many of those close to her, wrote: “She has used knitting as the medium to bridge the gap between the craft form, hand knitting and the fine arts as represented by her designs. Secondly, women’s association in the crafts including knitting have tended to diminish their significance. With Kee’s involvement however, the position has been reversed.”

In his University of Queensland thesis Designing “Handknits”: Jenny Kee in the 1970s, Bill wrote that Jenny had significantly improved the public’s “lowly” perception of the crafts, using handknitted garments “to elevate the status of knitting”, with the handknit acquiring its own identity. He quotes a 1976 The National Times interview in which she reportedly said: “When I sign my name to a dress, I consider myself a creator of an artwork.” 339

Bill wrote: “It is important to be aware of the indignities to which the crafts had been subjected in order to fully appreciate the subsequent transformation they underwent during the 1970s. What occurred in effect resulted in the crafts emerging as a distinctive and highly valued art form. Today they have become an important part of contemporary Australian art.”

Looking back on those discussions with Bill, Jenny is proud to be seen as helping improve the image of the crafts in Australia. But are those jumpers art? On that she is very clear: No.

“I do not think knitting is art. I think Bill Gray in his thesis was trying to show how I elevated knitting into a fashionable art form, I guess he called it,” she says. “I like the way that Bill did acknowledge that I changed the craft of knitting into something that became really fashionable. I loved that I did that.”

So if not art, what is it? “I think it is design, it is using art but it ends up as design. When I paint that’s art, but when I design, I do my art which goes into a design. There’s a slight difference,” she says. “Other artists don’t paint and then put their art into scarves or whatever. I collage my work together and then it turns into a design. It’s the art of fashion and design; there’s a difference, it’s not art as I see it. Having lived with artists and knowing artists all my life, I think it is different.

“They’re jumpers and I elevated the art of knitting into something that became very fashionable but they are not art, darling. They were jumpers to me with art on them but they were jumpers. It’s the art of knitting.”

Jenny, who made a point of acknowledging the names and skill of her knitters, says they are craftspeople and has no truck with knitters who claim to be artists, or even textile artists. “I don’t abide that; it doesn’t gel with me because it’s their egos going crazy about their brilliance. Art’s art, it’s all wonderful, but I don’t think you’re ever going to get $3 million for a piece of knitting as you would for a Van Gogh painting,” she asserts.

“It’s a very creative process when people actually design something, they are putting their images on, it’s the art of knitting, but it is still not art. It’s called wearable art, you have to put the wearable in front of the art, you can’t just call it art and people … they’ve got this thing about being great artists. 340

“I don’t get it, why can’t they just be happy, you know, putting their art into the knitting, the technique of doing that, the painstaking way of creating the pattern and then knitting it? It’s a beautiful thing but it’s not great art, it is not. Putting Monet on to a knit is taking a piece of art and putting a piece of art onto a piece of clothing. It’s different and I do not like that preciousness that some craftspeople have, I just don’t like it, I just don’t know why they can’t be happy with the medium that they are using and calling it what it is.”

Jenny now 71, says she and Linda created wearable art long before anyone had heard that term and many fashion designers – Vivienne Westwood, Dolce & Gabbana, for example – also create wearable art. More recently she has collaborated with Woolmark on what began as a handknit project but instead was digitally knitted – a new process to her with an outcome she loved – and on designs for beautiful silk scarves. “Everyone says, ‘your scarves are pieces of art‘; well they’re pieces of beautiful art and design because it starts with a beautiful piece of art and then it goes into a piece of design.

“I don’t have that ego that wants to be called the great artist. I don’t get it. I love what I do, I love the way it comes out but I don’t think it’s art.

“I’m sitting reading surrounded by the ex-husband’s (artist Michael Ramsden’s) paintings,” she says of her home in the Blue Mountains, where nature has inspired many of her designs. “It is a piece of art on the canvas, he was never going to put it on a jumper. It’s a different process. You put it in a frame and hang it on the wall and then you called it a piece of art, but if you wear it then it’s wearable art.” 341

Disrupting Tradition with a Knitting Nancy

Brett Alexander was allowed only spool knitting at school. Photograph: Brett Alexander.

When Brett Alexander started spool knitting in primary school, it was considered a safe choice by his teachers. “It’s like the only textile technique in the 1960s and early ‘70s that boys were allowed to participate in that was not deemed to be gay. Other than that it was deemed to be too feminine – it’s still the same,” he explains.

Brett, an internationally recognised textile artist and art educator, has been spool knitting – also known as French knitting or I-cord – ever since. He also works with standard knitting needles to create what he calls looped networks, often using non-traditional materials such as paper twine.

While this was considered an appropriate craft for Australian schoolboys, it’s ironic that French knitting equipment is commonly known as a knitting Nancy, given that ‘Nancy boy’ is a derogative English term for a gay man. As a gay man who knits, Newcastle-based Brett is all too aware of the gendered nature of his craft. For more than 30 years he has been researching and exhibiting work which investigates the relationship between textile crafts, masculinity and homosexuality. The creative and the theoretical are linked by the craft of knitting.

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“For me doing it as a man and being open about it is sort of a disruptive act and that is how I see my practice – as part of the disruption of tradition so there is a craftivist act to it too,” he explains. “It’s art, but steeped in craft. The making process is really important to me.”

“The fact that in Australia the spool thing is called a knitting Nancy is just so gay,” laughs Brett.

Spool knitting equipment ranges from old-fashioned wooden cotton reels with four nails on top which many older knitters remember from childhood, to mechanised versions. Wooden knitting Nancys are often painted to resemble women and occasionally men, with vintage male versions commonly advertised as Knitting Peter.

As well as using commercial plastic knitting looms, he enjoys making his own equipment, creating French knitters, sometimes with up to 100 wooden pegs. He built a “steampunkish” version by drilling a hole in an IKEA chair and using bulldog clips to feed yarn through. A coffee table version with wooden pegs used to spool knit paper yarn was the centrepiece of his 2006 work Queer As Folk Art.

“Queer art is sometimes really obvious – for example, an erect penis,” Brett notes. Instead he tries to inject subtlety and humour into his work, which is mainly intended for exhibition. He also enjoys repurposing and combining knitting with other things including fetish elements – his 2012 work Yes Sir! incorporates circular knitted camouflage yarn attached to a latex hood, for example. “Something that is really hardcore with something that is really softcore.”

Brett recalls buying a weaving loom with his birthday money while still at primary school in Lake Macquarie, New South Wales. Now, as well as knitting needles and knitting Nancys, he uses low- tech plastic knitting machines and knitting looms, usually intended as children’s toys or for hobbies. These are “highly gendered and feminised” but because they’re not identified with traditional art or craft they have great disruptive potential, he believes.

Knitted children’s toys, which he sees as highly feminised, are also a starting point. “I buy toys on the Internet, I scour the Internet for all different sorts of knitting paraphernalia which is really highly gendered.”

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natural~un~natural by Brett Alexander; detail (right) of natural~un~natural. Photographs: Brett Alexander.

Brett, 55, enrolled in a PhD at the University of Newcastle in 2014, looking at “how masculinity, specifically knitting, functions within the feminised space of textiles” and aiming to place his large body of work in a theoretical framework. In 2017, he gave up the PhD because it was eating into his art-making time, but those themes remain important in his work.

Brett sees parallels between the invisibility of men in textiles and the 1980s marginalisation of homosexuals. This prompted him to develop textile work exploring this relationship and challenging the validity of gendered attitudes towards textiles, his work influenced by homophobia and his sense of isolation homophobia. In Playing with Dolls 20 machine embroidered grey school tunics are the centrepiece, similar to the girls uniforms’ at his primary school. “This reference cited the installation in schoolyard memories of bullying, victimisation and an awakening sexual and developing masculine identity.”

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Learning My Names by Brett Alexander, DomiKNITor exhibition, Maitland regional Art Gallery 2014; Learning My Names (detail). Photographs: Brett Alexander.

Brett began exhibiting professionally in 1987 and he has ever since. Sought-after for master classes, workshops and artist residencies, his work has been shown worldwide, including in the Ukraine, Slovakia, China, Thailand, Switzerland, Finland, Norway, Belarus, South Korea, Lithuania, Argentina and the US, as well as Australia.

He has also taught in Thailand, Sweden, the US and Slovakia, where he was artist-in-residence at a paper mill. “At one end there were trees and at the other end they were making McDonald’s wrappers.” His work, a kilometre of paper yarn spool-knitted over three weeks, was exhibited at the International Paper Symposium in 2002. He continues to work with paper, some handmade and sourced from Thailand. Travelling, viewing international exhibitions and collecting materials – Thai Sa paper, copper leaf, handwoven hemp, red Lithuanian linen – have become important in his work.

Through the use of such innovative materials and his own takes on traditional equipment, Brett sees himself as reclaiming textile crafts, marginalised within the fine arts, and challenging the gendered nature of textile practices. “There are a lot of men working with textile materials, but not connected with the craft component which to me is a really important part of my practice. To me, identifying as a craft practitioner is sort of queer because it does not sit comfortably within the fine art context and within the broader society it is of a lower status.”

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Not Just a Knitter

Kate Just with works from her Feminist Fan series, which she has called “a family portrait of feminism”. Photograph: supplied by Kate Just.

Kate Just’s long, slender fingers show few signs of the torture to which she has subjected them. In her small, well-lit studio with its wall of windows in a rather grungy industrial building, now an artists’ studio complex in the Melbourne suburb of St Kilda, she has lovingly handknitted a series of 40 portraits of the feminist artists who have inspired her. Describing this as “a time- intensive act of devotion”, she estimates each took about 80 hours and comprises more than 10,000 stitches.

Feminist Fan’s painstaking work, an intricate mix of hand knitting and hand embroidery, is, Kate says, “a genealogy of my influences”. Exhibited around the world including Tokyo, Helsinki, The Hague, the US and Australia, the series began in early 2015 with five groups, including Russian feminist punks Pussy Riot, then moved to individual artists.

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Frida Kahlo, part of the Feminist Fan series by Kate Just. Photograph: Sue Green.

From Frida Kahlo, Yoko Ono, Louise Bourgeois and Cindy Sherman to Australian artists Kate Beynon and Tracey Moffatt, Kate scanned each of the artworks or self-portraits she was working from, online software gridding it into a knitting graph. After knitting the gridded picture back and forth in woollen yarn on a circular needle – “the best tool in terms of feeling the flow of knitting” – her fine embroidery captured the detail.

“The series began with a reverence for the ways women activist groups such as Pussy Riot and Femen were taking over public or institutional spaces and challenging patriarchal structures,” she says in her artist’s statement. From there she extended it to early feminist performance works.

Pussy Riot from Kate Just’s knitted Feminist Fan series. Photographs: Kate Just.

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By the end of 2016 Kate had finished 25, each clearly handknitted, the tiny flaws and some skewed stitches perhaps anathema to the knitting perfectionist – but this was about much more than the knitting. Her enthusiasm showed no sign of waning and in October 2017, with 40 completed, she signed off on the series on social media, where, as each was completed she had extended its reach by posting pictures of the work. Each was accompanied by a detailed accompanying homage signed “I’m your feminist fan!” She has compiled these into an online book.

So there would be no more? Even after such a sustained effort, Kate, also the energetic graduate coordinator at the Victorian College of the Arts where she has been a lecturer for the past 13 years, didn’t rule that out.

While showing in New York Feminist Fan was written about by noted craftivist Betsy Greer who said it “puts the mirror up to the ways in which feminist artists have used their bodies as forms of protest over nearly the past century”.

Kate was an artist before she was a knitter. It was the heartbreak of a family tragedy – the death of her 26-year-old adopted younger brother Billy in 2001 – which brought her to knitting as a way of connecting with her mother MaryEllen in their shared grief. For years MaryEllen had been a busy, high-powered executive who had long since given up hobbies such as knitting. But with Billy’s death she turned back to it for comfort, teaching her daughter who had flown back to the family home in Connecticut from Melbourne.

“It was a language that we could share when we did not have any words. Learning at that time – at such a heavily emotional time of grief – it’s like stitch by stitch you are trying to put things together,” recalls Kate. “There is an inherently emotional thing about the language of knitting.”

Kate completed her PhD in sculpture in 2013 at Melbourne’s Monash University with her thesis, The Texture of Her Skin, based on her knitted work and dedicated to her parents. In it she writes of the associations of maternal contact and repair carried by her knitting. She quotes from her own artist statement for the 2012 exhibition Louise Bourgeois and Australian Artists at Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art in which she recalled learning to knit after her brother died:

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“Looking back, this obsessive loop-making was a solemn tribute to the social rather than biological weaving of our family. It also operated as an act of resistance against any further unravelling. As I knitted, I repetitively felt the sadness, the silence, the clicking, the counting, the sadness, my mother’s breathing, the clicking, the closeness of her body, the sadness, the counting, the clicking, the clicking, the clicking, the clicking.”

Kate had knitted the simplest beginner project, a scarf, with her mother. Back at the Victorian College of the Arts where she was then studying painting, she began knitting deeply personal, autobiographical work. Starting with Something for the Ladies – “a whole lot of male codpieces in baby blue” – she moved on to full-size sculptures, including one of her father, a former policeman, in full uniform. Uniform (Dad), 2002, knitted wool made life-size over a frame of wire, fibreglass and cardboard, now in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia, was an astonishing achievement for a beginner knitter. But for Kate, helped with the pants and shirt by her Australian partner Paula’s late mother Pat, it was the discovery of a medium perfectly suiting what she wanted to say in her artwork.

“All my work since then has been about family, love, intimacy, loss. It has been about women using their own language – material language, artistic language and familial language. From the very beginning, I guess because knitting has been inherently gendered female, I was interested to see how knitting could be subverted.”

Surprisingly perhaps, given the domestic stereotypes associated with knitting, the responses to this work were immediately positive. “I think because I had art training and I had an academic background, it was seen as an interesting thing to do. People loved it from the beginning. I was holding onto some negative perceptions, but my lecturers supported it and the other students showed interest. Opportunities happened for me as soon as I started knitting. I got a show in Melbourne at artist-run space Penthouse and Pavement, and I was invited to Sydney to show at Scott Donovan Gallery.”

As well, she was granted a project room worth thousands of dollars to showcase Uniform (Dad) and her later work Boundary (Love) at the Melbourne Art Fair. Boundary (Love), a hedge knitted in wool pieces attached to monumental three-dimensional cardboard letters spelling LOVE, arose from her interest in emotional and physical boundaries. She remembers driving through Connecticut to see the Christmas decorations in suburban front yards and imagined her own boundary hedge as a similar message of warmth and invitation. 349

Kate has also described it as a symbol of her resistance to the politics of exclusion around sexual orientation that affect her own life. A queer-identified artist, she moved to Melbourne permanently in 1996 to live with Paula, as American immigration restrictions in place until 2014 prevented their living together in the US. She has also had to negotiate legal complexities to parent a child – their adopted daughter, Hope – who came into their care eight years ago. Throughout her life, gender, feminism and equality have remained important themes in her work.

Her feminism derives from her parents – “they indoctrinated me from childhood.” Her dad was that rare thing in the 1970s, a self-declared feminist who looked after his children. MaryEllen, a nurse turned businesswoman and chief executive officer of a hospital, was “a hard worker, highly educated, ambitious, and confident – an incredible role model. Many times after she took on more challenging work roles, she would call my dad from the car and say, ‘I will be pulling in at 6.00pm’, meaning please have the dinner ready at that time.” My father retired early and continued to support her and her career. He was a deeply nurturing figure in our lives. In a way they provided a wonderful alternative to what are still very fixed gender roles.”

From the Melbourne Art Fair came a commission from Macquarie Regional Art Gallery and the opportunities kept coming in a career that includes exhibitions around Australia, and internationally, in Austria, New York City and Tokyo. She has also undertaken artist residencies in Austria in 2011, in Barcelona in 2012, and in Tokyo and New Delhi in 2016.

From her monumental text pieces to 4 metre high soft sculptures, Kate has only ever presented her work in contemporary art galleries and museums. “It is quite important to me that I’m seen as a visual artist rather than a craftsperson or fibre artist,” she explains. “The formal language and concepts in my work gives the knitting respect, attention, interest and authority. In my view, it is sympathetic to knitting to present it on an even plane with other mediums like painting, sculpture and installation.” It’s an assessment of the value of knitting as an art medium with which the market agrees; her works sell from between $3,000 for a small wall-based work to $20,000 for a large scale sculpture.

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Kate’s studio – feminist heroes on display Photograph: supplied by Kate Just

As Kate discusses her work it’s clear feminism is integral to everything she makes. For her 2012 show The Skin of Hope she created a child-size suit of armour called The Armour of Hope, and arm-length scar-embroidered gloves for herself entitled The Arms of Mother. These she knitted during her residency at the Australia Council studio in Barcelona where she was accompanied by Paula and Hope. The show was “about the experience of being in one’s own body, a subjective experience of social rather than biological motherhood. It was about intimacy, love and hope”. The project harnesses “knitting’s associations with nurturance, bondage and repair,” Kate has written.

Venus Was Her Name, an exhibition resulting from her Austrian residency, reimagines the Venus of Willendorf, an ancient figurine, as a real woman who made her own self portrait. The show included Kate’s own self-portrait as a knitted skin. In 2018 it was acquired by the Cruthers Collection of Women’s Art at the University of Western Australia – Australia’s largest specialist collection of women’s art.

After these projects came two large scale, night reflective knitted banners that spelled ‘HOPE’ and ‘SAFE’, a response to violence against women and media coverage of the issue at the time. Hope Banner, 2013, was made during a British Council Realise Your Dream fellowship in the UK 351

and Safe Banner, 2014, with a City of Melbourne artist grant. For both these projects Kate, a lively presence on social media, engaged with the wider community, inviting diverse groups of women, to join her in the knitting.

Internet savvy Kate’s website, which showcases her large body of work and its conceptual underpinnings, sums up knitting’s disruptive potential in her hands. “Just’s use of knitting across many works casts craft as a highly engaging sculptural medium, apologetic or political tool.” She writes of that life-changing moment when her mother taught her to knit: “In that moment, I understood knitting to be a powerful personal, political, poetic and narrative tool.” 352

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Contents: Exegesis

Introduction i) Overview 359 ii) The Structure of the Exegesis 363

S1 The Project 1.1 Theoretical Prism: Feminist Standpoint Theory 366 1.2 Knitting and Feminism 379

S2 Methodology 2.1 Practice-Led Research 394 2.2 The Research Project 398 2.3 The Exegesis 407 2.4 Journalism as Research 410

S3 Method: Autoethnography 417

Conclusion 430

References 436

Appendices i) SHR Project 2015/238 - Ethics Clearance 448 ii) SHR Project 2015/238 - Ethics Modification (1) – change of name 450 iii) Change of thesis title approval 451 361

Introduction

i) Overview This artefact and exegesis draws together a book of nine themed chapters about knitting in Australia, intended for commercial publication and a general readership, with a scholarly framework. The exegesis arises from issues identified in producing the artefact, an interview- based, non-fiction publication, Disruptive knitting: how knitters are changing the world. Its chapters examine and demonstrate knitting’s ability not only to reflect the wider Australian society but to influence that society, through both individual and collective acts of knitting in the context of the gendered nature of the craft. This publication aims to have appeal for knitters and for a wider group of readers interested in topics such as craft, political activism, feminism and gender issues. The project builds on my more than 40 years of writing, research and publication in the news media industry, in particular my extensive experience of interviewing techniques, including teaching these to junior newsroom journalists. More recently I have taught these techniques to student journalists as a member of the Swinburne University of Technology journalism program staff.

Central to this artefact production and its exegetical framework are two complementary questions: How has the traditional craft of knitting, stereotypically a woman’s hobby for the purpose of producing utilitarian items including garments, evolved to become a tool for numerous other purposes including political protest, reinforcement of and rebellion against traditional gender roles, and the creation of fine art? What does the practice of knitting reveal about Australian society, and how has it influenced events in that society since World War II?

This exegesis aims to provide a context and scholarly framework for the artefact, illuminating the gendered practice of knitting through the prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST), which was developed to interpret the views of women for the Academy. There is much discussion in the literature about the relationship between the artefact and exegesis. In simultaneously pursuing these two complementary and inter-related aspects of the project, reflecting in the exegesis upon the creation of the artefact in the course of doing so rather than upon its completion, I have engaged in what Barbara Bolt (2006, p. 8) describes as building “a dialogic relation between making and writing”. In doing so “the task of the exegesis is not just to contextualise practice, but rather is to produce movement in thought itself … the exegesis provides a vehicle through which the work of art can find a discursive form” (Bolt 2006, p. 12). 362

This has enabled consideration in greater depth, in the context of scholarly reading, of issues which have arisen in the course of the artefact research, but which it would not be appropriate to tackle in such depth in a commercial publication for a general readership. Conversely, as discussed below, I have drawn on my scholarly reading in developing the interview questions – incorporating issues I had not previously considered which have been drawn to my attention. I have incorporated the views of scholars in the artefact both directly and by calling on them to inform the analysis. In this way the two complementary elements speak to one another.

This exegesis reflects upon how, in the course of this research, the artefact has evolved from a social history of knitting in Australia – a gap I had identified, such a project having been tackled in now-dated books in other countries, including the United Kingdom (Rutt 1987), the United States (Macdonald 1988) and, more recently, New Zealand (Nicholson 2013). It quickly became clear that the most significant and interesting developments in relation to knitting were more recent, with not only the practice of knitting but the perceptions of its practitioners undergoing significant change. A highly gendered craft, albeit with some temporary relaxation of this accepted during wartime for the production of necessities, it was perceived by some feminists in the 1960s and 1970s as part of the system of oppression of women. More recently, many women – and some men – have turned the craft to their own ends, a tool for feminist and political expression. So the research project was modified. As Alec Grant, Nigel Short and Lydia Turner assert: “The story might change, develop and grow throughout the reader’s experience of the writing, and almost certainly changes and grows as the author authors and re-authors their writing …” (2013, p. 2). This was the case here.

The artefact thus developed as a series of nine themed chapters with knitting as their core focus. Each became, in effect, a piece of long-form journalism, comprising an individual research project, interrelated by focusing on an aspect of knitting practice. These chapters were brought together within the artefact to comprise the overarching whole. In the creation of each chapter existing knowledge and scholarship in the field were reviewed as a starting point. While this exegesis is built upon identifying issues that evolved in the course of writing the artefact, in reading the academic literature issues which inform the artefact were identified. This provided a foundation for the creation of new knowledge derived from contemporary practice-led research (PLR) investigating the role of knitting practice in Australian society and beyond and the views of knitters about its purposes and significance in this global and technological age.

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This exegesis does not include a separate literature review. Rather, the relevant scholarly literature is referenced throughout, in entering into and adding to academic debates and discussions arising from reflections on making the artefact. This process of recording reflections was central to the investigation of the research questions. After canvassing HDR supervisors about creative arts doctorates, Jen Webb and Donna Lee Brien noted (2015, p. 1323) the centrality of such reflections:

Perhaps the key point that came out of these discussions is the importance of reflective practice. The respondents insisted that candidates must, as one respondent explained, ‘reflect critically on their own practice to extend knowledge for other people’ (focus group; examiner).

So it was for me; I had knitted and written since childhood, and had been interviewing since commencing my journalistic career in the early 1970s. Viewing this craft, its influences and impacts through a scholarly lens was another matter.

The artefact and this exegesis are shown to speak to each other, with many of the scholarly references consulted also used in creation of the artefact. During this process I engaged with, and drew on, the ideas interrogated in these references and their analyses in developing questions and areas of discussion with the interviewees. For example, reading extensively about yarn bombing and urban graffiti enabled the development of questions for interviewees about aspects of these topics I had not previously pondered in great depth, such as personal empowerment and maternalising the urban landscape. Manuela Farinosi and Leopoldina Fortunati, for example, believe that from their yarn bombing case study emerges a radical reinterpretation of domesticity: “A public, political meaning is attributed to an activity that was until yesterday ‘private’, hidden inside the four walls of the house. Hence knitting changes its target from the home and the clothing of family members to the city, the urban environment” (2013, p. 295). As well, they see a change in knitting’s meaning “from being an expression of women’s subalternity to being a tool of revolutionary change in urban environments” (2013, p. 295). Such an interpretation goes well beyond the usual view of yarn bombing as decorative, and applies to some of the yarn bombers interviewed for purposes of this artefact. They use their own homes – lounge rooms, laundries – as studios in which to convert a previously domestic activity into something public and collective, either through face-to-face contact or by use of the Internet. Annette Fitton, for example, previously a home-based Melbourne wife and mother who realised the truth in his words when her son told her to “get a life”, is now an 364

internationally recognised yarn bomber. She initially regarded her work as decorative, a hobby based in her suburban home. But after being attracted to yarn bombing for its decorative qualities and for her own creative satisfaction, she now not only undertakes commercial commissions, but has created a nipple-knitting laneway installation project, displaying numerous crafted nipples as a protest at what she saw as a censorship action in covering over nipples on street art.

Further consideration of such scholarly discussions in relation to knitting later in the exegesis enables more detailed and in-depth exploration of these ideas about its uses and significance, providing insights in the process of creating the research framework. This complementarity was invaluable and made possible by undertaking research using the artefact and exegesis model, combining explorative and practice-led research with scholarship. “Many Australian universities are becoming more open to creative practice-led research as knowledge” (Arnold 2012, p. 9). Swinburne University of Technology has been at the forefront of this. Josie Arnold writes: “The artefact and exegesis model of the PhD in writing at Swinburne University of Technology offers an opportunity to bring the creative activity together with the academic debate and rigour” (2012, p. 11). This has been my experience. Through this exegesis I demonstrate how these two elements are together, knowledge production. 365

ii) The Structure of the Exegesis Introduction and Overview: As previously noted, central to this project are two complementary questions: How has the traditional craft of knitting, stereotypically a woman’s hobby for the purpose of producing garments and other useful and decorative items, evolved to become a tool for numerous other purposes including political protest, reinforcement of and rebellion against traditional gender roles, and the creation of fine art? What does the practice of knitting reveal to us about Australian society and how has it influenced events in that society since World War II?

In the course of this research the artefact has evolved from a social history of knitting in Australia to a book of contemporary themed chapters, each with the practice of knitting and its gendered connotations as its core focus, each building upon existing knowledge and scholarship.

Section 1 The Project: This chapter analyses the project through the prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST), an essential theoretical perspective but also relevant to the autoethnographic nature of the work, given my long-time identification as a feminist. I interrogate criticisms that FST is outdated and irrelevant, and conclude that it is not only relevant to the research subjects but for women researchers. For them this standpoint remains an important tool in the uncovering of previously overlooked knowledge, given their own status on the margins, a situation comparable with the status of knitters whose skills and knowledge have not been valued.

This chapter also specifically addresses the relationship of knitting to feminism, including the question of whether knitting is, of itself, a feminist act, as some young women knitters such as interviewee Sophia Cai believe. After a discussion in the context of defining feminism and viewpoints of scholars and interviewees, I conclude that is not the case; it is not the knitting alone which makes a feminist statement, but the sentiment, intention and politics of the knitter. So garments and homewares traditionally created for functional purposes could have those traditional functions subverted through their use as tools for a feminist statement – The Cursed Boyfriend Sweater of artist Makeda Duong and the UV light-sensitive baby blanket, with menstrual blood-dyed rosettes, knitted by Casey Jenkins, for example.

Section 2 Methodology: This chapter considers the practice-led research (PLR) methodology of this project and the complementarity of the artefact and exegesis. I discuss the research process, 366

whereby the artefact, an interview-based book for commercial publication led the research, yet was enriched and informed by my research and reading for the exegesis. I discuss the origins of the project and the autoethnographic method which would inform it.

Given that I consider this research project to be, in essence, a piece of long-form journalism, I discuss the concept of journalism as research and moves within the Academy to have journalism recognised as research. I conclude that for this project the complementary exegesis was invaluable, my reading and reflection informing it, providing greater depth for the artefact and a theoretical structure which enhanced and enriched its contribution to knowledge. This is not to say, of course, that all journalism requires such a companion to gain recognition by the Academy; it is entirely possible for the research to be contained within the journalism itself.

Section 3 Method: This chapter discusses the mediation of academic writing by the writer’s viewpoint and the moves towards replacing elimination of the self from such writing with autoethnographic methodologies. As I am not the subject of my research and the artefact is not a first person narrative, discussion focuses on whether it qualifies as autoethnography and how the work in this exegesis qualifies for such positioning.

The reflective exegesis is clearly autoethnographic. The artefact has the self as its starting point and the personal preface sets the tone for the reader for the material to come. I therefore argue that my lived experience relates specifically to the topic under discussion and informs everything from the questions asked to the approach to the writing. This is not the knitters telling their stories; I, the writer, am telling their stories. So I am both autoethnographer and journalist, my research taking place in the context of my personal experiences and participant observation, yet based on the interviews undertaken with knitters.

Conclusion: This project offers different ways of using qualitative methodologies, bringing creativity to the Academy. It draws on my twin specialisms of journalism and textile design to bring together insights into creative work that has largely been isolated and undervalued as women’s craft, having been created by labour regarded as having no calculable value – that is, a hobby or pastime – or paid at extremely low rates. The exegetic framework uses Feminist Standpoint Theory as an appropriate prism through which to analyse and discuss this research material, placing women at the centre of the research process and illuminating the lives and practices of marginalised craftspeople. 367

In the course of the project I have considered the role of journalism in relation to academic discourse and the shift towards recognising journalism as research in its own right, as well as the means by which this complementary exegesis enriched my journalistic research. Having done so, I conclude that an approach based on transparency is more relevant and realistic for contemporary journalism research than the outdated and unrealistic notion of the impartial observer.

The conclusion is a discussion of this project’s original substantial contribution to knowledge, my complementary exegesis bringing creativity as knowledge into the Academy. It illuminates the practice of the artefact in which the insights of my 87 interviewees cast new light on the neglected topic of knitting and gender stereotyping, their knitting and its role in their lives a lens through which to view contemporary society and political developments, and its influence on and ability to disrupt them. Mediated by me as the journalist, significant parallels emerged between the experience of the interviewees, illuminating contemporary social issues and trends. As a book for commercial publication it addresses a gap in the publication of works about the social and cultural impact of knitting and facilitates communication of this knowledge to the wider society. This PLR research fulfils the aims elucidated in this introduction and overview, bringing new scholarship to the topic of knitting. 368

Section 1 The Project

S1.1 The Theoretical Prism: Feminist Standpoint Theory The artefact examines how events and political developments in the wider Australian society effect changes in knitting – who knits, where, what is knitted and why – and how knitters are pushing the boundaries of their craft such that it can become a disruptive influence on society. This examination has taken place through the medium of interviews with knitters, artists and other relevant interviewees such as art gallery curators and scholars, most but not all of them women. Through the theoretical prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory (FST), developed to interpret and to bring to the Academy the views of women, the research is discussed and analysed in this reflective exegesis.

American feminist philosopher Nancy Hartsock is credited with coining the term “feminist standpoint” in 1983 (Hundleby 1998, p. 26). As Susan Hekman explained (1997, p. 341) when she revisited FST in a 1997 issue of Signs: Journal of women in culture and society devoted to FST, “the publication of Nancy Hartsock’s Money, Sex, and Power changed the landscape of feminist theory”.

Her goal is to define the nature of the truth claims that feminists advance and to provide a methodological grounding that will validate those claims. The method she defines is the feminist standpoint. Borrowing heavily from Marx, yet adapting her insights to her specifically feminist ends, Hartsock claims that it is women’s unique standpoint in society that provides the justification for the truth claims of feminism while also providing it with a message with which to analyse reality.

In 1995 Nancy Tuana and Rosemary Tong recognised this foundational importance of Hartsock’s work, including her in a collection analysing several schools of feminist thought – among them liberal feminism, cultural feminism, socialist-feminist theory, anarchism in feminism and Black feminist thought. Hartsock’s essay, first published in 1983, began the ‘Marxist feminist perspectives’ section (1995, p. vii). In it she described the feminist standpoint she was developing as “an important epistemological tool for understanding and opposing all forms of domination” (1995, p. 69). She insisted (1995, p. 85) that “feminist theorists must demand that feminist theorizing be grounded in women’s material activity”. Clearly, Hartsock believed the 369

importance of using a women’s activity as the basis of research and the creation of knowledge, as is the case with this project, could not be underestimated (p. 85-86):

Generalizing the activity of women to the social system as a whole would raise, for the first time in human history, the possibility of a fully human community, a community structured by connection rather than separation and opposition.

FST therefore provides an essential and apposite theoretical perspective to the scholarly discussions in and of this project, given the nature of this gender-related and woman-derived research data. In a 1997 debate about the contemporary relevance of Feminist Standpoint Theory, FST pioneer Sandra Harding wrote of what she saw as distortions of “the central project of standpoint theorists”: …

Rather, it is relations between power and knowledge that concerned these thinkers. They have wanted to identify ways that male supremacy and the production of knowledge have co-constituted each other in the past and to explore what heretofore unrecognized powers might be found in women’s lives that could lead to knowledge that is more useful for enabling women to improve the conditions of our lives (1997, p. 382).

FST is relevant in an analysis of the interviews with knitters. This prism enables insights into how they are using their knowledge of their craft and their willingness to join together in communities of women to push knitting’s boundaries and use it as a force for improving the society in which they live. FST is also highly relevant to the autoethnographic nature of this work, given my long-time identification as a feminist and a knitter. Such an approach validates my knowledge of and involvement with my research topic; “It says what I know matters” (Wall 2006, p. 148). FST, however, offers more than personal validation and ease of engagement with the topic and interviewees. “Feminist standpoint epistemology requires us to place women at the centre of the research process: Women’s ‘concrete experiences’ provides a starting point from which to build knowledge” (Brookes 2007, p. 77). It is the “concrete experiences” of Australian knitters that are the starting point of the artefact and on which I reflect here. This is in keeping with practice-led research, as is discussed in a subsequent chapter.

Some FST scholars see research such as this as the precursor to action to improve the lot of the oppressed minority whose voices it is hearing and deems worthy of attention. Abigail Brookes, 370

for example, believes it is important not only “to uncover the hidden knowledge women have cultivated from living life ‘on the margins’” (2007, p. 77) but also to take the next step and translate this into activism. “Feminist standpoint epistemology asks not just that we take women seriously as knowers but that we translate women’s knowledge into practice, that we apply what we learn from women’s experiences toward social change …” (2007, pp. 77-78). While I do not see myself engaging in activism on the basis of the knowledge gained through creation of my artefact, I do see myself blurring “boundaries between academia and activism, between theory and practice” (2007, p. 77), as Brookes advocates. I argue that researching, recording and analysing this “hidden knowledge” is important in documenting not only the undervalued contribution of knitters to Australian society, but their efforts to change that society.

Certainly a craft such as knitting, supposedly domestic, as practised mainly by women, is often dismissed as mundane and has, historically, been of little interest to researchers. Most of the available knitting scholarship is recent. It is, therefore, a relatively untapped resource, a source of significant knowledge and scholarly data waiting to be discovered. This concurs with Dorothy E Smith, regarded as one of the founders of FST, who writes: “Taking a women’s standpoint and beginning in experience gives access to a knowledge of what is tacit, known in the doing, and often not yet discursively appropriated (and often seen as un-interesting, unimportant, and routine)” (1997, p. 395). Today growing scholarly interest in women’s creative crafting, including knitting, means it is increasingly being viewed as an appropriate subject for scholarship. “Over time knitting has been seen as mundane, so ubiquitous and commonplace that it fades into the social, cultural, and historical background,” writes Susan Strawn (2012, p. 1). This has begun to change, she notes: “New generations of the late twentieth-century scholars and twenty-first century researchers recognized that knitting offered a previously untapped resource for a variety of disciplines” (Strawn, 2012, p. 2). As the women interviewed for the artefact reveal, whether it be by taking to the barricades against gas exploration or the quiet activism of knitting for those in need or to publicise programs such as organ donation, many of them are using it for the greater good and to actively change Australian society. Through this artefact, this knitting- based activism is brought to a wider audience and, through this exegesis, explored within an academic context.

Back to the ‘70s As the feminist movement gained support and influence in the late 1960s and 1970s, women across the Western world found their voices. “Standpoint theory emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a feminist critical theory about relations between the production of knowledge and 371

practices of power” (Harding 2004, p. 1). Smith writes that the women’s movement discovered “that as women we had been living in an intellectual, cultural and political world, from whose making we had been almost entirely excluded and in which we had been recognized as no more than marginal voices” (1987, p. 1). So – and this distinction was not entirely clear to me when I first encountered Feminist Standpoint Theory – FST is not simply about being a feminist and viewing the world from a feminist perspective, as I have since the early 1970s. It is about embarking on, undertaking and analysing research from that standpoint to create new knowledge, as, now in my 60s and still holding strongly to feminism, I have done in the artefact and am reflecting on in this exegesis.

Since its emergence in the early 1980s FST has been the subject of regular and at times bitter debate between scholars about its continuing relevance. In one such critique in 1997, Hekman drew on a number of the pioneering FST theorists including Harding and Smith to rebut it – Smith described Hekman’s interpretation of her work as “systematically out to lunch” (1997, p. 392). Hekman noted (1997, p. 341): “Particularly among younger feminist theorists, feminist standpoint theory is frequently regarded as a quaint relic of feminism’s less sophisticated past” – a conclusion she described as “premature” (1997, p. 342). But while Hekman advocated recasting FST and argued for “defining the feminist standpoint as situated and engaged knowledge” (1997, p. 362), I consider that it is highly relevant to apply the FST theoretical prism to women’s creative work – specifically here, knitting – in the 21st century.

Hartsock and Feminist Standpoint Theory were situated by Tuana and Tong in the context of the multiplicity of means devised by feminist scholars to explain and understand the world and their place in it and to endeavour to improve it (1995, p. xi). They noted “the diversity of feminist thought” (1995, p. xi):

Feminists disagree about which aspects of women’s lives – work, sexual relations, or family relations – best explain women’s oppression, repression, and suppression under patriarchy. They also disagree about which legal remedies, job opportunities, sexual experiments, reproductive technologies, and linguistic revisions are most likely to liberate women. Finally, they disagree about the forms of oppression other than gender repression feminists must address: racism, classism, homophobia, ageism, or any and all forms of systematic discrimination.

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Such was the multiplicity of feminist perspectives their anthology did not have room to accommodate them all, Tuana and Tong explained (1995, p. xii) – particularly with feminist philosophy continuously evolving and hopefully tackling aspects previously neglected such as race and sexual identity. Feminists could not even agree on the names and categorisations of these different schools of thought, they noted (1995, p. 4). Tuana and Tong observed that Marxist feminist thought shared the failings of other schools, needing “to further expand its categories to include the experiences of diverse women” – an important future challenge for all schools of feminist thought (1995, p. 68).

In their introduction to their ‘Marxist feminist perspectives’ section they described Hartsock’s development of Marxist feminist thought as “an advance over traditional Marxist thought in that it shows how gender and class struggle are interrelated” (1995, p. 68). Hartsock had insisted that “all women do ‘women’s work’” (1995, p. 66) and certainly in 1995 the relevance of this was clearly demonstrated with more women joining the workforce, they wrote. Yet women were still doing the bulk of household chores.

Clearly, a literal interpretation of a school of thought developed in 1983 is not likely to be appropriate in every aspect in 2018. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of FST remain a relevant and valuable theoretical prism through which to interpret my research data. “Feminist philosophers have become painfully aware of the degree to which traditional philosophy overlooks or trivializes women’s interests, issues, concerns, and persons” (Tuana & Tong 1995, p.2). Of course this overlooking is not confined to philosophy and this neglect of women’s interests and concerns lies at the heart of this project. Reassessing FST’s relevance in 2004, Harding noted that FST had, as mentioned above, been the subject of controversy, criticism and revisionism in the decades subsequent to its emergence. But she remained confident of its merits: “After all this controversy, what remains notable is that standpoint projects appear to have survived and even to be flourishing anew after more than two decades of contention … It has managed to locate its analyses at the juncture of some of our deepest contemporary anxieties” (2004, p. 13). She predicted its persistence – a prediction I feel confident of, given FST’s usefulness in this project. “I want to take people’s experience as a place to start,” wrote Smith (1997, p. 396), as part of a revisiting of FST in 1997. So, too, my starting point was the lived experience of Australian knitters, discussed later in the context of practice-led research.

FST’s recognition of lived experience is relevant in the context of the interviewer. During the 1970s, my own feminist views were developing as I became increasingly active in student politics 373

and youth politics in Wellington, New Zealand. I had grown up in rural New Zealand, where the expectation of most young women students was that they would marry and become full-time housewives, devoting themselves to such thankless tasks as making scones for haymakers and shearers. Those who did go on to higher education were expected to undertake study leading to traditional occupations – in particular, nursing and teaching – and dissuaded from doing otherwise. I had been persuaded by the combined efforts of my school headmaster and my parents’ lawyer – both men, of course – not to proceed with my ambition to study law. I had allowed myself to be defeated by the weight of this opposition and, freed from the shackles of high school and small country town conservatism, I was determined that would not happen again.

The study of law was, like knitting and so much else in our society, then as now, gendered: “As far back in history as we can see, we have organized our social and natural worlds in terms of gender meanings within which historically specific racial, class, and cultural institutions and meanings have been constructed” (Harding 1986, p. 17). Joanne Turney describes knitting as having become “ostensibly an activity or pastime for women as an expression of femininity” and she notes: “When one first thinks of knitting, one thinks of women” (2009, p. 8). As will be discussed in more detail later in this exegesis, many of the women knitters interviewed for this artefact had been taught the craft by a female family member, the passing down through the generations of a traditional pastime; they began because it was expected of them. Some continued for that same reason – knitting for grandchildren. The good daughter became a good grandmother. In Good and mad women: the historical construction of femininity in 20th century Australia Jill Julius Matthews argues:

For women, the gender order of any particular society creates an ideology of femininity, which establishes both the imperative and the meaning of being a good or true woman. This ideology is a patterned set of ideas and beliefs about women that influences both the behaviour and the treatment of all women in the society (1984, p. 15).

It is those behaviours and the treatment of women knitters, shaped by the gender constructions imposed on that craft, which have resulted in the rich diversity of experiences captured in the artefact and discussed in this exegesis. “In virtually every culture, gender difference is a pivotal way in which humans identify themselves as persons, organize social relations, and symbolize meaningful natural and social events and processes” (Harding 1986, p. 18). Some interviewees saw themselves as subverting these traditional gendered roles ascribed to knitting. For example, 374

some used this so-called domestic art as a means of political protest, to convey environmental messages or as a fine art medium. The men too did not escape this ascribing of gender appropriateness; Kristof Avramsson writes: “… A man knitting elbows his way into long-held contrived conventions of (domestic) femininity, queering space and generally causing embarrassment and a sense of cultural unease through his performance” (2016, p. iv). So it was that Kevin Richards, who knitted socks for soldiers on the train as a schoolboy in wartime Melbourne, relegated his knitting to Sunday afternoons at home when he left school and began work at age 14. Now 88, Kevin has never knitted in public since. “I have never known a man to knit on the train,” he observed.

Challenging the Paradigms Controversially, FST challenges traditional paradigms: “Tensions within and between its texts still generate lively debates in feminist circles, within which it first appeared a full generation ago” (Harding 2004, p. 1). It is noteworthy that Nancy Hartsock, credited with coining the term “feminist standpoint” in 1983 (Hundleby 1998, p. 26), describes standpoint theories as “essentially contested” and writes: “I prefer to see this proliferation of interpretation as an indication that standpoint theories represent a fertile terrain for feminist debates about power, politics, and epistemology” (1998, pp. 93-94). Of course some scholars, notably Donna Haraway, have argued that there can be no one FST: “There is no single feminist standpoint because our maps require too many dimensions for that metaphor to ground our visions” (Haraway 1998, p. 590). Hekman, in her divisive 1997 article revisiting FST, wrote: “If we take the multiplicity of feminist standpoint to its logical conclusion, coherent analysis becomes impossible because we have too many axes of analysis ultimately, every woman is unique; if we analyse each in her uniqueness, systemic analysis is obviated” (1997, p. 359). However, she concluded: “Women speak from multiple standpoints, producing multiple knowledges. But this does not prevent women from coming together to work for specific political goals” (1997, p. 363). Certainly the women knitters interviewed for this artefact have multiple viewpoints, some not only identifying strongly as feminists but using their knitting in the pursuit of feminist goals; others disavowing feminism and simply knitting for enjoyment. Through PLR, viewed through the prism of FST, the lived experience of this marginalised group is given voice. That is, the voice of women and some men pursuing a craft which may be both highly political and consciousness-raising, yet is dismissed as a stereotypical women’s hobby. Its relevance to some of the most important issues of our time is revealed.

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FST challenges the view that “politics can only obstruct and damage the production of scientific knowledge” (Harding 2004, p. 1). After all, feminism is political and a wide range of feminists in academia were – and are – adopting this standpoint as a means of creating knowledge from their own perspective and to explain the world: “Consequently, it was proposed not just as an explanatory theory, but also prescriptively, as a method or theory of method (a methodology) to guide future feminist research” (Harding 2004, p. 1). These women academics bravely challenged and rejected the traditional patriarchal view of what constitutes knowledge to contribute to a broader and more inclusive view – all knowledge, not just knowledge for and by women. As they did so, PLR (noted in more detail in a later chapter) emerged, scholarly theory interacting with research grounded in and validating real life experience.

The standpoint of women situates the inquirer in the site of her bodily existence and in the local actualities of her working world. It is a standpoint that positions inquiry but has no specific content. Those who undertake inquiry from this standpoint begin always from women’s experience as it is for women. We are the authoritative speakers of our experience (Smith 1990, p. 28).

In noting the androcentricism present in numerous facets of research in universities, including policy and choice of research topics, Maria Mies makes particular mention of methodology and calls for “a new methodological approach consistent with the aims of the women’s movement” (1983, p. 65). Drawing on her own experience in both research and the women’s movement she writes of the need for “the integration of research into social and political action for the emancipation of women” (1983, p. 70). Scathing about attitude surveys, Mies insists that “the creativity of science depends on its being rooted in living social processes” (1983, p. 71). This project does not go as far as either Brookes or Mies advocate; this research has not been integrated with the “social actions and struggles” (1983, p. 70) of its subjects; it is reported advocacy rather than advocacy itself. However it is grounded in my own lived experience of both knitting and writing, integrated into the conduct of the project and empathy with the interviewees without pretence of achieving neutrality or arm’s-length observation. The artefact has at its core the perspectives of the interviewees. They are quoted directly and their comments interpreted from my perspective as the writer. The exegesis comprises my reflections on my readings, the literature, the processes of interviewing and the viewpoints of my interviewees, analysed on the basis of my own lived experience, as will be further explored in my discussion of autoethnography. In doing so it addresses a gap in the scholarly literature about the topic of this artefact. 376

Harding notes that FST was a means of explaining “the surprising successes of emerging feminist research in a wide range of projects” (2004, p. 1) – surprising, that is, because such research successes flew in the face of the traditional view that producing scientific knowledge is a neutral activity, free from political influences. I would say, as does Harding and other FST scholars, the success of these women’s work was because of that very political influence, rather than despite it. Harding writes of the worth of research undertaken from a feminist standpoint: “Thus, feminist issues could not be pigeon-holed and ignored as only women's issues, but instead had to be seen as valuably informing theoretical, methodological, and political thought in general” (2004, p. 2). So this research is not simply a “women’s project” about a “women’s interest”. This book too, is not just for knitters or even just for women. Rather, this artefact is intended for anyone interested in gender, political activism, craft and in the influences on the wider Australian society. In reflecting upon its production in this scholarly exegesis I note that the impact of this traditionally gendered craft extends well beyond gender issues.

The Personal is Political Of course this validation of feminist research is not to say that all women researchers agree about the way forward – or about anything. Collins notes that beginning from a woman’s standpoint “does not imply a common viewpoint among women. What we have in common is the organization of social relations that has accomplished our exclusion” (1987, p. 78). So it was my experience that we, young, activist urban women in New Zealand in the early 1970s, felt excluded. Although in 1893 New Zealand had been the world’s first country to give women the vote in Parliamentary elections, still we believed that all fundamental decisions about our lives were made for us, not by us. I was on the front lines of protest about the significant political, social justice and feminist issues of the day – on the surface a massive change in my life, but one for which the seeds had been sown through my dissatisfaction about the low level ambitions for women students at my rural high school. To us these issues of women’s rights and political rights were intertwined – we marched for abortion rights and campaigned for equal pay just as we marched for an end to the Vietnam war, campaigned for the abolition of university fees and for independence for East Timor. As the FST theorists looked to Marxian discourse as offering what Harding has since described as “the only resources powerful enough to counter the prevailing conceptual frameworks for the kinds of natural and social science projects of feminism in the 1970s and early 1980s” (1997, p. 383), so we saw the struggle against the oppression of women as inextricably linked to other forms of oppression and struggles for equality. We were not inclined to see the ascent of a woman to a powerful position as a victory if she was not also 377

taking a progressive approach to political, social justice and feminist issues. So, for example, when Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Britain this was no cause for celebration.

Women interviewed for the artefact chapter about craftivist and political activism, and some of those interviewed for the art and yarn bombing chapters, have in recent years seen their knitting as a means of making a statement against their exclusion – a feminist statement or even a broader political one. The act of knitting, sometimes carried out in public, sometimes domestically, is inextricable from the message they convey through both the process and end products. An excellent example of this is the network Knitting Nannas against Gas, whose supporters subvert the gender stereotype by using their knitting to protest against coal seam gas exploration and development and other forms of environmental destruction. To use the expression coined by feminist Carol Hanisch in 1970, one which has reverberated over the decades and across many fields of human endeavour, “the personal is political” (Hanisch 1969). Writing about her influential paper in an introduction to publishing it on her website more than a decade later, Hanisch noted: “While trying to think how I would change ‘The personal is political’ paper if I could rewrite it with today’s hindsight, I was actually surprised how well it stands the test of time and experience” (2006). The fearless Nannas, with their knitting needles and thermoses, staking out mine sites and chaining themselves to the railings of New South Wales State Parliament, illustrate the truth of this statement.

The artefact relates the personal experiences and views of people such as these – especially women practising a craft which may be denigrated in the mainstream, and particularly by men, as evidenced by the March 2017 sneering remark by conservative Australian Federal Minister for Immigration Peter Dutton that the chief executive officers of Australia’s largest companies, should “stick to their knitting” instead of commenting on gay marriage (AAP 2017). In doing so the artefact leads to the scholarly debate about the cultural value of women’s work. “In virtually all cultures, whatever is thought of as manly is more highly valued than what is thought of as womanly” (Harding 1986, p. 18). Despite such denigration, interpreted not only as sexist but homophobic by some, given that Qantas CEO Alan Joyce is gay, knitting is highly valued in these knitters’ own supportive circles, be they face-to-face or online, and beyond the limits of such circles. Dutton’s comments, for example, prompted Greens Senator Janet Rice to pull out her knitting and work on a rainbow scarf during question time the following day.

This exegesis reflects upon the artefact as a work about the lived experience of knitters in the context of changing Australian society and the global digital age. In doing so it contributes to the 378

scholarly discussion about giving voice to views often unarticulated, some not even acknowledged. As Sharlene Hesse-Biber writes: “As a feminist interviewer, I am interested in getting at the subjugated knowledge of the diversity of women’s realities that often lie hidden and unarticulated” (2007, p. 113). It shows how whilst not all these interviewees identify as feminists, some (such as Annette Fitton, as mentioned above) engage in what I and many others would identify as feminist actions – for example, constructing a knitted nipples installation in response to the censorship of street art (Green 2018, p. 77). Maura Kelly found that while there was considerable variation in the extent to which knitters and knitting communities were involved with feminist politics, there were “some explicitly feminist individual knitters and knitting communities. More broadly knitting offers the opportunity to both male and female knitters to challenge gender norms” (2014, p. 143). The interviews with these women and with some male knitters, informed by my personal experience, drew from them the valuable insights and knowledge that comprise the artefact and are reflected on here. Could it be that, as Wylie contends, these knitters, by virtue of wielding their knitting needles, are privy to special knowledge? Wylie believes standpoint theory is not only a political theory but a social one:

Its central and motivating insight is an inversion thesis: those who are subject to structures of domination that systematically marginalize and oppress them may, in fact, be epistemically privileged in some crucial respects. They may know different things, or know some things better than those who are comparatively privileged (socially, politically), by virtue of what they typically experience and how they understand their experience (2004, p. 339).

While these knitters may not identify as feminists nor be politically sophisticated, even those women whose knitting is not about protest nor about making explicit political statements bring insights into our society as it functions now and as it was. FST positions and recognises as scholarly data women’s specialist knowledge of knitting, given that they are the main proponents of this highly gendered craft in the 20th and 21st centuries. Before it became part of their domestic duties, until mechanisation superseded handknitting as a source of income, it was undertaken by men, but today few men knit. So it is women who are best placed to describe the various motivations for undertaking this craft, their attitudes to what has traditionally been dismissed as a female domestic hobby and its importance in their lives. Paradoxically, the oppressive attitudes to women which have engendered this characterisation of knitting have led to their expertise in it and the creation of knowledge derived of their experience.

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As a theoretical perspective in this exegesis, FST reveals individual women’s interactions with knitting. For example, Barbara Schembri is an ailing Melbourne retiree who knits for charity and does pro bono accounting work. Yet the artefact research revealed that while a single mother with two children and little income in the 1970s, Barbara financed her university education by commission knitting. She was one of just three women in her accounting class and faced male antipathy for knitting in class. “My grandmother always taught me that women had as much right in everything as men,” she explained. Her experience of financing her education through knitting gave her valuable insights into the struggles of single women and women striving for higher education in traditionally male subjects in the very years when FST was emerging. Encultured gender attitudes, strongly influenced by the patriarchal nature of society at that time, are thus revealed by this theory.

More than 40 years on, it is apposite to return to the question, touched on earlier, of whether FST, which emerged at that time when women were finding their voice, remains relevant as a critical theory in Australian universities today and as a tool for the creation of new knowledge. In considering ‘Where standpoint stands now’, Hundleby wrote:

Standpoint epistemology directs the knower to consider as part of knowledge claims whether oppression might affect the type of understanding that is available and to compensate for any influence of oppression by attending to the perspective of those resisting the attendant oppression (1998, p. 41).

That conclusion was written almost 20 years ago, yet it is as valid today as it was then and in the 1970s. There is a weight of evidence to suggest that in the decades since FST emerged women have not achieved gender equality and remain oppressed and discriminated against. This is the case both for research subjects and female researchers themselves. Finding interviewees for this artefact has been easy – knitters, used to having their practice of a so-called domestic hobby denigrated, have welcomed the opportunity to speak and be heard. “In accounting for the influence of power differentials on our knowledge claims, we work to counteract the epistemic roadblocks that prevent politically marginalised perspective nerves from being articulated and from being heard” (Hundleby 1998, p. 41). When their voices are heard, both individually and collectively, their contribution to knowledge is significant, as is demonstrated through the artefact and the reflections on it in this exegesis.

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This denigration of knitting and the gendered nature of the craft has been the starting point for some men’s groups, particularly gay men, who have moved to reclaim it. In 1997 Janet Saltzman Chafetz contended: “The recently developing queer theory,… which deals with the social construction of sexual identity and preference labels, especially those that are ‘marginal’, is also interwoven with feminist theories” (1997, p. 116). More recently Avramsson concluded that knitting “provides an excellent site to explore gender reversal, a traditional feminine occupation only slightly inhabited by men” (2016, p. 148). For these men, acknowledging the traditional feminine associations and female domination of knitting offers not only the potential to reclaim a craft which was mostly undertaken by males until mechanisation undermined its financial viability, but to explore and challenge construction of their own identities.

However, it is not only the research subjects but the researchers themselves for whom this standpoint remains an important tool in the uncovering of knowledge, given their own status on what Brookes describes as “the margins” (2007, p. 77). As discussed earlier, women scholars in universities adopted FST as a way of creating knowledge from their own perspective. In March 2016 the Griffith University and University of Queensland study Women, careers and universities: where to from here concluded: “Vertical segregation by gender remains in Australian universities, with women disproportionately represented at the lower levels and men disproportionately represented at the higher levels of both academic and professional staff” (Strachan et al. 2016, p. 9). They further reported that: “Gender equity in Australian universities amongst academic staff, as benchmarked against the Australian Public Service (APS), was relatively poor … For academic staff, horizontal segregation occurs through both discipline and role specialisation” (Strachan et al. 2016, p. 9). These are the women, judged by the same research standards as men, for whom FST remains as relevant as when Smith wrote in 1987: “Power and authority in the educational process are the prerogatives of men” (1987, p. 29). She warned: “We have learned to live inside a discourse that is not ours and that expresses and describes a landscape in which we are alienated and that preserves that alienation as integral to its practice” (1987, p. 36). In this project FST enables the recording and analysis of the views and contributions of women knitters around Australia – information which casts light on the nature and functioning of the wider Australian society, yet has previously received little attention from researchers. 381

S 1.2 Knitting and Feminism Defining feminism is highly problematic and the subject of intensive scholarly debate which, on its own, could comprise several dozen exegeses. As Rosalind Delmar writes: “The assumption that the meaning of feminism is ‘obvious’ needs to be challenged” (1986, p. 8). She then offers a “base-line definition of feminism …

that at the very least a feminist is someone who holds that women suffer discrimination because of their sex, and that they have specific needs which remain negated and unsatisfied, and that the satisfaction of those needs would require a radical change (some would say a revolution even) in the social, economic and political order” (1986, p. 8).

But Delmar notes that beyond this baseline lie multiple complications. Although she was writing in the mid-1980s, this analysis holds today. Such is the nature of feminism that just as scholars define it differently or allow for a spectrum of definitions, so, too, do women asked about their feminism. Knitters are no different, as evidenced by the range of responses from interviewees. While Sophia Cai self-defines as a feminist partly through the very act of picking up her knitting needles, others such as Casey Jenkins engage in overt and confronting acts of feminist activism. This study of knitting throws light on these differences which both unite and divide women.

With lay definitions ranging from hardline radical activism to superficially straightforward touchtone definitions such as equality between men and women, obtaining an answer to the question, “are you a feminist?” appears contingent on implicit agreement as to what a feminist actually is – agreement unlikely to be achieved amongst a diverse group of women such as the interviewees for this research. Interviewee Annette Fitton, for example, engages in what I interpret as feminist acts, standing up for the right to display women’s bodies through street art. As discussed above, she created a knitted nipples installation in response to an act of anti- woman censorship – the painting out of nipples on street art in a Melbourne lane by an unknown person. Yet she does not identify as a feminist. Fitton specifically addressed this in an email to me: “I don't see myself as a feminist, there are so many different ideas on what feminism is, I prefer to think of myself as an equal rights for everyone supporter” (Fitton 2016, 28 June).

Fitton’s view accords with calls to enhance women’s rights by expressing them as human rights, as discussed in Women’s rights, human rights: international feminist perspectives: “This separation of women’s rights from human rights has perpetuated the secondary status of 382

women and highlights the importance of recognising specific women’s human rights concerns” (Bunch 1995, p. 12). However, she holds this view despite having described this work in a previous email as “a criticism of our society’s view on the human body. We have become progressively more Victorian in the last 50 years. I think that is a shame” (Fitton 2016, 10 April). This analysis appears to me both contradictory and surprising. Fitton acknowledges she is commenting on current social attitudes to women’s bodies, what she perceives as the shift to a more Victorian outlook and she is responding through her knitting to the defacing of the art. I contend this is a feminist statement even by the standards of such a baseline definition as Delmar’s, with women facing gender-based discrimination. I note Delmar’s statement (1986, p. 13) that: “It is by no means absurd to suggest that you don’t have to be a feminist to support women’s rights to equal treatment, and that not all those supportive of women’s demands are feminists.” Perhaps, therefore, such a response is not entirely surprising, given the negative connotations of the word feminism for some women and that Fitton was a stay-at-home mother and wife for whom knitting has increasingly provided an escape from what pioneering feminist Betty Friedan (1963, p. 425) described as the “comfortable concentration camp” of the suburban home.

Feminism, it seems, has become a loaded word, one with a wide range of interpretations and the capacity to instil fear and anger, not only at the situation of women which makes feminism necessary, but at the suggestion that a particular woman is a feminist. To some it is, in effect, an insult. So it is important to place this exegetic discussion about the links between feminism and knitting in this context of scholarly debate and definition. I consider this further in discussing feminism and the fear factor below.

Feminism’s Fear Factor Why then is this word to many women synonymous with liberation and hope, so powerfully disturbing to others? In Manifesta: young women, feminism and the future, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (2010, p. 61) consider why the word feminism has become so frightening, even to some women on the left:

Identifying ourselves as feminists means addressing uncomfortable topics: the humiliation of being discriminated against, the fact that we are vulnerable when we walk home late at night or even in our homes, or the sadness of discovering that the sons in our families are treated altogether differently from the daughters. Injustice and oppression are hard to face, a fact that is evident in the number of rape and sexual 383

harassment charges that emerge years, even decades, after the event actually happened.

The power of the word feminism to evoke such emotive responses is evident in Baumgardner and Richards (2010, p. 50) subtitling their ‘What is feminism?’ chapter, ‘A concise history of the F word’. They write: “Feminism, a word that describes a social-justice movement for gender equity and human liberation, is often treated as the other F word …. by the time the two of us were at college, learning that we were indeed feminists, the term was dripping with qualifiers” (2010, p. 50). Such qualifiers were evident in several of this research subjects’ responses. Judith Mitchell, for example, is a mature, independent woman, a designer and Melbourne yarn store manager whom, I know from previous personal contact rather than from our formal interview, has recently separated herself from a difficult, long-standing relationship. Mitchell is a tertiary- educated woman who attended university in South Africa during the 1970s, years when so- called second wave feminism was flourishing on campuses, so could reasonably have been expected to identify as a feminist. When she did not, it was important that I resist expressing surprise, even taking her to task, mindful of Hesse-Biber’s discussion of the role of the feminist interviewer: “As a feminist interviewer, I am aware of the nature of my relationship to those whom I interview, careful to understand my particular personal and research standpoints and what role I play in the interview process in terms of my power and authority over the interview situation” (2007, pp. 113-114). Mitchell was quick to dismiss any such suggestion: “I don’t regard myself as being particularly feminist.”

In a similar vein, interviewee Dr Fiona Wright, a Sydney poet and essayist who lives with anorexia and for whom knitting has been an important tool in her journey towards recovery, did not discuss the issue of knitting and feminism. Asked about the nexus between the two, she declared herself “a big believer in women’s work”, referring to crafts such as knitting, she did not place this in a wider feminist context. Her mother and grandmother were both knitters, but it was her father, whom she recalls had learned to knit while in the Army or just before joining up, who taught her. The subsequent discussion with her was in the context of female friendships, a vital support as she has come to grips with her eating disorder. Knitting has been a manifestation of the skill of controlling intense emotions discussed during her cognitive behaviour therapy. But the support of a close group of women and Fiona’s view of craft as something that makes her feel in control could be seen as analogous with women taking control of their lives.

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For the second wave feminists of the 1970s feminism was about more than just taking control and making one’s own decisions, it was about opening up women’s lives to all the possibilities available, so many of which were still denied to them, and enabling and empowering them to take advantage of those possibilities. This was a far broader interpretation than that of many young, contemporary feminists – so-called third wave feminists – as is discussed below. Mann and Huffman see this shift as a profound change, one which “grew out of a critique of the inadequacies of the second wave” (2005, p. 57). They write:

The second wave’s notion that the personal is political was a double-edged sword that highlighted not only how personal issues were political, but also how personal lifestyle choices should not undermine feminist politics. Hence, it was both disciplinary and transformative in that it required that social change was part of one’s everyday life. By contrast, the new generation, in its attempt to open up and broaden feminism, introduced a number of less restrictive ideas, strategies and ways of conceptualizing feminism (2005, p. 70).

This transformative view of the power of feminism meant that for many of the second wavers, myself included, feminism was – and is – more than simply the struggle for equality between men and women, measurable through analytics such as pay equality, hours spent on housework, the number of women in company boardrooms and non-traditional occupations such as engineering. Leading Australian feminist Eva Cox believes there is a misunderstanding that the ‘70s women’s movement was about giving up on the feminine and doing the masculine instead. She has no recollection of any edict about knitting’s incompatibility with 1970s feminism and she notes that women were urged not to undertake activities simply because they were regarded as “feminine” or expected, as a result of which it is possible some decided not to pass on their knitting skills. For a number of the women interviewed about knitting and feminism, the craft did begin as a traditional skill learned as a child from their mother. But as their own feminist views developed, their reasons changed – it became a means of expressing their frustration at being thwarted from taking advantage of all of life’s possibilities.

One such feminist knitter is Makeda Duong, who was taught to knit by her mother, but it was not until her textile arts course was dropped by the University of South Australia that she made the connection between feminism and her textile-based artworks. Baumgardener and Richards contend: “In the most basic sense, feminism is exactly what the dictionary says it is: the movement for social, political and economic equality of men and women … We prefer to add to 385

that seemingly uncontroversial statement the following: Feminism means that women have the right to enough information to make informed choices about their lives” (2010, p. 56). For some interviewees those choices have included choices about why they knit. The Knitting Nannas, for example, are subverting the stereotype of the knitterly grandmother to use their craft to protest against the exploration of agricultural land for gas. The observation that “most women come to feminism through personal experience” (Baumgardener & Richards 2010, p. 58) may seem self- evident, but resonates with the first-hand experience of many of those Nannas. Clare Twomey and Lindy Scott, for example, took the initiative in setting up the Knitting Nannas Against Gas, after men in the Northern Rivers protest group with which they were involved suggested they should be making cakes and doing the photocopying.

In this discussion of feminism and knitting, the experience of a number of other knitters interviewed for the artefact’s Knitting and Feminism and Knitting and Political Activism chapters can also be considered in this context. They include a young academic who switched to working in textiles and teaching textile art following the dumping of the UNSA course; a bored young mother; a professional woman who took to political activism; a woman undergoing a tortuous menopause; a curator wanting to break down art/craft barriers and include the excluded; a lesbian mother who bravely left her marriage and suburban life and went to university; and an artist who faced vicious online trolling in response to the strident feminist messages in her artwork.

Defining feminism as “a political movement, which aims to challenge and overturn inequalities between the sexes” (2009, p. 9), Joanne Turney concludes that the diversity of ways in which knitting can be interpreted thwarts any single analysis:

Although it is possible to construct a feminist discourse surrounding the activity of knitting, such an analysis is fraught with contradiction. When a woman knits, is this an expression of her intelligence, creative ability and tenacity, or is she adhering to and reinforcing the conditions and values of a patriarchal society? It seems that knitting itself is not the problem, rather what one knits and its intention or purpose (2009, p. 40).

This wide range of motivations described by the interviewees illustrates the diversity to which Turney refers, and of course many knitters have multiple rather than singular reasons for pursuing the craft. Liz Saltwell, for example, who found her voice as an activist through yarn, initially took it up to help a local cafe by decorating nearby trees. Wartime knitters interviewed 386

– Win Bucknall and Flora Westley, for example – knitted socks for soldiers because that contribution to the war effort was expected of young women. The war notwithstanding, it was also expected of women in the 1930s and 1940s as an important means of creating clothing. But the wartime context meant that this was also expected of men who were not in the forces, so interviewee Kevin Richards tells of knitting for the soldiers as a schoolboy. German-born Wolf Graf, who also learned to knit as a youngster, uses complicated mathematical knitting to keep the demons of anxiety and depression at bay. Melbourne new mum Ruth Power knits for her young daughter and poet and writer Fiona Wright knits clothes for friends’ babies as a way of occupying hands and mind as she struggles against anorexia. This reinforcement of the knitting stereotype – women in their 30s knitting for babies – could also be interpreted as a modern woman spending her time as she chooses. Casey Jenkins, who learned to knit specifically to use it in her feminist activism, has also made a baby blanket – but her blanket, knitted from yarn coloured with her menstrual blood and incorporating anti-women messages knitted in light- sensitive invisible yarn, is a powerful and controversial statement of her feminist ideals. Casey’s use of yarn stained with her menstrual blood and public performances of knitting with yarn held in her vagina has aroused anger and viciousness, including from women. This is evident from the online trolling to which she has been subjected since beginning her so-called “vaginal knitting”, and illustrates the diversity of women’s opinions on issues of feminism. Eli Zaretsky notes (1988, p. 259) how difficult it is to define feminism and these division amongst feminists, while Delmar states: “The fragmentation of contemporary feminism bears ample witness to the impossibility of constructing modern feminism as a simple unity in the present or of arriving at a shared feminist definition of feminism” (1986, p. 9). These divisions between scholars about what feminism constitutes and even over a clear definition are reflected in the differences between knitters over whether knitting constitutes a feminist act and the use of it in pursuit of feminist activism.

Many attributes of feminism are a question of its time – for the first wave feminists seeking voting rights for women and for the so-called second wave feminists of the 1970s its attributes and objectives would be very different. Contemporaneously, third wave feminists, born into a society in which the gains won by those of my generation were supposedly established, believe that women can and do have the right to define what it means to be a woman – and if that includes actions seen as sexist and spurned by second wavers, so be it. In her critique of girlie culture Laura Portwood-Stacer has little sympathy for the argument that by simply making a choice – knitting, for example – a woman makes an action feminist. She describes those making such an argument thus: “The women who have the luxury of taking the achievements of second 387

wave feminists for granted” (2007, p. 8). Such presumption can be illustrated with reference to the angering of second wave feminists in 2002 by Australian journalist Virginia Haussegger, discussed in the artefact. Writing in The Age about discovering she had left it too late to get pregnant, she criticised “our purple-clad, feminist mothers” who encouraged women in the '70s and '80s to reach for the sky, yet had not “thought to tell us the truth about the biological clock” (2002). Portwood-Stacer says such women “don’t seem to realise that it was the very activism that they see as ‘anti-feminine’ and ‘anti-joy’ that affected those gains they now feel are their ‘birthright’” (2007, p. 8). Portwood-Stacer makes a crucial point when she writes: “Saying that something is subversive does not make it so” (2007, p.2). To return to the question posed at the beginning of this section, there is much knitting in the artefact that is feminist, from artist Kate Just’s painstakingly knitted portraits of her feminist artist heroes in her Feminist Fan series to Lizzy Emery’s yarn bombed vaginas. But it is not the knitting itself that makes it so; rather it is the intentions, sentiment and politics of the knitter.

Feminism, as noted, is not only about equal rights and economic independence for women but about valuing women’s experience. Smith writes: “The standpoint of a woman, which locates us in the particularities of our experience, is profoundly contradictory to objectified forms of knowledge” (1990, p. 61). It is my recording of the particularities of Australian knitters’ experience which enables the creation of new knowledge in the form of the artefact and on which I reflect in this exegesis. Many of the knitters interviewed, whether formally studying knitting in the context of a textiles course, using it in their artwork, stepping onto the political stage or simply pursuing it as a domestic hobby, have experience of it being demeaned and derided – and, by default, themselves as women making choices. Feminists stand up to this derision and say clearly: knitting has a value. This is true of much of so-called ‘women’s work’, and it was the efforts of women artists to repudiate this that led to the formation of the Women’s Arts Movement in the 1970s. “Feminists undertook a re-evaluation of amateur (usually domestic and unpaid) crafts historically practised by women … Feminists approached these crafts with an acute ambivalence, seeing them as ‘trivialised and degraded categories of “women’s work” outside the fine arts’, but also as an arena for self-expression in the face of oppression,” writes Adamson (2010, p. 491) of the work of 1970s and 1980s feminists. This artefact is the statement of my own belief that the knitting of Australian women has value, that it is not trivial and that, whether in the construction of an overt political protest or simply a form of personal self-expression, it is a reflection of the wider social and political context. The scholarly discussions in this exegesis reflect upon and complement this.

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It is worth noting here that for some knitters their craft has literal value. This has been facilitated by the Internet, in particular the knitters’ social network Ravelry and the online craft marketplace Etsy. They have made it possible for knitters in relatively isolated countries such as Australia to make a living – or at least a partial living – from the sale of their designs without reliance on the publishing industry, and from selling their ready-made products. For some, including interviewee Jac Fink, a Sydney-based extreme knitter, knitting is a full-time business, although she struggles to break even. For others interviewees, such as designer Meg Gadsbey and emerging designer Rhiannon Owens, Ravelry offers the possibility of showcasing designs to a global network of potential buyers, albeit coloured by their expectations of low prices and free designs. A Hart Business Research survey of 12,475 American knitters found that in 2012 knitters typically spent $50 a year on patterns. It calculated “the total enthusiast market for knitting and crochet patterns was about $31 million in 2012” (Hart Business Research 2014).

Self-described “Global creative marketplace” Etsy.com had 1.9 million active sellers and 33.4 million active buyers at 31 December, 2017 with 2017 gross profit at $US 290.2 million and net income $US 81.8 million (Etsy 2018). Michele Krugh, who writes of the difficulty of making a living from Etsy, states (2014, p. 281):

Since the time of the Arts and Crafts movement of the late nineteenth century, craft production and consumption has been politicized. Craft’s focus on hand making has been used to contrast intentional, individual labour with the division of labour involved in industrial mass production.

Etsy is a participant in this discourse, she writes, but notes: “The contemporary emphasis on individualism— on the unique personality of the maker and their self-brand—can limit craft’s political effectiveness” (2014, p. 296). Given Feminist Standpoint Theory’s grounding in Marxist theory, it is an apposite choice of theoretical prism for analysis of this gendered handcraft activity. Unsurprisingly, given this gender bias of handcraft pursuits, 87 per cent of Etsy sellers are women, a statistic it describes as “empowering women around the globe” (Etsy 2018). While these artisan women are extending themselves beyond self-expression and using the Internet to facilitate sales of their handmade products, any contention of empowerment must be interpreted in the light of the difficulties of making a living from craft and the traditional undervaluing of craft. The role of knitting in both the formal economy and its participation in the informal economy, including the political effectiveness of that, is not the focus of this project, but does offer offers fertile ground for further research. 389

Is Knitting a Feminist Act? While critiques of second wave feminism abound, third wave feminists do not escape unscathed; on the contrary, some scholars believe the individualistic, do-it-yourself nature of contemporary feminism has diluted its power to effect change. Susan Archer Mann and Douglas Huffman write: “To us, DIY feminism is politically regressive and presents a major fault line between the second and the third wave. Indeed, it reverses the second wave’s notion that the personal is political as the political becomes totally personal” (2005, p. 74). Feminism, Mann and Huffman argue, must “be transformative of both the individual and society” (2005, p. 75). Such an argument, with which I identify, negates the possibility that the practice of knitting itself could be intrinsically considered a feminist act. An outcome designed to draw attention to and/or advance the situation of women is required from the picking up of the needles and creation the network of loops; the process of making is alone not sufficient. My initial response to this question was “no”; on deeper consideration it remains so. This is not a question which it would have occurred to me to ask or even to contemplate before embarking on this project. But, in an example of practice leading this research, it arose in the course of an interview with young Melbourne knitter Sophia Cai, and so I have touched on it in my artefact and reflect on it in more depth in this exegesis.

Some interviewees, such as Judith Mitchell, mentioned above, would also answer the question as to whether knitting is a feminist act in the negative, but do not themselves identify as feminists. Mitchell saw no contradiction between feminism and her love of making dolls clothes and playing with her dolls – a position some may interpret as in keeping with third wave feminism, given that she is doing what she wants without heed to the stereotypes of appropriate behaviour for an adult woman. However, Mitchell did not even consider this an appropriate discussion to be had in the context of feminism. She said: “Isn’t it all about what you love? Why would feminism become an issue if you are just basically doing something you love?” This response was surprising to me as a second wave feminist, particularly given that it is feminism, notably the efforts of second wave feminists at the time when Mitchell was a university student, which has made it possible for women such as her to have the freedom to be educated, lead independent lives and to do what they love. But her question about the nature of women’s freedoms is important within the context of this exegesis: Is a contemporary woman’s freedom and independence to choose to play with dolls, to choose to knit, of itself a feminist act, as contended by interviewees such as Cai? While a second wave feminist such as myself would 390

likely respond in the negative, Lynne Vallone (1999, p.198) argues that it is just such an attitude that’s the problem:

The apparent scarcity of feminisms in the younger generation may partially result from the older generation’s inability to accept newer (younger) forms of feminism that seem less ‘personal as political’ and just more personal, that is, individual and anti- institutional. Older feminists look at the younger generation and find little they recognize as feminist.

Nonetheless there is willing acknowledgement from some of the other knitters interviewed, such as artist Kate Just, that they are feminists, creating work which they identify as feminist, which conveys feminist messages. The women using knitting for feminist and political purposes referred me to others who were doing so and were very happy to talk about it, to the point where I had more interviewee recommendations than I needed – a fortunate position for a researcher. Kate Just’s series Feminist Fan, begun in 2015 and completed in October 2017, comprises knitted reproductions of portraits of her feminist artist heroes. The project itself is feminist, but so too, the act of knitting which Just uses as an art medium. Knitting is not simply a tool for creating the project, but one traditionally associated with the oppression of women in a domestic context, as discussed previously. I agree with Beth Ann Pentney when she writes: “Knitting can be used for feminist goals because it is grounded in a gendered cultural practice that can readily be politicized for different purposes by different groups and individuals” (2008, p. 2). This is a view of which I became more convinced as the artefact research progressed and I saw the wide range of political uses to which knitting is being put, most of them involving some element of contradiction or subverting of the traditional, stereotypical view of knitting as a women’s domestic hobby.

This is not a point of view which excludes the scepticism of scholars such as Kelly who declares herself: “More sceptical about the possibilities for knitting as a feminist practice in everyday life…I find that although knitting practices may not be explicitly feminist, they can still contribute to larger feminist projects” (2014, p. 143). For some artists who use knitting, such as my interviewees printmaker and emerging Sydney artist Kate Riley and internationally renowned Adelaide-based artist Fiona Hall, it is a tool for projects which are not specifically feminist in nature. But they have nonetheless chosen a medium with a gendered history. Just, taught to knit by her mother in 2000 after the death of her brother, has said of it: “In that moment, I understood knitting to be a powerful personal, political, poetic and narrative tool” (c. 2015). For 391

her it is a tool in the service of feminism not simply feminist in and of its own nature. Knitting is not a randomly chosen tool, but one which, as Pentney has written (2008, p.2), can paradoxically be shown to derive its power from that gendered history and from subverting stereotypes.

But for some young knitters such as Melburnian Sophia Cai, the very act of knitting is a statement about being a young feminist, a woman making her own choices, rather than a means to a message. Cai, a dolls’ clothes maker and collector of cute toys, said in an interview:

I have always liked cute things in my life and I have never thought that made me any less of a feminist. I think the thing about feminism is, it is not about defining people more one way or the other as in, some people may feel like if you want to be a housewife you are not really a feminist – a view perhaps perpetuated when feminism first started. Now we have moved into this general view that as a woman you can do anything and feminism is not here to tell you what you should do. I can feel very free to do things like knit and crochet and not feel like I have to defend my choices (Cai 2016, 10 July).

That Cai feels such freedom is on the one hand rewarding to those of us who agitated for change to bring freedoms to women. However, the freedom to “be a housewife”, to star in pornography designed for women, to change one’s name after marriage, are not the kinds of freedoms we second wave feminists had in mind when we marched with our placards linking our cause with other movements for social change. Contemplating life ‘Beyond post-feminism’, Angela McRobbie writes of a kind of turning back of the clock, the post-modern ironic looking uncomfortably like the 1970s sexist to we second wavers. “Feminism is associated with the past and with old and unglamorous women” (McRobbie 2011, p. 180); irrelevant and no longer needed, its time has passed. Western women “can dress as they please, enjoy pornography if that is their ‘choice’ and fall drunkenly out of taxis without repercussions” (2011, p. 182). Ours was a feminism “blind to how it appeared to many in the younger generation as an austere and disciplinary feminism”, Mann and Huffman contend, (2005, p. 87); one which drove younger women to a more embracing and inclusive way of living. It is, therefore, more keeping with the broader, more individualistic view of those third wave feminists.

Attitudes such as Sophia Cai’s have been reinforced by the philosophy of prominent American knitting writer and designer Debbie Stoller, author of Stitch and bitch: the knitters handbook, in which she wrote of the disdain of friends when she became a passionate knitter after being reintroduced to it in her 20s by her Dutch grandmother. Their view that this was a “frivolous and 392

time wasting” female activity “made me rethink my original feminist position” (Stoller 2003, p. 7). She realised that the bad image of knitting could be attributed to its gendered associations.

And that’s when it dawned on me: All those people who looked down on knitting – and housework, and housewives – were not being feminist at all. In fact, they were being anti-feminist, since they seemed to think that only those things that men did, or had done, were worthwhile (2003, p. 7).

This revelation led Stoller to resolve to “take back the knit … do everything in my power to raise knitting’s visibility and value in the culture” (2003, p. 9). Certainly her aim to increase its visibility appears fulfilled, given the number of knitting groups in public places such as bars and cafes, the global popularity of worldwide Knit in Public Day and the proliferation of knitters in parks, on public transport, in waiting rooms and queues. Sydney interviewee Mary-Helen Ward planned her post-retirement European trip to provide the maximum opportunities for knitting on trains, in stark contrast to her childhood in New Zealand where knitting was a behind doors-only activity. However, as Elizabeth Groeneveld (2010, p. 272) writes: “The continual presentation of ‘new’ knitting as ‘not your grandma’s’ betrays a kind of ignorance about older generations of women and the ways in which crafting may have served a similar purpose in their lives.” The new public profile notwithstanding, long-time knitters and feminists – and I count Mary-Helen and myself among their number – would argue that the supposed reclaiming of knitting by Stoller and her ilk is not only misleading, but demeaning because in a sense she is rewriting and erasing us from history. We have continuously plied the craft for more than 50 years as have many of my interviewees, such as Barbara Schembri, a retired accountant who financed her university studies by commission knitting when she was one of only a few women in her accounting classes. We may not have done it in the pub, but handknitting’s history is continuous. Stoller refers to herself and those of her generation as reclaiming “lost domestic arts” (2003, p. 11). I argue that while Stoller and others of her generation may now be discovering knitting and other crafts for themselves, they were never lost.

The Medium is Not the Message As discussed earlier, scholars are turning their attention to knitting, including explorations of whether knitting is a feminist act. This project participates in this discourse. Previously, there was a paucity of scholarly research on this subject and it is still extremely limited. The artefact accompanying this exegesis records and analyses the views of knitters across Australia and the exegesis reflects upon the significant issues raised by those discussions. Together they comprise 393

part of this creation of significant new knowledge around a topic previously seen as unworthy of scholarly attention. “Reaching beyond the stereotype, knitting offers a resource well suited to the contemporary academic emphasis on cross disciplinary and cross cultural studies”(Strawn 2012, p. 4). This attention is unsurprising, given the resurgence of knitting in the past three decades and in particular since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, with increasing uptake by young knitters. Leading US knitting designer Nicky Epstein has said: “It really started with 9/11, that whole time in the early 2000s. I have friends who are psychiatrists, and they recommended knitting for therapeutic purposes. It’s become chic now to be able to knit” (Epstein, 2014). In particular, there was a proliferation of knitting simple, comforting garments such as scarves and homewares, for example cushions and throw rugs, evidently a response to the emphasis on cocooning and making a safe place at home following the terrorist attacks. “Knitting, as a source of meaning and attentiveness in everyday life…is consonant with social trends towards ‘cocooning’, downscaling, or slow living, which media reportage often links with a post-9/11 context” (Parkins, 2004, p. 436). Such projects are particularly popular with young, relatively inexperienced knitters such as Cai, who was knitting a throw rug in thick yarn on extremely large needles at the time of my interview.

While a number of the women members of knitting groups may identify as feminists, the diversity of views on this could be expected to reflect the findings of Kelly, discussed above. More than 20 years’ membership of the Melbourne-based Handknitters Guild, which has monthly sit and knit get-togethers, as well as my experience of knitting groups in New Zealand, suggest they attract a wide variety of members, varied in age, knitting experience, political allegiance, socio-economic level and, to a lesser extent, gender. Kelly conducted ethnographic research in stitch ‘n bitch knitters’ groups and online communities of knitters, as well as interviews with individual knitters, and concluded: “Ultimately, while knitting can be part of a feminist project, the contested meanings of knitting practices suggest limited and context- specific possibilities for knitting as a feminist project” (2014, p. 143). She also found: “Only a few of the feminists I interviewed saw any connection between their own feminist identity and their knitting. Even those who saw a connection between knitting and feminism were not purposefully engaging in knitting as a feminist practice; most of my participants were feminists who knit, not feminist knitters” (2014, p. 143). These research conclusions are unsurprising. To put this in a contemporary context, the knitting of tens of thousands of pussyhats in the lead-up to and following the January 2017 women’s marches against the inauguration of President Donald Trump could be seen as a feminist act, particularly in the light of Trump’s comments about grabbing women by “the pussy” (Jacobs, Siddiqui & Bixby 2016). Some museums such as 394

London’s Victoria and Albert Museum are, despite complaints, collecting the pussyhats as embodying crafitivist social protest (Russell 2017). However, it is likely not all of those who knitted and wore them would identify as feminist.

An observer may perceive a choice as feminist, yet, as previously discussed in relation to Annette Fitton and as argued by Delmar (1986, p.13), it may not be not viewed in that light by the person making that choice. Thus, I agree with Kelly’s comments that “knitting… can fall into the trap of the uncritical use of the ‘choice’ discourse that suggests that any choice a woman makes might be feminist without analysis of the ways in which it may (or may not) contribute to the feminist project of achieving gender equality” (2014, p. 143). I also agree with Pentney (2008, p. 12), that: “Clearly not all acts of knitting can or should be considered feminist in intent”. She warns of “the limitations of an overly optimistic conception of feminist and knitting practices” that picking up knitting needles and yarn alone does not constitute a feminist choice. The point is made forcefully by Portwood-Stacer, with her critique of “empty feminism” (2007, p. 2). She writes: “Declaring personal activities to be political is as old as feminism itself, but there is a certain resonance for this trend at a time when ‘post-Third Wave’ theorists have undertaken a recuperation of all things feminine” (2007, p. 2). Kelly has warned (2014, p. 143) that knitting is a prime candidate for inclusion in this ‘choice’ discourse – that is, a woman chose it so it’s feminist. Clearly, its domestic and gender-specific connotations offer fertile ground for those engaging in public actions – art projects, for example – aimed at rejecting such connotations. But as Kelly points out (2014, p. 143) it is not the choice alone which contributes to the goal of equality of gender, but the purposes to which that choice is put. For example, a knitting project such as artist Casey Jenkins’ baby blanket, created for the Midsumma Festival, is undoubtedly both a feminist and a political statement; knitting baby booties on the tram, although increasing knitting’s visibility, is not necessarily so.

Criticising young women who see themselves as feminists making a feminist statement by picking up their knitting needles will do nothing to promote either feminism or knitting. Many older knitters have faced considerable derision over the decades for their choice of craft, so there would be a certain irony in their criticising younger knitters for the interpretation they place on their decision to knit. Acceptance of such an approach necessitates a more inclusive attitude – the kind of feminism advocated by Pentney (2008, pp. 1-2) who writes of “the advantage of casting a wider net over what ‘counts’ as feminism”. She argues that “contemporary third-way feminism should be imagined as a practice… A continuum model places different feminist knitting practices along the horizon that does not engender a 395

hierarchical valuing of such practices” (2008, p. 2). Whilst not advocating overt criticism of young, third-wave knitters, I believe it is important to be aware of the hollowness of such calls for an arms-wide-open approach.

Failing to value such practices on any kind of hierarchy runs the risk of, by default, endorsing a do-nothing approach. Portwood-Stacer contends: “Apart from these portrayals of cultural feminism as a kind of false consciousness, there is also the danger that woman-identification will be taken as a sufficient stand-in for activism that materially benefits women” (2007, p. 6). Data on the remaining gaps in gender equality bear out this argument. Gender equality data on the Australian Human Rights Commission website shows: “The national gender ‘pay gap’ is 18.2 per cent and it has remained stuck between 15 per cent and 18 per cent for the past two decades ….In 2013, Australia was ranked 24th on a global index measuring gender equality, slipping from a high point of 15th in 2006” (Australian Human Rights Commission 2017). Closing this gap may be enhanced by the kind of consciousness-raising feminist knitting activism undertaken by artist Casey Jenkins. It is, however, impossible to see simply taking up knitting achieving gains for women. Feminism is, as Smith points out, “a commitment to women” (1990, pp. 4-5). As an ardent feminist who has been active in advocating for change, I believe this need for improved gender equity in Australia must be emphasised to young women, and note that activism is essential to achieving improvement. Portwood-Stacer writes: “Feminists realize that empowerment is not as simple as throwing off the chains of patriarchy and becoming a perfectly free being” (2007, p. 9). A decade has passed since she wrote that. But it is clear that the sentiment is still relevant. Gender equity remains an elusive goal – it’s not possible to simply knit it into being. In short: Knitting is an excellent medium for conveying a message; knitting is not the message. 396

Section 2 Methodology

S 2.1 Practice-Led Research Practice Led Research (PLR) provides the overarching methodology for this artefact and exegesis project, enabling the two elements to reveal their complementarity, as well as bringing creativity into scholarship. This methodology bridges the gap between theory and practice with the exegesis incorporating my reflections on the process of creating my artefact, an interview-based non-fiction book for commercial publication with themed chapters which are in effect, pieces of long-form journalism. While Nigel Krauth points out (2011, p. 1) that in the early years of the creative writing doctorate in Australia “the expectation was that an exegesis should be a sort of critical journal, a reflective account of processes undertaken while creating the accompanying work, having a close umbilical relationship to it”, this exegesis goes beyond reflection alone. While I have recorded my reflections on the research process and, as discussed below, they have provided some important directions for the artefact, the exegesis also provides, through the prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory, a theoretical structure for the artefact and elucidates the dynamic relationships between the two components of this research project.

These relationships between the artefact and exegesis became increasingly apparent as this research project progressed. This complementarity became evident early by undertaking scholarly reading simultaneously with the artefact research, rather than waiting to commence the exegesis when the artefact was completed. Each element of this project informed the other and was richer for that in a way which would not have occurred had they not been worked on together. Working simultaneously on the two enabled reflection upon the issues arising from this practice and exploration of these in the context of FST through research and scholarship. As Arnold writes (2012, p. 165): “In PLR, a creative practice leads to and relates closely to the exegesis. The practice explores the practicum and in reflecting upon it enables issues to come forward that lead to an intellectual and scholarly journey that continues it rather than validating it for the academy.” So this practice-led methodology brings knowledge to the Academy through an artefact that is not subsidiary to the exegesis but actually leads the research, yet at the same time draws on the readings undertaken for the exegesis and is enriched by the knowledge and insights derived from the process of its creation. As previously noted, this artefact has arisen not only from my own knowledge of knitting and Australian craft practice, but from my more than 40 years of journalistic practice and the research, interviewing and writing skills that brings. By 397

simultaneously exercising these, reflecting on this practice and developing a theoretical framework within this exegesis, they are not separate from my scholarly research but offer a complementary qualitative methodology resulting in the creation of knowledge.

PLR is a methodology more common in fields such as science and medicine, where it is quantitative, but in recent decades it has been applied to a broader range of fields of study and research practice. Krauth (2011, p. 13) points out that in the 25 years since Edward Cowie established the first creative writing doctorate at the University of Wollongong in 1985, the exegesis became “a site for radical experimentation”. Here it is the research practice – journalistic practice – which drives the process: “Practice-led strategies for research place creative practice and its outcomes at the centre of the process … At the heart of the field research process, is the drive to base claims and actions upon evidence from the real world” (Candy et al. 2006, p. 210) This is a vibrant and evolving form, still relatively new, which has emerged to enrich the wide range of activities developed within academia, thus broadening and deepening concepts of knowledge.

Real-world, qualitative research – in this case interviews with dozens of knitters across Australia – provides the raw material for the artefact. When analysed in the context of the relevant literature and other research including media coverage, social media and knitting publications, it is a rich source of knowledge brought to the Academy through this doctorate and to a wider audience through commercial publication of the artefact. Undertaking a significant number of interviews – 87 in total – rather than simply providing a handful of case studies, has enabled comparative analysis and revealed the existence and emergence of trends and commonalities of experience. Makela describes the artefact (2007, p. 158) as “a method of collecting and preserving information and understanding. Thus the process of making and its products are strongly connected with the source of knowledge. In this sense we are facing the idea of knowing through making.” This may be compared to the practice of knitting itself; the knowing, including the learned behaviour handed down through generations and, more recently, commonly learned from YouTube, and the learning of project-specific new stitches and patterns and the sharing of this knowledge are as important for many knitters as the making and creation of product. “The making and the products of making are seen as an essential part of research: they can be conceived both as answers to particular research questions and as artistic or designerly argumentation” (Makela, 2005, p. 1). As well, for many knitters the process of making is as important, or even more so than the end product, as discussed in the artefact chapter about 398

motivations for knitting; a considerable body of research now provides evidence for the health and mental well-being benefits of knitting.

While Maarit Makela, a design scholar, refers in particular to the products of art or design practice and her comments can therefore be related directly to the craft of knitting, this analysis can equally be applied to a written artefact. As Arnold (2012, p. 11) points out:

Illuminating and articulating practice as knowledge is a challenge in an academic environment that has not always seen practice as knowledge and often still struggles to do so ...The creative practitioner brings to the academy new dimensions of what knowledge itself consists of, and how this contributes to learning.

Therefore the focus in my interviews with knitters has been more about their experience of knitting, including its purposes, and their motivations and its role in their lives than what they knit. From these conversations valuable insights about the nature of Australian society, with a particular focus on gender and politics, have been derived. As Smith wrote of her application of FST: “Speaking for themselves and from their experience has been a fundamental commitment of the women’s movement, and it remains foundational to the method of enquiry I have been trying to develop for sociology” (1997, p. 396). In this research the women are speaking for themselves and their experience is, as Smith wanted for her own research “a place to start” (1997, p. 396). The theory is “a method of developing investigations of the social that are anchored in, although not confined by, people’s everyday working knowledge of the doing of their lives” (Smith 1997, p. 396). Listening to them, recording and analysing their doing, their lived experience, reveals the undervalued and underexplored knowledge held by these women and in doing so casts new light on Australian society.

Questions about the very nature of knowledge are raised by the PLR form, argue Jen Webb and Donna Brien (2008, p.2). Without here revisiting what they note have been lengthy epistemological debates stretching back to the Ancients, it is useful to mention their discussion of the generation of knowledge by the creative arts:

History is filled with knowledge that has emerged out of creative practice. For the most part, however, that knowledge is gleaned subsequent to the work and is attributed not to the artist, but to those more committed to the theological interpretive frameworks: the critics, the 399

‘experts’ in analysis, those formally authorised to present an interpretation (Webb & Brien 2008, p. 2).

They contend that there is an alternative: “Knowledge and interpretation can be located in and attributed directly to the art/artist. However, this relies on an acceptance of a less theological approach to knowledge; less reliance on a clear statement from an authority; and less need to follow a line of thought that leads only forward” (Webb & Brien 2008, p. 2). I would argue that not only is the artist – or in this case, the writer, myself – the locus of knowledge and the interpreter of it, but that knowledge is located within the subjects of the research, in this case the knitters. Through the interviews with them and subsequent analysis of these, their knowledge is illuminated. What’s more, many of these self-effacing interviewees would not have considered themselves repositories of information worthy of recording as significant in Australian history or as providing valuable insights into the workings of Australian society. 400

S2.2 The Research Project: This project was conceived as a social history of knitting in Australia. Since knitting was brought to Australia by early European settlers, attitudes towards this craft, its purposes and the social standing of knitters have been embedded in social, political and cultural developments within the mainstream society. Yet there had been little research to record this. Strawn’s observations (2012, p. 1) in relation to the US apply equally to Australia: “Over time knitting has been seen as mundane, so ubiquitous and commonplace that it fades into the social, cultural, and historical background.” I intended this history to include a survey of some knitted artefacts such as the wartime knitting in the Australian War Memorial, and to explore knitting within this context, illuminating how a craft which is essentially “two sticks and a string”, often dismissed as a women’s hobby, is not only a reflection of Australia’s unfolding social history but part of it.

This was a project motivated by my identification of a gap in both research and knowledge about this topic in Australia, one which became evident while undertaking my undergraduate Bachelor of Arts (Textile Design) as a mature age student at RMIT University in the late 1990s. “Indeed information available for research about knitting often must be teased from widely scattered collections of extant knitted products, tools and yarn, pattern books, trade journals, and other publications” (Strawn 2012, p. 1). Social histories of knitting were available for a number of other countries including Rutt’s landmark (but now dated) 1987 A history of hand knitting, Macdonald’s social history of American knitting (1988) and Nicholson’s more recent New Zealand version (2013), which also encompasses spinning. The very existence of these books, Nicholson’s in particular, was an illustration of the long-standing gendered attitudes towards the “domestic” craft of knitting and the perception that it was an inappropriate topic for scholarship. Whilst the status of Rutt’s publication was undoubtedly enhanced by the fact that he was not only a man but that he was the Bishop of Leicester, Nicholson was the focus of controversy and derision after being awarded a 1993 New Zealand Suffrage Centennial Year Trust Whakato Wahine research grant. While she saw the grant as a recognition of “the role of knitting in the history of New Zealand women” (2013, p. 3), she notes (2013, p. 2) in her introduction, ‘The status of knitting’: “The project was greatly distinguished by receiving a full sneer by the high-members of the admirably argumentative Ralston Group on TV3, who felt that the Suffrage money should have gone into something really important and useful such as the great ocean of sports funding.” Despite this derision her book won New Zealand’s leading book award: Montana Book Awards Medal for Non-Fiction 1999. No such book existed for Australia and I envisaged filling that gap. While I contemplated doing so immediately after completing my 401

undergraduate degree the timing was not right for me; this PhD project provided both the opportunity and the framework.

However, it quickly became evident that the developments in knitting which most interested me and which I regarded as most significant were those which had occurred within my adult life time. Specifically, this was Australia’s part in the so-called resurgence of knitting internationally (although some interviewees would insist that it never went away) from the mid-1980s, but in particular after the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. It was a time of cocooning, a return to the home, to the known, to the comfort of crafts as an antidote to fear and to the rise of alienating new technologies (Hamer 2003, p. 1). Knitting was “the new yoga” and embraced by celebrities from movie star Julia Roberts to singer Madonna, actor Sarah Jessica Parker and even, supposedly (although this seems to relate to a single sighting and is unconfirmed), actor Russell Crowe. The significance of this went far beyond mere celebrity endorsement for the craft. As Parkins wrote at that time (2004, p. 426):

… the significations of celebrity knitting are a means through which the acceleration and temporal complexity of everyday life are negotiated. The knitting subject – whether celebrity or ordinary – articulates the desire for a slower, more balanced life. Knitting can be seen as a reaction against the speed and dislocation of global post-modernity.

So it was not only the activity of knitting itself, the who was making what and when, which were of potential research interest; knitting, it became clear to me, offered a prism through which to view and analyse society. As I began my interviews it became increasingly evident that here was a rich source of new knowledge about gender and gender attitudes, political activism, the significance of craft both as a reflection and an influencer of our society and the impact of the Internet and social media on our lives. So the title of this project was changed from A social history of knitting to Knitting in Australia to more accurately reflect the changed emphasis. This is not a book about knitting for knitters. This is a book about society, with a particular focus on Australia, hopefully to be embraced by a readership beyond knitting and craft circles. The artefact’s new title, Disruptive knitting: how knitters are changing the world reflects that. Utilising PLR means that not only am I creating a book for the lay reader, but that this exegesis contributes significant new knowledge in the light of these contemporary developments and of my identification of a gap in the scholarly literature.

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The Burden of Objectivity I came to this project as a former senior journalist, turned journalism educator. Throughout my journalism training and years of newsroom experience elimination of the self – personal opinion, conflicts of interest – from my writing had been emphasised. In this more recent role, however, I convene Swinburne University’s Ethics for Journalists unit in which journalism students are encouraged to engage with the merits issues such as impartiality and bias. Challenging the traditional view that journalists must remain at arm’s length is not new. In 1984 Stanford University teacher Theodore J Glasser called for the liberation of journalism from “the burden of objectivity” (1984, p. 16) saying: “Objectivity in journalism effectively erodes the very foundation on which rests a responsible press” (1984, p. 13). He called recognition of this overdue.

More than three decades on, the lines between impartial news reporting and opinion are increasingly blurred on numerous online news sites and blogs. It appears that the traditional view is giving way to the more realistic acknowledgement that journalists’ opinions inevitably, and sometimes unconsciously, colour their work, from the story angle, choice of interviewee and questions asked to the choice of quotations included. In 2014 Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism scholar Kellie Riordan (2014, p. 4) noted that the new kind of journalism being forged for the web enabled those “third form” publishers to take “the most relevant editorial standards of the past, while introducing new ways to establish credibility”. Recommended priorities included greater transparency along with “analysis that is facts-driven rather than opinionative” (Riordan 2014, p. 4). The journalist and non-fiction writer is a social and cultural product, drawing on a lifetime of experience and specific circumstances in the creation of work, even when doing so in the guise of the dispassionate observer. “Sociologists routinely turn their gaze to the lives and times of others; they are less prone to see themselves as social and cultural products, producing social and cultural products” (Richardson 1997, p. 1). Yet journalism has traditionally seen this is a handicap to be overcome in the production of unbiased reports: “The principles of objectivism seem to be satisfied by impartial observation of events that is carried out at a distance, whereas they seem to be denied by the role of a participant in the events,” writes Wojciech Furman (2012, p.109).

Scholars such as Furman are developing new approaches to the principles of objectivism. “We are going to try and prove that the roles of an observer and of a participant are both crucial. They are complementary even though there is some tension between them” (2012, p. 109). I welcome this new approach. In undertaking this project, my personal experience with the topic, 403

as discussed above, had the potential to impose a burden – the burden of objectivity. To have attempted to undertake this project in an objective and impartial fashion, would not only have been difficult verging on impossible, I believe it would have been dishonest. I embrace this acknowledgement and the views of scholars such as Glasser and Furman that declaring a participant role as well as that of the observer and analyst is not only acceptable but to be encouraged. In this interview-based project I, a long-time knitter and textile designer, was both observer and participant; Furman’s observation of tension despite complementarity would be borne out, as I strove to record the interviewees’ views without imposing my own and without asking questions derived from my personal views which would then colour and direct their answers.

Both the autoethnographic research method, discussed below, and the questioning of the conventions of the objective journalist challenge traditional research models. The traditional journalistic model holds that the writer’s own experiences and opinions must not colour his or her writing if this ethic is to be upheld – anathema to the autoethnographic approach, which puts the writer at the heart of the project. “We are not scientists seeking laws that govern our behavior; we are storytellers seeking meanings that help us cope with our circumstances” (Bochner 2001, p. 154). So, too, practice-led research itself:

One of the great strengths of PL/BR is that it exists at all. It was devised because traditional methodologies were not appropriate for the creation of an artifact. PL/BR was invented to provide a methodology that would be in concert with the creative process. To some extent, PL/BR is for many creative research projects not just the most appropriate methodology, it is the only one (Winter & Brabazon 2010, p. 7).

They applaud the kind of interactions with the researcher which were possible – in fact central – in the execution of this project. Interactions with the knitters created a two-way street in which I kept them updated on its progress through talks and newsletter items while they contributed by providing interviews, anecdotes and references and suggesting other interviewees.

The method allows a unique interaction between researcher and process, researcher and artifact, researcher and herself, that can lead to results that meet high academic standards, contribute unique original knowledge, and produce an exegesis and artifact that can be easily, and widely, disseminated (Winter & Brabazon 2010, p. 12).

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The knitters themselves, greatly assisted by knitters’ social media groups, were responsible for the richness and diversity of the interviews, their contacts providing Australia-wide case studies and their enthusiasm for the project’s very existence and for being included in it not only encouraging but validation of this as a topic for scholarship.

This process of creating the artefact enriched my teaching of journalism through the exercise of journalistic practice – writing, analysing, interview techniques – and through the direct relationship between this research and the journalism curricula. For example, I teach media law, including copyright, to young people for whom illegal downloading is the norm. Some see this as theft, yet are able to rationalise it; but they still expect protection for their own copyright as journalists and struggle with the notion that in this digital age of global communications, all work is subject to the terrestrial laws of the country of download. Similarly, global social networking by knitters and the posting of free designs has undermined traditional copyright protections, with many knitters now reluctant to pay for designs. This reduces financial reward for publishers and professional designers, with a significant reduction in the number of published knitting pattern books in recent years. As US designer Donna Druchunas, who has published 11 knitting books, reveals to her readers, most designers “juggle a lot of different projects to pay the bills” (2016).

The Interviews With historical research, reading from the now-extensive range of published books about knitting, journal articles and media cuttings and recording of my reflections continuing simultaneously, interviews for this project were conducted between August, 2015, and April 2018. I interviewed 87 people, mostly knitters but also others relevant to the topic including a psychologist, museum and art gallery curators, a knitting store owner, artists, designers and art and craft critics and commentators. In total 65 of the interviewees were knitters and 19 were not, although these lines are somewhat blurred – some of those counted as knitters were also artists, some of those counted in other roles such as the knitting store owner were also knitters. Sixty-nine interviewees were women, 17 were men and one transgender interviewee did not identify as male or female. All states and territories were represented, with interviews conducted face-to-face in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Wellington, New Zealand. Interviews with participants from Western Australia, Tasmania, Queensland, the Northern Territory, the ACT and overseas were conducted face-to-face in other states or by telephone. I was concerned telephone interviewing would be a disadvantage for these interviewees, but found that both their frankness and their enthusiasm for the project, combined with my 405

extensive journalistic interviewing experience meant that this was not the case. I owe much to interviewees who were prepared to share deeply personal stories, some of which they had never previously discussed. The interviewee breakdown was as follows:

Victoria 39 New South Wales 19 Queensland 8 Western Australia 5 ACT 4 South Australia 4 Tasmania 3 Northern Territory 1 Overseas 4

All interviews were recorded by my digital recorder with the interviewees’ permission and also recorded manually via my shorthand notes. Each interview was written up soon afterwards in story form – that is, not as an interview transcript but as my, the journalist’s, story about them and their experiences. The stories included not only direct quotes and reported speech from the interview, but own observations and were sometimes supported by extra research. This project is not oral history but long-form journalism – the interviewees were not telling their stories, I was telling their stories based on my interviews with them.

In his discussion of the methodology of journalism, Stephen Lamble (2004, p. 92) noted: “The over-riding aim of the discipline is to seek answers to questions as an aid to finding and telling the truth in fair, accurate, balanced and ethical ways”. Truth-telling was my aim in the creation of this artefact, albeit the truth as perceived by the interviewee. Context for this was provided by the detailed research, a key tool in the journalist’s toolbox, I undertook before embarking on this project. This included reading and analysing commercial publications such as books and magazines about knitting, art and feminism, scholarly books and articles, newspapers and magazines and online publications including websites and blogs. Some interviewees I knew personally, others were described to me in the course of conversation with an interviewee who recommended that I talk to them. But some I knew little about before commencing the interview. The background information, where available, along with my own knowledge of the topic and ideas generated by my scholarly reading on subjects such as yarn bombing, informed 406

my questions, the other key tool utilised in the creation of this artefact. At the heart of this questioning were the journalistic news and feature writing basics: Who, What, When, Where, Why and How. So, for example: Who is this person? Where do they live and work and knit? Why do they knit, why is it important in their life? What do they knit and what impact does that knitting have/has had on this interviewee’s life? When did this person start knitting and who was the teacher? How is knitting important to them? I sought a mix of both historic and contemporary information.

This was a project which did not require high level investigative journalism tools such as analysis of documents, title searches and data analysis. With little background information available about some interviewees, conducting the interviews in a relaxed, conversational mode (including with those on the telephone) and cultivating a confiding tone and an atmosphere of trust was crucial. As a member of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, I am guided by its Journalists Code of Ethics and the values it espouses. I therefore sought to report the interviewees honestly and fairly, independently and with respect for the rights of others (MEAA, 1999). My own life experience as a knitter and its importance to me, which I was happy to confide in the interviewees where appropriate, was central here. For this reason, although it is possible that another journalist, including a journalist knitter, could achieve similar results by asking the same questions of the same population, I doubt it. I have a strong, lifelong connection with this subject, as outlined in the artefact preface, and the impact of my hand disability on my knitting life created empathy in many interviewees. This accords with the trend to transparency in journalism, as is further discussed later. As Kelly McBride & Thomas Rosenstiel noted in relation to newsgathering (2014, p. 92): “The most persuasive way to make a case for why audiences should trust you is to show your work, offer evidence to back it up and explain how you gathered it…transparency becomes a mechanism that allows the public to sort the reliable from the suspect.” So, too, my transparency about my processes and my personal involvement with the topic was appreciated by my interviewees and, in accordance with clause 4 of the MEAA Code of Ethics (MEAA, 1999), I did not allow my personal interest to undermine my “accuracy, fairness or independence”. Rather, operating in a transparent fashion enhanced the trust relationship.

In writing the interviews as pieces of journalism using my shorthand notes, in some cases additional supporting material was used – for example, media cuttings, blogs and, in the case of designer Jenny Kee, a thesis. All interviewees were given the opportunity to approve/disapprove/make changes to this write-up and while a few wanted substantial 407

changes, having had second thoughts about what they said, most wanted minimal or even no changes. These replies were obtained by email as a lasting record. I regarded this high rate of agreement as a vindication of my journalistic skills and their trust in me. I strove for accuracy, yet although verification is a key tenet of journalism, I did not attempt to verify the interviewees’ stories through traditional means, for example by interviewing third parties. “Through the discipline of verification, journalists determine the truth, accuracy, or validity of news events, establishing jurisdiction over the ability to objectively parse reality to claim a special kind of authority and status” (Hermida 2012, p. 659). I felt confident that the interviewees had been truthful with me. This was particularly so as, at the outset of each interview as part of confirming the interviewee’s informed consent, I stated that if I was told anything they did not want published, they should make that clear to me. In accordance with the Code of Ethics, I respected confidences. Also, although the interviewees had this opportunity to make deletions and changes, the fact that so few availed themselves of that in any substantial way suggested that the write ups reflected the truth as they perceived it. In his examination of developments in journalistic verification in the light of the influence of social media Hermida notes: “There are indications that some areas of journalism are edging towards a discipline of collaborative verification” (2012, p. 663). I regard the process used here as illustrative of this new approach. It represented a change in my journalistic process – one required of me by the Swinburne University ethics committee, with interviewee approval of what was to be published necessary – but I was happy with the results and confident that I had behaved ethically and with integrity. Through discussion and a process of collaborative writing, without imposing pressure, I was able to persuade some interviewees to allow me to include anecdotes and life experiences which they had originally told me only in confidence. Several interviewees sent heart-warming emails congratulating me on how I had told their story. It seemed an indication of the low esteem in which both knitting and women are held that some interviewees, believing they had nothing worthwhile to say, were surprised at how interesting the stories about them were.

“hi there, i teared up reading it, thank you!... thank you and hugs Best regards, Susan McDougall” (McDougall 2017, 16 May )

“So glad to meet you and I love what you’ve written, really, really great.” Ruth Marshall, Australian artist, New York City (Marshall 2016, 4 September)

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“Thanks for making my efforts so interesting. You certainly have excellent writing skills. My very best wishes for your continued well being. Kind regards Valerie” (Elliott 2017, 18 June)

These interviews form the substance of the artefact, a book for commercial publication which, after several possible iterations, is now titled Disruptive knitting: how knitters are changing the world. This reflects the ground-breaking purposes to which many of the knitters interviewed are putting their knitting, the overarching importance of the Internet and social media, the insights into gender and political activism provided by the knitters’ experiences and the unexpectedness of such rich and significant research findings, given the traditional deprecation of knitting and knitters.

In interpreting the interview data, I constructed the narrative as a series of themes, most of which I had in mind when I embarked on the project – knitting during and post-World War II, yarn bombing, knitting and mental health, for example. Some, such as the 5000 Poppies project, arose in the course of the project and its interviews. The choice of these themes was determined not by the criteria of news journalism, such as geographical proximity (although most interviewees were within Australia), novelty, conflict and relevance (Túñez & Guevara 2009, 1.034-1.035). Rather, they were determined by their capacity to illuminate the role of knitting and knitters in, and their influence on Australian society. Lamble (2004, p. 102) considers the methodological ties between journalism, history and law and discusses the process of not only finding out what people have done but interpreting that information – seeking the why. So the information provided by my interviewees, interesting and important as it was for its own sake, took on new meaning and context in the light of the answers of others. While some of these stories are included as separate sidebars, others are incorporated into the discussion, with many interviewees having touched on multiple topics and having therefore been included in more than one chapter. Each of the themed chapters is, in essence, a piece of long-form journalism, constructed with the use of my journalistic research and interview skills. The content is a mix of the material taken from the interviews, historical and contemporary research material and my own analysis. Interestingly and unexpectedly, I found that this was informed by the scholarly journal articles I read throughout the project.

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S 2.3 The Exegesis: As discussed above, this exegesis provides both a theoretical framework for this research project and the opportunity for reflection which has informed and enriched the artefact. This has been made possible by the emergence of the artefact and exegesis model and its successful adoption at Swinburne University of Technology. Jillian Hamilton and Luke Jaaniste (2010, p. 32), who describe the exegesis as initiating “a new form of academic writing” (2010, p. 32), see the emergence of what they call the connective model of exegesis since the formal recognition of practice-led research in the 1990s – that is, one that “adapts and integrates the context and commentary models to overtly connect the creative practice and its processes with its broader theoretical and practical contexts” (2010, p. 39). This is the process undertaken here, with the interview-based artefact placed in the broader contexts of feminism, autoethnography and Feminist Standpoint Theory, while at the same time I offer commentary on these contexts and the relationship of the research to them.

Despite these perceived advantages of the model, some creative researchers initially railed against the necessity for an exegesis – and some still do, as is evident from the discussion of journalism as research below. Deakin University PhD candidate Gaylene Perry wrote (1998) of the enforced requirement of the exegesis seeming distant from her writing processes, “an anomaly in my personal concept of creative writing”. Yet her paper considering misgivings surrounding the exegetical requirement concluded with a reflection not only on possible alternatives but on its potential power. “To deliberately place a work that calls itself critical or theoretical alongside a work that calls itself creative can produce provocative dialogues between those works, and this is a point that a creative writer working within a higher degree research model might keep in mind” (Perry 1998). This has been my experience, the journalistic work benefiting from the dialogue with the exegesis, in particular because the journalistic work is intended for commercial publication and is therefore not a scholarly book but one designed for the lay reader and to appeal to the widest possible audience. Without the exegesis, the rich lode of scholarship relating to knitting, much of it recent, given that knitting has not long been seen as a suitable subject for scholarship, would most likely have remained untapped and would not have informed both the interview process and the writing of the artefact.

The process of developing this exegetical material assisted not only in the development of arguments within the exegesis, but with analysis of the quantitative material derived from the interviews for the artefact. Jeri Kroll writes (2004, p. 8): “There is no doubting, however, that being made to articulate your practice, to place it in a theoretical context and to periodically 410

explain and defend your strategies to supervisors will alter what you accomplish. The product and exegesis usually develop side by side.” Such was my experience and while mostly the research was led by the artefact, at times this situation was reversed with viewpoints discovered in scholarly readings informing my own viewpoint and, in particular, informing the interview questions. For example, the scholarly readings elicited points of view about yarn bombing I had not previously considered. Joanna Mann’s discussion of the role of whimsy (2015, pp. 65-72) and Lesley Hahner and Scott Vada’s valuable analysis of the aesthetics of exceptionalism (2014, pp. 301-321) were well worth discussing in my own analysis and fitted into my consideration of yarn bombing losing its edge through commercialism and incorporation in collections and display in mainstream galleries.

The reflexive component of the exegesis was also critical to this process. Arnold contends: “The exegesis doesn’t validate the practice as knowledge, rather it explicates how the practice is knowledge for both the Academy and for the practitioner. This is an important point: the practice is enriched through reflection upon itself …” (2012, p. 21). The process of writing the exegesis illuminated the importance and originality of the contribution to knowledge resulting from this research practice and the creation of the artefact, based on the lived experience of the interviewees. This in turn enabled me to analyse and better understand my motivations for undertaking this project and how those motivations fed into this research practice. Reading on autoethnography and the need for the autoethnographer to be prepared to take risks and to reveal much of the self to the reader was instrumental in my decision to write the preface to the artefact and to provide a more detailed discussion than I had originally intended in this exegesis of the personal significance of this project.

Exploring self as data in an autoethnographic study of the creative project applies a qualitative research method that relates autobiographical personal experiences, analysing and interpreting the self as data. Whilst its beginnings can be traced to anthropologists who immersed themselves in their own data, it is now a metaphor for much self-reflexive scholarship” (Arnold 2012, p. 165).

As a journalism lecturer with cohorts of extremely self-focused students to whom daily life is a continual social media photographic opportunity, I spend considerable classroom time trying to persuade the students that their work is not all about them and that they should try to produce journalism without the incursion of the self. In Swinburne University’s journalism program subjects the self is separate – there may be the occasional reflexive journal – and students lose 411

marks for using words such as “I” and “me” and expressions such as “she told me” in their stories. After a lifetime of working in this vein, with the exception of the occasional opinion and first person piece, the autoethnographic approach was initially anathema. But scholarly reading and discussions with supervisors clarified the significance of it. After reading an initial draft of material about my hand injuries and the drastic effect of that on my knitting, associate supervisor Andrew Dodd said: “This explains a lot.” That remark, made in passing, helped me see the significance of these personal events on this choice of topic and my approach to them and opened me to greater autoethnographic exploration of this. As Alec Grant, Nigel Short and Lydia Turner note (2013, p. 2) “a reflexive world” is opened up with experiences linking one to the other: “Thus the story might change, develop and grow throughout the reader’s experience of the writing, and almost certainly changes and grows as the author authors and re-authors their writing: The point of any present story is its potential for revision and redistribution in future stories.” So my own experience coloured the questions I asked and resonated with those of the interviewees, one interviewee leading to the next, the fragments of their experiences and my own cohering as a whole as the writing progressed.

Through the interview process interviewees reveal their stories. I reject the contention of Makela (2007, p. 163) that “artefacts present themselves as mute objects, which do not reveal their stories until interpreted. The crucial task for each practice-led research project is, therefore, to give a voice to the artefact.” While the artefact is a product of my own reading, interpretation and analysis combined with the raw material of the interviews, to describe the interviewees as mute would not do them justice. When their stories are revealed my interpretation ascribes meaning to those stories and places them in a wider context. This is, of course, a highly subjective process and denotes a significant difference between oral history and journalism; as stated previously this artefact does not comprise the interviewees telling their stories, it is their stories told and interpreted by me. To that extent the interviewees, who already have a voice, have a greater chance of that voice being heard in the context of the published work, just as the voice of the individual protestor gains greater power when reported by the media. 412

S 2.4 Journalism as Research Given that the artefact accompanying this exegesis is a piece of journalism, created by journalistic techniques, it is valuable to discuss here whether it alone constitutes, or should constitute, research or whether it can be considered as such only in tandem with the exegesis. This is a significant debate for PLR. Journalism as research is an issue journalism academics, most of whom have come to the Academy from that industry, have been discussing and lobbying over for decades, particularly in the most recent decade. In 2007 Sarah Niblock wrote:

There is currently a demonstrable difference between journalism practice and academic research, which has so far stymied attempts by journalists to submit sizeable samples of professional activity as research outputs and funding proposals. This partly reflects the strict definitions of research that universities and research funding bodies still place upon scholars, but also the reticence of the journalism industry towards scholarly investigation (2007, p. 30).

She called for (2007, p. 31) “critical, reflexive accounts of contemporary editorial practice and decision-making. This will serve to bridge some of the perceived gaps between theory and practice.” This bridging function is served by this exegesis. In it, I reflect upon the process of creating the artefact – my piece of journalism, an interview-based book – as well as explicating my methodology and method and providing the structure and rigour of the Feminist Standpoint Theory prism. Without this the interview-derived material and analyses of it would still provide a significant original contribution to knowledge, but with little theoretical or traditional academic content. This exegesis is the bridge between it and the Academy, bringing both elements of this project into scholarly knowledge.

In 2014, pioneering journalism scholar Chris Nash described (2014, p. 76) “the relationship between journalistic research and traditional scholarly research” as an issue in “sharp focus” at a time in which university journalism programs were developing their scope. In considering what constituted a journalistic exegesis he noted (2014, p. 80): “For the purposes of this discussion, the term exegesis can be interpreted as the critical interpretation or analysis of a piece of journalism with respect to whether and how it meets the definition of original academic research.” While journalism was directed to lay readers – the public – the disinterested, intellectually rigorous exegesis was directed to scholars, he asserted.

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I suggest the exegesis has three core elements—the literature review, the exposition of the research methodology, and the evaluation of the research outcomes. Together with an introduction that explains its interest value, originality and significance, and a conclusion that confirms those claims on the basis of the research outcomes, the three core elements of the exegesis envelope and locate the journalistic component as the most appropriate disciplinary instrument to produce a logically coherent, rigorous and cogent contribution to knowledge (Nash, 2014 p. 81).

This groundbreaking work sought to locate journalism within the Academy and to establish “the sort of journalism that might qualify as research, typically but not necessarily long form and/or investigative” (Nash, 2014 p. 76). It was illustrative of the shift in the past decade of the Academy’s attitudes towards recognition of journalism, particularly long form and investigative journalism, as research worthy of credit by university research analytics. In 2015 Dr Johan Lidberg, a senior lecturer in journalism at Monash University, announced at the annual conference of the Journalism Education and Research Association of Australia that the first batch of in-depth journalism had passed the Monash Non-Traditional Research Outputs Committee and had been awarded research points – the first of the Group of Eight universities to recognise journalism as NTRO. This was the result of eight months spent drawing up a guideline document for the recognition.

This was hailed as a major achievement by other members of the association. Professorial Fellow Wendy Bacon, of the Australian Centre for Independent Journalism, a long-time advocate of such recognition, wrote in an email to JERAA members (Bacon 2015, 9 December): “It is an achievement and we need to remember that we were laughed out of court when we first suggested this – including by creative colleagues who had already won their battle.” At my own university, Swinburne University of Technology, journalism program staff have been verbally assured that journalism can be submitted for recognition as Non-Traditional Research Outputs. However, journalism is not included in the list on the Swinburne Research Analytics site as one of the types of works that can be submitted and it is unclear which of the five categories listed would accommodate it.

The Australian Research Council does now recognise NTROs and provides universities with credit for these, subject to certain provisions. According to The state of Australian university research 2015-2016: Vol 1 ERA national report:

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The provision within the ERA framework for portfolios allows for related works that demonstrate coherent research content to be submitted and reviewed as a single output. This is particularly important in the case of applied, creative and practitioner- based research, where a body of work needs to be viewed as a whole so that the full significance of the research involved can be considered.

According to the accompanying table, Research Outputs by Type, 29 portfolios are recorded as having been submitted in journalism and professional writing, from a total of 791 portfolios in all categories. No breakdown of the specific number from journalism alone is provided.

Swinburne University’s five categories are based on the ERA submission requirements. But there is no mention of journalism in the explanation of any of these categories in the ERA guidelines. They specify that a university must submit “a statement identifying the research component of each such research output” (ERA 2015, p.45). Submission to Swinburne requires completion of a form which the university’s staff wiki warns will take up to 30 minutes to complete. Anecdotally, it is my understanding as a result of communications with Media and Communication Department colleagues that no journalism has yet been approved as an NTRO at Swinburne and some applications have been rejected, for reasons including a lack of a research components statement. Also, NTROs are sometimes awarded fewer research points than traditional research outputs.

This shift notwithstanding, there are still qualms about the capacity of journalism alone, without supporting theoretical research component, to be considered academic research. Despite her enthusiasm for the Monash innovation, Bacon (2006, pp. 151-152) had previously expressed reservations about the capacity of this large and varied field to sit within research. She wrote: “Most would agree that much in-depth journalism does meet the criteria of being creative and original investigation throwing fresh insight on a particular situation. This would be sufficient for it to qualify as research in the United Kingdom, assuming of course it was peer-reviewed.” But she acknowledged difficulties of reportage of pre-existing material such as covering court cases, of the multiple short stories a journalist often produces on a topic and that “broader analysis and interpretation in journalism is often embedded rather than explicitly argued and might often be revealed in a whole body of work rather than a single piece” (Bacon 2006, p. 152). A decade on, these difficulties still exist and are still being debated as the academy moves to find ways to accommodate journalistic research and writing and reward it with research points. In 2015 American research professor Kevin Kemper stated categorically (p. 74): “Journalism can and 415

should be recognized as academic research output only if it reflects the same level of rigour and impact as any other academic research output.” Having clearly resigned himself to the fact that his journalism did not count for much in the university, and nor did his inter-disciplinary approach, he advised: “Be certain that you situate that journalism within a rigorous programme of quantitative or qualitative research that would get you tenure anyway. Let the journalism be the icing on the cake” (2015, p. 80). Duffy however, saw the matter differently. Writing in the same issue of Asia Pacific Media Educator, which focused on the vexed issue of journalism as research, he was not prepared to concede so readily. He wrote: “Journalism’s potential contribution to the three pillars of tenure-research, teaching and service signals the need for recognition to be accorded by universities to journalism as academic output” (2015, p. 5). His assertion, one which would undoubtedly draw the ire of both some academics and some journalists, was:

“Scholarly writing can be viewed as an advanced form of journalism: the methods are more rigorous, the sample sizes more representative, the editing process tougher and done by subject experts rather than expert editors. Good journalism can reach similar heights, and both are concerned with investigation and increasing our understanding of the world around us.” (2015 p. 10).

I contend that this piece of long form journalism, created using the journalistic skills of research and interviewing but also by collaboration with the interviewees, is a valuable contribution to knowledge. But it is richer for the accompanying exegesis which provides not only a theoretical structure but fills gaps in the literature as previously discussed.

Difficult to accommodate, too, is the resistance of some journalism education academics to journalism as research because of reluctance to cede to university ethics clearance procedures. At Swinburne University, for example, research projects such as this must gain Human Research Ethics Committee approval, but journalism for media publication does not. The SUHREC requirements that interviewees must approve content to be published is anathema to the professional journalist who does not check back what is written with the interviewee. To do so with, for example, a politician and offer the opportunity to remove something later regretted would be laughable and this same rule is applied to all. Journalists work to their own codes of practice such as the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance’s Code of Ethics (2017), but these can be hard to enforce – the code of ethics, for example, applies only to members. Any encroachment by the universities into the policing of journalistic content is hotly resisted. For 416

example, an outcry from JERAA members greeted the news from Associate Professor Cathy Jenkins of the Australian Catholic University in July 2016 that her university had introduced “a Taught Ethics approval process where all units (including Journalism) that use interviews as part of their assessment have to be approved by an ethics sub-committee, and any units that involve stories being published in any form must go through a full ethics approval process” (Jenkins 2016, 14 July).

Despite these reservations, as with many practitioners who become scholars, the Academy’s failure to embrace their works of journalism as research is inherently frustrating for many journalists who make the transition from industry. The very reason for which they were recruited is deemed insufficiently scholarly to bolster their research profile. Lindgren and Phillips (2011, p. 75) summarise the issues: “At the heart of the debate about journalism as research is the question of what constitutes research.” Through a case study they illustrate the potential for journalism to be recognised as research in its own right through “a methodology that is deemed acceptable in academia” (2011, p. 81) and, through a second case study, as “a methodology that can be used as a research approach in other disciplines” (2011, p. 81). They conclude that “different ways of thinking about journalism as research can extend the boundaries for journalism practitioners working in academic environments” (2011, p. 81). Five years after her keynote paper for the first issue of Journalism Practice, Niblock revisited this subject noting (2012, p.508): “Practitioner-academics are in a strong position to submit practice- is-research in a number of ways.” But reminding the journalism practitioner that, as researcher, he or she is now in the university arena, she writes (2012, p. 504): “I continue to assert that reflexivity is at the heart of the success or otherwise of practitioner-academic approaches to research.” Such reflexivity, the associated scholarly reading and construction of a theoretical framework was an important part of my research process, and this artefact would have been poorer for that had it alone been defined as research for purposes of submission of this PhD.

As a PhD candidate who came to the Academy from industry and without a higher degree, it was a relief to discover that my proposed research would be taken seriously, particularly given the choice of a topic stereotypically associated with older women. Ellis notes that “ethnographers typically view journalists as ‘lightweights’ who aren’t trained in formal research methods or theory” (Harrington 2003, p. 90). She believes this less than favourable view is reciprocated: “In turn, journalists, view ethnographers as ponderous jargon-using academics who haven’t yet gotten the knack of having fluid conversations with people or telling a dramatic and engaging story” (Ellis 2005, p. 180). But she notes that “the stereotypes are far from the truth for intimate 417

journalists and narrative ethnographers” (2005, p. 180) and speculates that their common interests could result in their learning from each other. Certainly, despite some scholarly scepticism, there are interesting parallels between first person journalism, which abandons the traditional role of journalist as independent observer, and the growth in autoethnographic research. Ellis draws parallels between those journalists who have chosen not to be independent observers but, rather, to insert themselves into their stories and autoethnographers who insert themselves into their research (Ellis 2005, p. 180). Such parallels are timely given the ongoing debate about the appropriateness of the traditional model of arm’s-length journalist as observer. Interestingly in the context of such debate, I have noticed that my students, most of whom maintain a blog or are regular readers of blogs, have trouble coming to grips with the concept of neutral observer and keeping themselves and their opinions out of their journalism.

As mentioned above, journalists choose the topics they will write about, who they will interview, the questions they will ask, what will be included and what will be excluded, as I have done in the creation of this artefact. The values, opinions and beliefs of the journalist inform his or her world view and work, with the journalist framing the story according to the desired interpretation. The concept of framing connects to “the process of culling a few elements of perceived reality and assembling a narrative that highlights connections among them to promote a particular interpretation” (Entman 2009, p. 336). So the choices made in framing this artefact are not only informed by my connections with the subject matter and the personal importance of this project, declared to the reader in the preface, but to draw the interpretations I believe to be relevant and correct from the accumulated qualitative data collected.

There is a trend in journalism away from a pretence of the possibility of complete objectivity to a more realistic openness. Ian Richards notes “a sense of growing disillusionment with journalistic objectivity” (2001, p. 60) but warns of the ethical implications of such attitudes:

In short, there is today widespread recognition among journalists that the traditional ideal of objectivity is impossible to achieve, and widespread acknowledgment of the validity of many of the criticisms which have been levelled at this ideal (2001, p. 63).

He advocates a redefinition of the concept and says that, in practice, this already happens: “In place of traditional notions of objectivity, journalists need to be granted the licence to develop and apply a journalistic perspective on events” (Richards 2001, p. 67). Former senior journalist Syd Deamer advised trainee journalists: “Don’t strive to be objective, strive to be fair.” (Hurst & 418

White 1994, p. 174). Such was my goal in presenting the stories of these interviewees; I see their enthusiasm for the way I wrote their stories and the lack of corrections as a vindication of this approach. From the outset, I make it clear to the reader that I have a personal involvement with this topic – that there is an autoethnographic aspect, dealt with more fully below, and that although I am not in the story, in a sense it is my story too. Such an approach is in line with this emerging trend towards transparency in journalism. My aim in declaring these connections with the subject matter was transparency. I believe it is appropriate that this is now being advocated to replace outdated and unrealistic notions of journalistic objectivity. During a recent online discussion about amendments needed to the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance journalists’ code of ethics, Australian journalism educators argued that an emphasis on transparency was essential in this digital age. Typical of the email discussion comments was this by Caroline Fisher of the University of Canberra: “I think another area where our current code lags is around the ideal of editorial transparency and transparency of journalists interests/biases et cetera” (2016, 27 June). This is particularly so as the lines blur between stories and analysis, fact and opinion, reported and blogs, journalism and native advertising.

Two significant recent and ongoing stories – the Brexit campaign and climate change – have drawn this debate into the public arena. Leading film producer Lord Puttnam was critical (Plunkett & Martinson 2016) of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, saying it had “effectively been hamstrung by the strict rules on impartiality which govern it”, with the need to find contrary views in the interests of balance. Similarly, UK climate change committee member Professor John Krebs (2016) has called on the media to recognise the overwhelming weight of science in recognition of the impact of climate change and to stop giving extensive coverage to climate change deniers in the interests of impartiality. This public airing of the issues is welcome; such debates are often the preserve of journalism academics and it is important that readers are made aware of them and of the outdated and unrealistic nature of the concept of journalistic objectivity. Although I regard my artefact as a piece of long form journalism, there is no pretence of objectivity here. This is a project dear to my heart, conducted as I wanted, the participants chosen by me and asked the questions I wanted to ask them. Their data has been amalgamated and analysed by me in the way I considered most appropriate to achieve both a readable, entertaining yet informative book for the lay reader, but one which also makes a valuable contribution to knowledge about Australian society through the lived experience of these interviewees. 419

Section 3 Method: Autoethnography

Academic writing is mediated by the viewpoint of the writer, yet researchers have traditionally written at arm’s length. The intellectualising of the work has generally involved elimination of all trace of the self; but this is changing:

The research process and production of scientific knowledge has traditionally been understood to be based on abstract analysis and intellectual capacity rather than physical and emotional resources, promoting an understanding of academic practice as a detached, non-emotional and objective activity. Lately, several researchers have bemoaned this lack of recognition of the bodiliness of our work. (Essen & Varlander 2012, pp. 395-396).

Many scholars such as these are advocating greater recognition of “bodiliness”, with the result that autoethnographic methods are taking their place in academic writing and research. In this project such an autoethnographic approach is advantageous: my personal engagement with the subject matter has been central to my understanding of the perspectives of the knitters interviewed for this research, particularly given that they are not a single, homogenous group. My feminist history and sympathies and my respect for Feminist Standpoint Theory, its continuing relevance and its usefulness in creating a theoretical structure also served me well. Practice-led research, the bridge across the gap between theory and practice as I discussed above, made this possible.

With the topic of knitting drawn from my lived experience, this change in recognition of the place of the self in academic writing is significant to this research. The project explores not only existing writing in this field and reports the comments of interviewees, but also analyses them in a wider societal context, as previously noted. Knitting, traditionally dismissed as a domestic craft, is a relatively new subject for scholarship, in part because of these previous disparaging 420

attitudes to it, and it has been little studied in Australia. “Over time knitting has been seen as mundane, so ubiquitous and commonplace that it fades into the social, cultural and historical background” (Strawn 2012, p. 1). Susan Strawn, both a scholar and a knitter, notes that despite the re-evaluation of women’s work which began in the 1970s, other crafts with similar connotations, such as quilting, were taken up earlier as worthy topics for scholarship. Fortunately, this is now changing: “New generations of late twentieth-century scholars and twenty-first century researchers recognized that knitting offered a previously untapped resource for a variety of disciplines” (Strawn 2012, p. 2). It is apposite then that at a time when recognition of knitting as a suitable subject for scholarship is changing, a method which is “iconoclastic and boundary changing” in nature (Grant, Short & Turner 2013, p. 1) be drawn on to investigate knitting-related research questions. By this autoethnographic means, this project is adding new and important knowledge not only to textiles scholarship, but in the wider Australian political and social context to which these research findings relate.

As the role of autoethnography in research has gained increasing acceptance within the Academy, approaches to it taken by scholars have diverged and these differences are evident in the resultant debate. Leon Anderson notes (2006, p. 373) that much discourse has related to evocative autoethnography, with its increased focus on emotion and self-reflexivity, exemplified by noted scholars such as Carolyn Ellis and Arthur P. Bochner. It is this self-reflexive approach which characterises the preface of the artefact – the only section of it written in first person and making direct reference to my connections with the research topic. This preface is, in effect, a declaration of my connection to the topic and the way it has coloured what follows. As a handknitter since my New Zealand childhood, having been taught at age six by my grandmothers and mother, my academic narrative would inevitably be a subjective one, in which my lived experience informed my interpretations, whether acknowledged or not. “Every piece of writing reflects the disposition of its author” (Chang 2008, p. 10). Better then to acknowledge and embrace these subjectivities at the outset. Consequently I “out” myself to the reader, describing my personal experience and relationship with the subject matter in this preface. The self underpins the artefact, as it does this exegesis, developing PLR as a personal academic narrative.

In their efforts to demonstrate the importance of the researcher’s personal experience as the subject of investigation, Ellis and Bochner emphasise that unless we insist on a level of such personal accountability “our academic publications reinforce the third-person, passive voice as the standard …” (2000, p. 734). They affirm that this traditional, passive approach denies the 421

inevitable subjectivity of all writing and the potential for the first person approach to add new and important information to scholarship. I enter into this discussion of my understanding of autoethnography as practised in this exegesis by noting the classic Ellis and Bochner definition that it is “an autobiographical genre of writing and research that displays multiple layers of consciousness, connecting the personal to the cultural” (2000, p. 739). This personal-cultural connection offered an appropriate means to address the research elements of this project, given the link between my own involvement with the subject matter and my investigations of its role in Australian society.

However, advocacy of a more analytic type of autoethnography by scholars such as Anderson, contains an implicit – and at times explicit – criticism of the evocative style and has, unsurprisingly, been rejected by leading practitioners of evocative autoethnography including Ellis and Bochner. Anderson writes:

The purpose of analytic ethnography is not simply to document personal experience, to provide an “insider’s perspective,” or to evoke emotional resonance with the reader. Rather, the defining characteristic of analytic social science is to use empirical data to gain insight into some broader set of social phenomena than those provided by the data themselves (2006, pp. 386-387).

Steven Pace, who favours flexibility and “the thoughtful application of mixed research methods” (2012, p. 13), says that while controversial, criticism by scholars such as Anderson of the evocative method for its “rejection of traditional analytic goals” (2012, p. 2) assists those “who want to use analytic reflexivity to improve theoretical understandings of their creative practice” (Pace 2012, p. 4).

Others advocate a more critical approach, turning a critic’s eye on what Ellis (2005) describes as “the ethnographic I”. Stacy Holman Jones believes the relationship between telling stories and this critical approach is unrealised and writes: “Because theory and story exist in a mutually influential relationship, theory is not an add-on to story” (2016, p. 229). She further notes (2016, p. 234): “In critical autoethnography, theory is a language available to us as we write our stories.” In an example of this critical autoethnography, in which he critiques one of his own stories, John Quicke (2010, p. 239) explores the advantages of this critical reflexive process and its ability to assist other researcher-practitioners. In this exegesis, while reflecting on the creation of the artefact, issues which arose in its creation, the means by which they were 422

resolved and the outcomes, my lived experience is central, but the goal is self-reflexivity rather than critique.

Positioning the Self This desire for self-reflexivity raises the issue of the positioning of the self. Heewon Chang identifies three possibilities for this in autoethnography:

First, you can investigate yourself as a main character and others as supporting actors in your life story. Second, you can include others as co-participants or co-informants in your study. Third, you can study others as the primary focus, yet also as an entry to your world (2008, p. 65).

Clearly, the first possibility is relevant to this exegesis, with its scholarly-based reflections on the process of creating an artefact which drew on my lived experience. Moreover, Chang’s third possibility appears to equate with the research process for this artefact – interviewing knitters around Australia about a topic with which I have an intimate involvement and analysing their experiences – a process I would find impossible to separate from my own lived experience. I am the “culturally engaged and vulnerable observer” (Grant, Short & Turner 2013, p. 1). While to Chang this third possibility “does not engage self sufficiently to earn the label of autoethnography” (2008, p. 66), this is a view with which I take issue. I would argue that the self can be thoroughly engaged, without the use of the first person. It is instructive that Chang notes: “When the term ‘auto-ethnography’ was first introduced by an anthropologist Heider, ‘self’ did not mean the ethnographer self, but rather the informant self” (2008, p.46). In this research the self is engaged at every turn – in fact, separating the self from the research findings would be impossible. The two are inextricably intertwined, my study of others not only an entrance point to my world but part of it. Also, as will be discussed later, my life-changing health issues underpin this research and were a motivator for it. Chang continues: “Yet it is common in social science research, in that researchers use their personal experiences or perspectives to guide the selection of the research topical subject without centring on self” (2008, p. 66). Certainly this guidance is evident in the selection of topic for this practice-led research, but the influence of my personal experiences is more far-reaching. The self is everywhere.

Chang notes the differences between autoethnography and other types of self-narratives: it is no mere account of self, it transcends such accounts “to engage in cultural analysis and interpretation” (2008, p. 43). About both processes and outcomes, it validates self-reflection 423

while also going beyond this. “Another major difference between you and other ethnographers is that you openly acknowledge your personal memory as a primary source of information in your research,” Chang tells autoethnographers (2008, p. 71). So it is here, as my PLR draws the self as data into scholarship, not simply acknowledging personal memory but interpreting those memories. This work takes place within the context of those memories. This includes not only the artefact, with its record and analysis of interviewee experience, those interviewees discovered and their consent and trust obtained through the use of personal contacts, but also this academic framework for the artefact constructed in first person voice.

Drawing on Llived Experience Given that this artefact has the self as its starting point, as discussed above, it is appropriate to consider it in the context of autoethnography. The preface to the artefact, personal in tone as discussed above, sets the scene for the reader, inevitably illuminating and colouring perceptions of the material to follow. This is a non-fiction work, based on historical and contemporary research, as well as the interviews which are its nucleus. It is not simply an account of the interviews, but is inextricably linked with, and its story told from, this personal starting point and in the context of my own lived experience. “All writings are in some way autobiographical because they reflect authors’ perspectives and preferences in their choice of topics, writing style, direction, and conclusion,” notes Chang (2008, p. 35). This lies at the heart of autoethnography and, I would argue, at the heart of all journalism, as discussed in more detail later when I further consider the issue of journalism and objectivity.

In the artefact the lived experience relates specifically to the topic under discussion and informs everything from the questions asked to the approach to the writing. I emphasise here that this is not the knitters telling their stories; I, the writer, am telling their stories. As previously illustrated by email extracts, most interviewees were comfortable with this approach and praised the finished result. New to the university ethics committee process and the need to obtain interviewee approval for quotations used, I was surprised that the changes they made when shown the copy were minimal and often very helpful. However one interviewee, herself a research scholar, found this virtually impossible to come to grips with and appeared unable to differentiate between me, the writer, telling her story, and her, the interviewee doing so. She kept describing this work as an oral history and, irritatingly, returning my draft over and over with changes, not only to the quotations but to the narration to make it more her words than mine.

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Institutional resistance toward autoethnographic practice is well documented. In a discussion of this Grant et al. observe (2013, p. 10) in relation to “powerful benchmarks” that they:

… lead to the thorough and successful socialisation of qualitative scholars and students in higher education to the importance of privileging values such as ‘rationality’ and ‘distanciation’, supposedly crucially appropriate rigour sensibilities regarded as foundational and essential rather than socially and culturally constructed and historically contingent.

I have been fortunate to be able to incorporate my own lived experience into both elements of this PhD project at Swinburne University, with my program and department heads and supervisors open to and supportive of this approach. Rather than the traditional normative approach in which lived experience remains separate and at arm’s length from the research, with “emotionality, subjectivity, and related structures of experience … perceived by many in higher education as anathema rather than valuable resource” (Grant, Short & Turner 2013, pp. 10-11), I was encouraged to draw on this experience and seek out scholarship which illuminates and elucidates my lived connections with the topic. As someone returning to scholarly study and research after a lengthy absence, having previously worked in the traditional model, the opportunity to embrace the autoethnographic approach and practice-based methodology was welcome and exciting.

In a sense, I am both autoethnographer, researching and writing about a subject with which I have a close personal association, and a journalist creating a piece of long form journalism by telling the stories of others, using my personal knowledge, contacts and experience to do so. The subject of knitting in Australia, with which I have had an intense and life-changing relationship, for reasons outlined below, is well-suited to autoethnography, despite its having been historically held in low esteem. Fortunately, attitudes to knitting as scholarship are changing and I did not suffer the experience of New Zealander Heather Halcrow Nicholson whose book was derided when awarded a grant, as discussed previously.

As also discussed above, this research work has taken place within the context of my personal experiences, with my personal contacts facilitating the identification of potential interviewees and enabling me to empathetically record their experiences and historical perspectives. My 21- year membership of the Handknitters Guild, Victoria, a community knitting group, both social and educational, run by volunteers and committed to the enjoyment and promotion of knitting, 425

has been particularly instrumental in this. Members, extremely supportive in the late 1990s when I undertook my textile design degree, have again been helpful and supportive. Several have been interviewed, others have suggested interviewees in Victoria and interstate, the librarians have assisted with research, particularly related to World War II knitting patterns, and I have kept members updated about my research progress through illustrated talks at their monthly meetings. But I chose this topic not only because of my personal contacts and interest in it. It also offered an opportunity to bring both my previous scholarship and industry experience in journalism and textile design in combination to the Academy. “Reaching beyond the stereotype, knitting offers a resource well suited to the contemporary academic emphasis on cross disciplinary and cross cultural studies” (Strawn 2012, p. 2). Also, reconnecting with this craft and the knitting community, in which I remained intensely interested yet separated from by my hand disability, offered a means of contributing to research and scholarship in a field of study in which I had identified a gap.

Vulnerability and Disclosure Embarking on autoethnographic work can be challenging for a researcher, requiring a level of reflection and disclosure that may lead to feelings of vulnerability and exposure. Scholars report the challenges of this work and some acknowledge the need to make their students aware of what it entails. Carolyn Ellis, for example, warns a student (Ellis & Bochner 2000, p. 752): “If you’re not willing to become a vulnerable observer, then maybe you ought to reconsider doing autoethnography.” Grant et al. (2013, p. 11) acknowledge that tapping one’s own life as a resource – “from the heart, based on personal experience, rather than solely on the basis of rationally acquired information” – can be discomforting and can require “thick skins, or their speedy growth”. Nonetheless, I believed it was essential in the interests of full disclosure to the reader and to create a context for this work to discuss, at least in passing, my enforced separation from knitting and textile design. I am, as discussed above, the vulnerable autoethnographer and these issues had to be tackled, despite personal discomfort. My life- changing health issues were not easy for me to reflect on and I had preferred to keep these private in my subsequent working life. Therefore, this process was at times uncomfortable, and led me to reflect on the importance of frank disclosure in autoethnography even if it is unsettling. In the early stages of this project, I pondered the extent to which recent personal experiences coloured this topic choice and would potentially impact on my methods in conducting the research. As that would inevitably be the case, I concluded that these issues must be addressed in this exegesis, despite this being a topic I usually prefer not to draw attention to. After all, reflections on this would surely add an extra dimension to my work. “Arguably, 426

academic-, discipline- and professional-based practice based on personal knowledge and experience is more credible, ethical, imbued with integrity, empathetic and potentially effective” (Grant, Short & Turner 2013, p. 11). I also realised that, as a lifelong feminist, it was important to acknowledge this and my personal activism in this area. The selection of Feminist Standpoint Theory as the appropriate theoretical prism for this research project was not simply a matter of choosing a theory which was a good fit. This was also about choosing one in which I had a strong personal belief and which would facilitate my goal of bringing neglected women’s knowledge to the Academy.

While I was working in a demanding role as a newspaper magazine editor in Wellington New Zealand in 2009 my hands, in particular my thumbs, and arms suffered incapacitating RSI which then triggered latent arthritis, of which I was previously unaware. Such arthritis is, I was told by a medical specialist, common in middle-aged women who have undertaken a lifetime of knitting or sewing, particularly if combined with intensive computer use. Membership figures for related groups on Ravelry, the online social network for knitters, bear this out: In April 2017 the two Ravelry groups for knitters with arthritis had a total of 700 members, while 1509 members belonged to groups for knitters with chronic pain (Ravelry 2017) – of significance to me given that my overuse injury also triggered fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition related to the pain messages sent to the brain from the nerves. The hand injuries necessitated my leaving my senior job because I could not work with voice activated software room in a noisy newsroom and the editor would not provide a separate office because other managers did not have one. With limited freelance work available in New Zealand, I returned to Melbourne, rejected my general practitioner’s advice that I apply for a disability benefit and used my pre-existing contacts to build up a business as a freelance writer and university tutor. I could no longer knit, sew, draw, crochet or undertake any of my lifelong hand-intensive hobbies and also had to give up my handknitting design sideline.

Reflections upon these health events are relevant to this project, given that they precipitated my return to Melbourne, my teaching role at Swinburne University of Technology and the choice of a research topic enabling me to reconnect with the knitting community. This was a hobby from which I had derived significant mental health benefits, the company of social groups and even an international travel knitting group, from which I was now isolated. I was no longer part of the shared activity at the heart of a significant part of my social life – knitters’ groups, knitting and textile study tours, textile organisations, writing for knitting and craft publications and involvement in Craft Victoria, for example. However, while psychologists would probably have 427

advised finding other hobbies – I refused the counselling offered by my employer and my medical practitioners – I continued to remain keenly interested in knitting, craft and the issues related to their resurgence. This research project therefore became a means of re-engaging with what was such an important part of my life. Undertaking it was an autoethnographic process, with this vulnerable autoethnographer lacking certainty that this re-engagement would occur. Perhaps it would simply be a depressing reminder of what I had lost. However, the enthusiasm of knitters Australia-wide for the artefact and their assistance with it enabled this personal hope to be fulfilled, along with the additions to scholarship which derive from both my analysis of the interview data and my reflections on subjective personal experiences.

Undertaking this project has also provided an opportunity to discuss the health and work circumstances I faced more openly with others and to think more deeply about their implications. As Chang notes, such research is “an excellent vehicle through which researchers come to understand themselves and others” (2008, p. 52). In discussing types of autoethnographic writing, including confessional-emotive writing, she warns that these can sometimes be seen as self-indulgent: “Autoethnography is vulnerable self-exposure opens a door to readers’ participation in the stories. This open invitation to mutual vulnerability may appeal to readers and evoke sympathy” (2008, p. 145). This was the case with a well-received first-person article I wrote for a US knitting magazine about the sudden onset of my overuse injuries at a time when I was knitting a special gift for my late mother who had had a stroke (Green 2011, p. 144). I was uncomfortable about the exposure and the project was not motivated by a desire for sympathy, but I welcomed the support of the knitting community. That experience made me less hesitant about the potential for being seen as sympathy-seeking by drawing attention to my personal circumstances in this project, although I was mindful of Chang’s warning: “Confessional-emotive writings do not always enjoy favourable reviews” and were sometimes “branded as emotional catharsis”(2008, p. 145). I was aware of this potential danger; hopefully by specifically alluding to my own circumstances only in the preface I have minimised this possibility, with the impact of my personal circumstances largely contextual and underlying rather than repeatedly stated.

In recent years there has been significant research about the mental health impacts of craft, in particular “the personal, psychological and social benefits that can be derived from knitting and its consequent impact on well-being for committed knitters” (Riley et al. 2012, p. 56). Benefits reported include coping with stress and emotional control, happiness, mood improvements, concentration, memory and ability to solve problems (Riley et al. 2012, pp. 55-56) as well as 428

social connections – “knitting served as a catalyst to bring a group of participants together not only to share in a common craft but to create bonds between people” (Potter 2016, p. 3). Reflections upon these impacts on my own life and reading the relevant scholarship led me to investigate this further with the interviewees. Data elicited from this research revealed their motivations for knitting ranged from those traditionally ascribed – creation of garments, knitting for charity, for example – to assistance with mental health issues, recovery from major physical illnesses such as cancer, coping with isolation and loneliness and enhancing personal creativity. This project, then, adds to scholarly insights into motivations for knitting, particularly as there is a gap in research on this topic in Australia.

The Exegesis as Autoethnography Use of the autoethnographic approach in higher degree research has been facilitated by the innovative artefact and exegesis model. In her discussion of the relationship between the two, Bolt states that the exegesis plays a “critical role” in revealing new insights into the artefact and its production “that can be articulated in words” (2006, p. 7). By contrast, “Traditional scientific approaches, still very much at play today, require researchers to minimize their selves, viewing self as a contaminant and attempting to transcend and deny it. The researcher ostensibly puts bias and subjectivity aside in the scientific research process by denying his or her identity” (Wall 2006, p. 147). Qualitative methods such as autoethnography nudge against this world of traditional science, Wall says, describing autoethnography as “an emerging qualitative research method that allows the author to write in a highly personalized style, drawing on his or her experience to extend understanding about a societal phenomenon” (2006, p. 146). My extensive experience as a senior journalist, for which I was recruited by Swinburne University of Technology, is based on enabling others to tell their stories and, as discussed above, this was my approach to this research project. My firsthand experience with the topic notwithstanding, I had no wish to write in the first person nor to write a memoir, aside from the contextual preface. So while the artefact is not a first person narrative, this exegesis is a first person development of the academic framework for the artefact. Telling interviewees’ stories in my own voice, in the context of my lived experience, to provide greater understanding of the role of knitting in contemporary Australian society was my aim in the production of the artefact; it was also clearly the aim in this reflective exegesis. The interaction between myself and the process of gathering my research data, and the personal insights throughout this process enrich the contribution to knowledge made by this project.

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Situating Research in Personal Circumstances Scholars have clearly shown that personal experience influences narrative and its value can be therapeutic. Citing Parry and Doan (1994), Keisinger writes: “The therapeutic value of narrative becomes apparent each time we deconstruct debilitating life narratives and reframe them in ways that empower us, thus improving the quality of our lives” (2002, p. 107). Parry and Doan, in writing of narrative therapy, note that its point is “the clients voice and the liberation of this voice” (1994, p. 120). Personal experiences impact on narrative can actually influence the future course of the writer’s life. In examining her relationship with her father, Keisinger writes of “reframing my life story in ways that empower rather than victimize me” (2002, p. 95). Lockford, analysing her experience with performative essays, realises that although discomforting, “they make me mindfully question the comfortable perimeters of my scholarly habits and habitats. And as those perimeters expand, fresh horizons fertile with possibilities for how I may better cultivate my personal and professional homes are revealed. Thus, am I moved from stillness to action” (2002, p. 86). My level of personal involvement with and satisfaction derived from this research project have enabled me to engage fully with it and finish it well inside the deadline.

Such therapeutic benefits of autoethnographic narrative have been noted by scholars. Bochner writes (Ellis & Bochner 2000, pp. 746-747):

I get impatient with writers who belittle or diminish the therapeutic consequences of stories… A text that functions as an agent of self-discovery or self-creation, for the author as well as for those who read and engage the text, is only threatening under a narrow definition of social enquiry, one that eschews a social science with a moral centre and a heart … Why must academics be conditioned to believe that a text is important only to the extent it moves beyond the merely personal? … Why should we be ashamed if our work has therapeutic or personal value?

I have experienced these benefits despite the personal exposure and potential for embarrassment, although this was not my intention in embarking on the project – after all, therapy is hardly the purpose of undertaking a higher degree. While I hoped, as discussed above, to reconnect with knitting and old knitting friends, I considered that this experience would be pleasant, the topic enjoyable, but certainly didn’t see it in mental health terms. Rather, my key focus was the creation of new knowledge, filling a gap I had identified in both scholarship relating to knitting and books addressing knitting in Australian society.

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Nonetheless, the changes which have occurred in my life since my hand issues were diagnosed in late 2008 and fibromyalgia was diagnosed in 2010 have had a significant impact on my approach to both the artefact and this exegesis. I am not the person I was, physically and psychologically, before these health problems arose. Sociologist Laurel Richardson asks: “How do the specific circumstances in which we write affect what we write?” (1997, p. C1). Clearly, the answer varies from person to person, place to place, between times and with myriad other factors. But that they do affect what we write is indisputable. “While there is a ‘reality’ out there, the political complexities of subjectivities and their inevitable involvement in the research process, make a final and definitive ‘objective’ statement impracticable” (Leatherby, Scott & Williams 2013, p. 10). Capturing the ‘reality’ out there is the aim of this research, but as with any research it is a particular view of that reality, as autoethnography acknowledges. It is an honest approach; there is no claim to impartial research, nor to being a neutral observer. Personal biases and the accumulated knowledge and experience of a lifetime are not only acknowledged but celebrated and fundamental. Here I acknowledge my biases and accumulated knowledge on the topics at the heart of this research project – knitting, feminism, gender studies, political activism, journalism – without which its contribution to knowledge about the disruptive impact of knitting and knitters on Australian society would be stifled by attempts to objectify and neutralise all that makes it a rich contribution to scholarship.

In this project, the framework exegesis develops the ‘voice’ of my working in the artefact – a voice different from the more straightforward telling required for journalism. Ellis asserts that journalists are often seen by ethnographers as “lightweights” lacking in formal training; “In turn, journalists, view ethnographers as ponderous jargon-using academics who haven’t yet gotten the knack of having fluid conversations with people or telling a dramatic and engaging story” (Ellis 2005, p. 180). Chang sees voice as a key element in autoethnography as a reader-friendly approach: “This unique voice of the autoethnographer is a voice to which readers respond” (2008, p. 52). Certainly this has been my experience, with knitters now eagerly awaiting publication of my book, their interest stimulated not only by the illustrated stories of other knitters’ activities recounted during my talks to individuals and groups about my project, but the personalised telling which includes my own story.

This project offers different ways of bringing creativity to the Academy and making a significant contribution to knowledge through this record and analysis of the activities of Australian knitters who have previously received minimal attention from scholars and writers. “Narrative helps us makes senses (sic) of our multilayered reality… It filters what we see and how we interpret 431

events” (Mullet, Akerson & Turman 2013, p. 72). As noted throughout, this research project brings together my personal story, through the preface to my artefact and the structure provided by this exegesis, with the stories of knitters around Australia, mediated by my personal experience and storytelling. “The creativity with which autoethnographic pieces are often written, opens up a reflexive world in which the researcher/researched join with the reader to create a story”, Grant et al. assert (2013, p. 2). So, too, with my artefact, as knitters joined with me to tell their stories, which are also my story. 432

Conclusion

This project draws on my twin specialisms of journalism and textile design to bring together insights into creative work that has largely been isolated as women’s craft, created by labour regarded as having no calculable value – that is, treated as a hobby – or paid extremely low rates. The exegetic framework for this autoethnographic, practice-led research uses Feminist Standpoint Theory as an appropriate prism through which to analyse and discuss this research material. This places women – in particular women knitters – at the centre of the research process and illuminates the lives of marginalised craftspeople.

The artefact, a book intended for commercial publication and a lay readership, brings together the information compiled from interviews with knitters across Australia about their knitting and the lives in the context of this knitting. My own deep personal connection with this material, as discussed in the Method section of the exegesis in relation to autoethnography and in the Methodology section in relation to the trend to transparency in journalism, has enabled the drawing out of detailed personal information from these interviewees. This project goes beyond a discussion of the news story basics of where, when, why and how they knit, to analyse their knitting’s relevance to key social issues such gender, women’s role and social inequality. It enriches the discussion of how, for many, it has become a tool for rebellion, art making and activism on feminist and political issues. It also discusses how knitting is not only a reflection of the wider society but serves to influence that society – the editorialising of post-war knitting magazines on the need for women to return to the home, for example. The development of political and feminist consciousness in women who begin taking their knitting beyond the home with decorative yarn bombing is a further example of the impact of their knitting on these women’s lives. This analysis itself contributes to knitting scholarship, with the significant parallels between the experience of interviewees illuminating contemporary social issues and trends. The discussion within the exegesis of the issues arising during the course of this practice- led research speaks to the artefact by providing a framework for this analysis through the prism of Feminist Standpoint Theory. It is further enriched through my reading of previous scholarship on the subject. Together the two elements of this project develop new and significant insights that fill a gap in the scholarly literature.

The artefact is a piece of long-form journalism, created using the skills in my journalistic toolbox, in particular research, interviewing and interpretation. It is therefore also discussed in the 433

context of journalism as research and the ongoing debate over whether journalism alone constitutes research. There are those such as Duffy who believe that journalism alone, without supporting theoretical research, should be considered academic research. He notes that “as a discipline, journalism has received a chilly welcome from academe” (2015, p. 7) and asserts: “Barring snobbery towards popular scholarship, it would be hard to take the position that well- researched, well-argued and well-written scholarly journalism should not be considered by P&T (promotion and tenure) committees as having equal weight to scholarly journal articles” (2015, p. 8). But I am not of these ranks. I regard this exegesis as the bridge between this artefact and the Academy. It brings both elements of this project into scholarly knowledge and contributes significantly to the scholarship of the artefact and, through the synergies between the two as previously discussed, to its value as a publication for the lay reader.

This exegesis reflects upon and analyses the production of the artefact, Disruptive knitting: how knitters are changing the world, a book of nine themed chapters. It addresses a gap in the publication of works about the social and cultural impact of knitting by analysing key aspects of Australian society in terms of the lived experience of the 87 interviewees. While most were women, the interviews with 17 male and two transgender knitters, one of whom is male identifying, cast further light on the gender stereotypes associated with knitting, responses to those stereotypes and the assumptions they provoke. These first-hand accounts have been mediated by me as the journalist, telling and interpreting the interviewees’ stories and bringing together common threads to illuminate trends and shared experiences. Although I strove for accuracy in doing so, as discussed in the Methodology section of this exegesis, I did not attempt to verify the truth of the interviewees’ stories through traditional means. Rather, I used collaborative verification which, as Hermida has written (2012, p. 663), is used increasingly in journalism given the rise and power of social media. Through this process of collaboration with the interviewees, and as required of me by the Swinburne University ethics committee, I worked with them to reach a shared truth. By offering the interviewees the opportunity to change what I had written, yet at the same time winning their trust, I was able to enrich the artefact and its insights using this more contemporary journalistic approach.

In this exegesis I have discussed the role of the journalist in relation to academic discourse; in particular, the relevance of the traditional perception of the journalist’s role as ‘neutral’, an impartial observer. Clearly, my long involvement with the topic of knitting meant that I was not neutral in interviewing my subjects for this piece of long-form journalism. Nonetheless, I believe that it was richer for that, my own experience and understanding important in developing my 434

questions and gaining the empathy of my interviewees. Also, my analysis of the significant gender issues raised by the responses of the interviewees was coloured by my own lifetime of feminism and the importance I ascribed to Feminist Standpoint Theory. I acknowledge that a literal interpretation of FST, or in fact any school of thought developed, as it was, more than 30 years ago is not likely to be appropriate in every aspect in 2018. Nonetheless, the basic tenets of FST remain a relevant and valuable theoretical prism through which to interpret my research data.

Further, I have considered the shift towards recognising journalism as research in its own right – the subject of much lobbying by journalism academics – and the means by which this complementary exegesis enriched my journalistic research. I have also discussed my emphasis on transparency during the research process, and conclude that this approach is far more relevant and realistic for contemporary journalism research than the outdated notion of the impartial observer. It is also a more honest approach. Had I not revealed my connection to the subject in the preface to my artefact, many readers would have been ignorant of a connection which informed the work at every turn, while those who knew of that connection may have been perplexed by my pretence at neutrality.

I have shown how my role in the artefact extends beyond that of mere reporter. Ellis notes (2005, p. 177): “For the most part, journalists in America see themselves as conduits who transfer quotes primarily from interviews to stories reported in the media. They are reporters, who dig up the facts. Most do not think of themselves as ethnographers.” Ethnographers, too, “see themselves as conduits of the facts … Most ethnographers though do not think of themselves as storytellers,” she writes (2005, p. 177). Here, as in Ellis’s own work, those boundaries are blurred. I am both reporter and storyteller, a conduit for the views of my interviewees. Walt Harrington considered what journalists, “the junkyard dogs of ethnography” (2003, p. 90), could offer ethnography. He concluded: “The weakness of journalists … is that they too rarely place the individuals they capture so well into a cultural context” (2003, p. 101). Here, though, I have placed my interviewees in context, going well beyond merely transferring what they have told me to the printed page. Rather, the interviews are raw data, qualitative material, the analysis and interpretation of which has enabled me to draw insights which illuminate larger aspects of life in Australia.

My complementary exegesis brings creativity as knowledge into the Academy despite, as Nigel Krauth (2011, p. 3) says: “The evolution of the exegesis as a research tool in Australian creative 435

arts disciplines begins with the difficulty of acceptance of creative arts practice as research at all in the university context.” Continuing a trend to identifying knitting as a suitable topic for research and scholarship, I have shown that this project goes beyond merely describing the experiences and points of views of the interviewees. This cross-disciplinary research analyses, interprets and extends our understanding of gender issues and political activism in Australia, defining what Strawn (2012, p. 4) describes as “traditional boundaries”. She writes:

Academic interest continues to shift toward cultural and social phenomena, including interpretations using textiles and textile Artisans, designers, and materials. Reaching beyond the stereotype, knitting offers a resource well suited to the contemporary academic emphasis on cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural studies (2012, p.4).

Bringing to bear the academic theoretical perspectives of Feminist Standpoint Theory, the methodology of practice-led research and autoethnographic method on the subject of knitting has enriched this project and the scholarly knowledge deriving from it. As discussed by Strawn (2012, p. 1) knitting has been recognised as a worthwhile subject for scholarship only relatively recently, and the scope for augmenting the body of knowledge relating to and deriving from it is substantial. Strawn (2012, p. 1) writes that she “argues for knitting as a largely untapped resource with unique potential for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural study”. So it is here, where the seemingly unlikely marriage of the disciplines of journalism and textile design in the context of these theoretical perspectives has added to the nascent scholarship on knitting. Further, it brings new perspectives to important topics such as gender and feminism, political protest in Australia, the creation of art and the influence of the Internet and social media on the formation of community and the breakdown of traditional controls such as copyright.

This research further extends the work of scholars such as Stella Minahan and Julie Wolfram Cox (2007), who considered the emergence of the Stitch’nBitch knitters groups, both virtual and actual, as “a response to major political, social and technological changes of the new millennium” (2007, p. 5). The resurgence of knitting in the face of a flourishing of new technology and, as discussed above, following the 11 September 2001, US terrorist attacks, prompted scholars such as these to realise the potential of knitting scholarship to generate new ideas and ways of seeing. With this resurgence now well established and having lost its novelty value, the time is right to look at what knitting in Australia and, more specifically, knitters can tell us about the society in which we live, social and political attitudes and changes in such attitudes.

436

In the context of my interviews women knitters, once denigrated for their domestic hobby, discussed its use to actively protest about aspects of the society in which we live, to draw attention to and rebel against the restrictions placed on them because of their gender. They have told how the Internet and social media have opened new forms of global communication and networking to knitters. Male knitters discussed both the satisfaction of bucking gendered stereotypes and the courage needed to do so, as well as the weight of expectation which they defy simply by picking up needles and yarn.

I have conducted this analysis of my data both as autoethnographer, given my personal connection to the subject matter, outlined above and in the preface to my artefact, and as journalist – but with no pretence at being an objective observer. As discussed above, the concept of the objective journalist is increasingly irrelevant and I, as do many of my journalism academic colleagues, advocate fairness and transparency as more appropriate and achievable goals for the ethical journalist. While noting a tension between “the two rules of the journalist: this of an observer and that of a participant” (2012, p. 118) Furman writes: “Both of these roles are needed in modern society, as they are mutually complementary.” In this project I have shown how it is these complementary roles which have enabled me to successfully undertake this research. While my journalism education and experience have enabled me to undertake the knitter interviews and data analysis, it was my participant role, my long knitting history which made me one of them – someone who understood, a reliable person with whom to entrust the details of friends who may be willing to be interviewed or to recommend friends too, someone who could be trusted with stories and troubles never before shared.

This practice-led research, the artefact and exegesis working in tandem, fulfils the aims elucidated in the introduction to and overview of this exegesis. In particular, the exegesis illuminates the practitioner scholarship of the artefact, providing a theoretical framework for it – what Bolt (2006, p. 12) describes as the “vehicle” for the artefact – to be considered in greater depth than is appropriate in a commercial publication. Thus it brings new scholarship to the topic of knitting, as discussed throughout. I have shown how this project evolved from a social history of knitting to one fully engaged with contemporary developments, in particular the repositioning of the traditional gendered nature of knitting and the influence of contemporary political developments, the Internet and social media on it and its influence on and ability to disrupt them. This evolution has enabled me as researcher to derive new knowledge from this contemporary investigation of knitters in this technological era. It also casts new light on the role of gender in knitting. Once dismissed as a women’s hobby, it is now being embraced for 437

those very gendered associations, used by women to make statements about their place in the world, to influence the society in which they live and by men to reject such gender stereotyping.

In summary, this project brings an original substantial contribution to knowledge, both to the academy through this Practice Led Research by artefact and exegesis project and to the wider society through the publication of a book for a lay readership which casts new light on a neglected topic. 438

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Appendices Appendix i)

From: Keith Wilkins On Behalf Of RES Ethics Sent: Thursday, 24 September 2015 2:14 PM To: Josie Arnold ; Sue Green Cc: RES Ethics ; Nanette Carter ; Andrew Dodd ; Astrid Nordmann Subject: SHR Project 2015/238 - Ethics Clearance To: Prof Josie Arnold/Ms Susan Green, FHAD Dear Josie and Sue, SHR Project 2015/238 – A social history of knitting in Australia: Artefacts and Exegesis Prof Josie Arnold, Ms Susan Green (Student), Dr Nanette Carter, Assoc Prof Andrew Dodd - FHAD Approved Duration: 24-09-2015 to 30-09-2020 I refer to the ethical review of the above project protocol by a Subcommittee (SHESC3) of Swinburne’s Human Research Ethics Committee (SUHREC). Your responses to the review, as emailed 14 September 2015 with attachments, were put to the SHESC3 delegate for consideration and positive feedback sent to you which you have acknowledged today. I am pleased to advise that, as submitted to date, the project may proceed in line with standard on-going ethics clearance conditions here outlined. - All human research activity undertaken under Swinburne auspices must conform

to Swinburne and external regulatory standards, including the current National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research and with respect to secure data use, retention and disposal. - The named Swinburne Chief Investigator/Supervisor remains responsible for any

personnel appointed to or associated with the project being made aware of ethics clearance conditions, including research and consent procedures or instruments approved. Any change in chief investigator/supervisor requires timely notification

and SUHREC endorsement. 451

- The above project has been approved as submitted for ethical review by or on

behalf of SUHREC. Amendments to approved procedures or instruments ordinarily require prior ethical appraisal/clearance. SUHREC must be notified immediately or as soon as possible thereafter of (a) any serious or unexpected adverse effects on participants any redress measures; (b) proposed changes in protocols; and (c) unforeseen events which might affect continued ethical acceptability of the project. - At a minimum, an annual report on the progress of the project is required as well as at the conclusion (or abandonment) of the project. Information on project monitoring and modifications/additions, self-audits and progress reports can be found on the Research Intranet pages. - A duly authorised external or internal audit of the project may be undertaken at any time. Please contact the Research Ethics Office if you have any queries about on-going ethics clearance. The SHR project number should be quoted in communication. Researchers should retain a copy of this email as part of project recordkeeping. Best wishes for the project. Yours sincerely, Keith Wilkins for Astrid Nordmann Secretary, SHESC3 ------Keith Wilkins Secretary, SUHREC & Research Ethics Officer Swinburne Research (H68) Swinburne University of Technology P O Box 218 HAWTHORN VIC 3122 Tel +61 3 9214 5218 Fax +61 3 9214 5267 452

Appendix ii) RE: SHR Project 2015/238 - Ethics Modification (1)

SF Sally Fried on behalf of RES Ethics Wed 17/02/2016, 12:00 PM

RES Ethics;

Josie Arnold;

Sue Green;

Nanette Carter;

Andrew Dodd;

Astrid Nordmann Deleted Items To: Prof Josie Arnold/Ms Susan Green, FHAD Dear Josie and Sue, SHR Project 2015/238 – Knitting in Australia: Artefact and Exegesis (formerly A social history of knitting in Australia: Artefacts and Exegesis) Prof Josie Arnold, Ms Susan Green (Student), Dr Nanette Carter, Assoc Prof Andrew Dodd - FHAD Approved Duration: 24-09-2015 to 30-09-2020 I refer to your e-mail of 27 January 2016 in which you requested a modification to the project by change of title and modification of the consent information statement. The documentation was reviewed by a SHESC3 delegate. I am pleased to advise that, as modified to date, the project/protocol may continue in line with standard ethics clearance conditions previously communicated and reprinted below. Please contact me if you have any queries about on-going ethics clearance, citing the SUHREC project number. Copies of clearance emails should be retained as part of project record-keeping. As before, best wishes for the project. Kind regards, Sally Fried, Secretary, SHESC3 453

Appendix iii)

454