BOB MESIBOV: Preindustrial Wickery Tightly Tied to Place

More than ceramics, jewelry, metalwork and woodwork, basketmaking in pre-industrial times was tightly tied to place. Basketmakers have always used fibre plants that grew locally. The nature of the local fibre plants determined how they made their baskets: flatwork, twining, coiling or a mixture. There aren't South Pacific plants that can be made into the strong split-bamboo work of Japanese basketmakers, and Japan doesn't have the "flax" that the Maori use for their mats, clothes, bags etc. Native Americans and Africans in desert places make tightly coiled grass and sedge baskets. Marsh dwellers everywhere use rushes.

While I was still a working basketmaker I spent 3 months in southern Chile (1983). I photographed the range of basketry made locally and talked to local basketmakers. As everywhere, basketmakers there used what was handy and abundant. An abalone diver's wife showed me the rough-and-ready baskets she made for her husband to use underwater, woven by twining a Juncus species indistinguishable from Tasmanian species. If you've never been to southern Chile, I can describe the vegetation to you as "Tasmania with more berries". There are many "tea-trees", and the attached photo shows what a sheep- and cattle-owner did with the tea-tree brush that grew up (as it does here) after clearing part of a paddock. The uprights are poles of a tree that doesn't rot in the ground, much like tallowwood fenceposts in Tasmania.

Southern Chilean farmers have very old cultural traditions. They were keeping livestock behind fences when the Spanish arrived in the 1500s. The Europeans who came to northwest Tasmania made log fences with great effort, and post-and-rail timber fences with even more effort, when tallowwood and tea-tree would have done the job more easily. Abalone diving is man's work in Tasmania, and men get their working gear from other men. Cultural geography is also in the mind.

Last year my wife and I were in the north of the North Island of New Zealand, and a girl told us her Maori grandma distinguished 80-odd different kinds of flax (harakeke, Phormium tenax). "Kinds" varied with soil, drainage, exposure etc. Each had multiple uses, but not every flax could be used for every purpose. The Maori cultivated flax in pre-European times. It is an extraordinarily useful fibre plant - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flax_in_New_Zealand.

James Cook found abundant flax and no warlike Maori on Norfolk Island, which led to the island's settlement. I'm sure you know the story:

'The first commandant, Philip King "noted in his report on the conditions on Norfolk Island dated 18 October 1796 that “flax needs no cultivation, as it grows sufficiently abundant on all the cliffs on the island …”. Philip Gidley King instructed convicts to harvest the plant from natural occurrences and to prepare it to make cloth. Their early attempts largely failed. King continued to believe in the possibility of a Flax industry on the island, but by 1791 was beginning to become despondent over efforts to successfully extract useable fibres. In his report of that year, King wrote that “every effort has been tryed to work it, but I much fear that until a native of New Zealand can be carried to Norfolk Island that the method of dressing that valuable commodity will not be known, and could that be obtained, I have no doubt but Norfolk Island would very soon cloath the inhabitants of New South Wales” (Historical Records of NSW, Vol. 1 Pt. 2, p. 429). Two Maori men from the North Island of New Zealand were taken to Norfolk Island in 1793, but were of little help in the preparation of the Flax, as it was apparently women’s work.'

- Mills, K. (2009) Was Phormium tenax introduced to Norfolk Island by the Polynesians? Cunninghamia (2009) 11(2): 171–175.

Cook and the Royal Navy wanted flax fibre for sails and for the dozens of types of ropes and cordage used on wooden sailing ships. Australia might have started a little differently if Maori women had been involved. Cultural geography is gender-biased.

Best wishes,

Bob