Mat Weaving on The Mekong

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FACEbook is spreading all kinds of messages all the time and increasingly globally. There are always messages to be taken away

But look at all the plastic hanging about here! The weaving is great and it probably gets a good price away from the Mekong as it should since it probably will not be adding to the RUBBISHraft in the PACIFIC or somewhere else?!

WICKERY WATERCRAFT IN TASMANIA

From Rex Greeno presented a paper on his canoes the nawi Conference – 30 May - 1 June 2012 ... "Rex Greeno was born on Flinders Island, the largest island in the Furneaux Islands, a group of islands off the north east coast of Tasmania. He grew up at Lady Barron, a small fishing village on the southern end of the island. Rex has explored the making of his cultural heritage through the making of the watercraft used by the Tasmania's Aboriginal people before European contact. ... It is through my maternal grandfather that I have my Aboriginal heritage. So it was inevitable that I would pursue my interest in the early water craft of my Ancestors. I read a book called Friendly Mission. This was George Augustus Robinson's journals of his dealings with the Aboriginal people. He mentioned his experiences of observing the local Aboriginal people building canoes out of certain types of barks."" ... Click here to read Rex's presentation to the CONFERENCE Nawi –  Exploring Australia’s Indigenous watercraft

 A sketch of the canoe found by Peron. Image courtesy of the Museum of Natural History, Le Havre.

Rex Greeno's canoe commissioned by National Museum of Australia
Click here to watch a video and read more 

.Image courtesy of Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery.

“We are people of this time and this place. The ningher canoe project was never simply about making a canoe. It has always been about journeys. Journeys of acknowledging deep and profound loss. Journeys about recovery, relationships, healing and struggling to regain control. Of what it takes to make a journey in the hope of becoming whole once more.

Tasmanian Aboriginal people are honoured to feel the love of the broader community as we have undertaken this poignant and important cultural step in recovering our precious culture. There is no failure. A journey is a journey, regardless of its outcome. I see you all here with us on this journey, and I know that this small step we have taken has been successful beyond our wildest dreams, as you are here with us, believing in our commitment to our culture, to this place, and the possibility that we can do important things together.

We built and launched a ningher, a canoe, and for a short time it graced the waters of the Derwent River. For a short time, you saw the passion in our hearts for practicing our culture: right here, right now."  .... Click here to read more 

HOW NORWAY DOES PLASTIC

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Norwegian Wickery

Wickery Market Elsewhere

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CERAMICwickery

FIXEDup CERAMICwickery ... Generally wickery bounces so you do have to wonder what the imperative was in imitating wickery in ceramics. Why fix it?

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For Sale in Vietnam

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Fish traps designed for use in shallow water

Is There a Paradigm Shift in Process?

GO2 ... https://www.interpretations-sydney.com/interpretation-iiii-stone/

Cellulose is an organic compound with the formula (Ca polysaccharide consisting of a linear chain of several hundred to many thousands of β(1→4) linked D-glucose units. Cellulose is an important structural component of the primary cell wall of green plants, many forms of algae and the oomycetes. Some species of bacteria secrete it to form biofilms.[5] Cellulose is the most abundant organic polymer on Earth.[6] The cellulose content of cotton fiber is 90%, that of wood is 40–50%, and that of dried hemp is approximately 57%. Cellulose is mainly used to produce paperboard and paper. Smaller quantities are converted into a wide variety of derivative products such as cellophane and rayon. Conversion of cellulose from energy crops into biofuelssuch as cellulosic ethanol is under investigation as an alternative fuel source. Cellulose for industrial use is mainly obtained from wood pulp and cotton. Some animals, particularly ruminants and termites, can digest cellulose with the help of symbiotic micro-organisms that live in their guts, such as Trichonympha. In human nutrition, cellulose is a non-digestible constituent of insoluble dietary fiber, acting as a hydrophilic bulking agent for feces and potentially aiding in defecation. Contents Cellulose was discovered in 1838 by the French chemist Anselme Payen, who isolated it from plant matter and determined its chemical formula. Cellulose was used to produce the first successful thermoplastic polymer, celluloid, by Hyatt Manufacturing Company in 1870. Production of rayon ("artificial silk") from cellulose began in the 1890s and cellophane was invented in 1912. Hermann Staudinger determined the polymer structure of cellulose in 1920. The compound was first chemically synthesized (without the use of any biologically derived enzymes) in 1992, by Kobayashi and Shoda. ... CLICK HERE TO GO TO SOURCE

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Is There a Paradigm Shift in Process?

A Nod To Wickery

Culture, Place, Wickery & People

Click here for context: https://www.ngarrindjeri-culture.org/

Now For Sale in New York as Potentially Something Else

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Click Here: http://parisbym.com/paris-food/

Wicker Coracle on Lang Co Island!

Spotted in daily use! AND here we are and I think we might have discussed these a while back?! FACEbook and GOOGLE help out yet again!

Wickery & Plastic

Wickery is not the SILVERbullet but when this sort of image pops up you can be forgiven for thinking that when there was more 'wickery' in our lives this sort of thing didn't happen.  It, generally lasts longer in use and beyond that, well it returns to the earth gently.

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Marine parks decision risks making ocean tragedy even worse By Julia Baird23 March 2018  ............... For too long, we assumed the ocean simply cleanses, purifies and spits out junk – and does not absorb it or get sickened by it. ...............

But slowly, certainly and tragically, we are discovering how foolish that assumption has been. It took about a century to even start questioning the wisdom of shooting raw sewage into the ocean and allowing sewage and industrial waste to pour in, unchecked. And now: plastic. We have all seen footage of ugly plastics suffocating our oceans, of bird stomachs lethally jammed with human-made jetsam, of string choking the throats of penguins, (just recently a friend of mine untangled balloon string from the neck of a turtle in our bay). A black footed albatross chick with plastics in its stomach lies dead on Midway Atoll in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Midway sits in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ............... This week, we learned it is far worse than we realised. So bad, that every conversation about the sea must now carry with it a sense of urgency. New research published in Nature has found that the Great Pacific Garbage patch (GBGP) currently spinning between Hawaii and California is “increasing exponentially” and is packed with tiny microplastics. ............... Alarmingly, experts say by 2050 there will be more waste in the sea than fish. Using data from multi vessel and aerial surveys, the researchers found this patch of bottles, ropes, toilet seats, fragments, is twice the size of France; vastly greater than other estimates (16 times as much as a previous study from 2014). And – of great significance in a week where we learned that commercial and recreational fishing is going to be allowed into a great swathe of previously protected Australian marine parks - the researchers also found that almost half of the rubbish – 46 per cent - is discarded fishing nets. If we look just at the 42, 000 tonnes of the largest plastics, “86 per cent of their contribution was carried by fishing nets.” Discarded nets off fishing trawlers are adding to the pollution problem. ............... The authors found that, in the past decade, “while the introduction of synthetic fibres in fishing and aquaculture gear represented an important technological advance specifically for its persistence in the marine environment, accidental and deliberate gear losses became a major source of ocean plastic pollution. Lost or discarded fishing nets, known as ghostnets, are of particular concern as they yield direct negative impacts on the economy and marine habitats worldwide." Material left or lost by fishers is designed to survive in the oceans: strong, thick nets, floats, traps, ropes. And no one has yet studied how much fishing gear is lost at sea, and how much plastic this involves. Should this not be a crucial part of any conversation about fishing in marine parks? Formerly, 50 per cent of the Coral Sea was given the highest level of “green zone” protection, in which mining and fishing is banned. The Turnbull government’s new plan will reduce this to 24 per cent – although mining there is still, we are told, to be banned in that particular area. ............... To put it baldly, currently fishing is allowed in 63 per cent of marine parks; the new plan raises this to 80 per cent. Environmental writer James Woodford, author of The Great Barrier Reef and Great White, spent a year travelling around Australia’s Commonwealth marine parks. The crucial question, he says, is not necessarily where the boundary lines of parks are drawn, but what you do within those lines. In other words, how the how the parks are managed – and it is here, that he says, Australia’s regulation of the sea has grown “looser and looser”. ............... He believes placing large trawlers in a reef, is “incompatible with conservation”. ............... “These are fearsome places that are incredibly fragile with delicate ecosystems ... anything that reduces the protection rather than increases it in face of all scientific evidence that says oceans are in trouble has got to be of huge concern to all of us”. ............... Marine parks, he says, are some of the world's last oceanic wilderness areas: “If you want to see what the Great Barrier Reef was like you need to go to the Coral Sea to understand that. The most striking thing in these places is the richness of the life ... I got to swim with hundreds and hundreds of sharks all in the same place - just life stacked upon life. Or in the Bremer Basin in south-western Australia, there are killer whales, sharks, sunfish. People ‘ohh’ and ‘ahh’ about one whale, but in marine parks like that, there is it so much life you don’t know where to look.” According to the research published in Nature, the high concentration of plastic in the North Pacific GPGP is coming from plastic sources in Asia as well as “intensified fishing activity in the Pacific Ocean”. ............... In 2009, the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, reported that there were an estimated 580,000 tonnes of abandoned fishing nets in the sea, drifting across ocean floors, trapping sea creatures in “ghost fishing”. (Coastal clean up data shows that fishing, aquaculture and shipping account for for 28.1 per cent of the global plastic inputs into oceans, but observations from the sea suggest the actual number is much higher.) ............... Much of this we will never see on the sea surface – as most global plastic demand is for buoyant plastic, almost half of the plastic washing into the ocean will quickly sink to the floor, where they will collect in underwater canyons or be compressed in sediment. Others, will of course, be eaten by marine life. In calculating their estimates, the scientists in this study have been conservative. Surely our response does not have to be the same. Julia Baird hosts The Drum on ABC TV and is a Fairfax Media columnist................ CLICK HERE TO READ THE SOURCE ARTICLE

Pandanus Preparation At Gumbalanya

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Injalak Arts Gunbalanya ... Injalak Arts Centre, Gunbalanya.. · 

Yesterday there was a pop-up Pandanus stripping and dyeing sweatshop next to the art centre. The ladies came back from a foraging and gathering trip in 40C heat. Mareiyaga demonstrates her expert skills in the beautiful afternoon light.

CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE VIDEO

A SECOND VIDEO CLICK HERE

Maori Weaving Video

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Potato Basket

"This basket holds my potatoes in the kitchen, and is far too useful to go on display." 

AB|7250|3571

Ritual Wickery From Elsewhere

Purchased in Melbourne from an artefacts gallery in Collins St in the late 1970s. It was on a whim and the gallery was clearing its stock. It came with no information and no provenance and since it has been in my possession nobody has been able to enlighten me in regard to its origin. It is  assumed that it originates somewhere near the Sepik River in Papua New Guinea. Beyond that it's cultural context is a mystery except that it most likely has a ritual significance.

Here it is clearly an example of 'wickery' that has traveled out of context as things do in a globalised world where the EXOTICother had (has?) a particular currency.

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