In conversation

Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War | Trish FitzSimons in Conversation with Geordie Williamson

Not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy.

Wool, for millennia the cold climate textile fiber, has a long relationship to war, both in terms of supporting it and causing it. Wool’s strategic value in wartime, a position it gained over centuries, and contrived shortages of same in the 20th century, have helped drive consumers’ transition to the synthetic fibers that have enabled fast fashion, and as both fiber and cloth are global contemporary pollutants.
Fleeced argues that the 19th century advent of southern hemisphere large scale sheep pastoralism and northern hemisphere industrialization of the woolen textile industry allowed – at least in part – the huge armies of the 20th century to exist. World War I represented a fundamental shift in the scale of armies and the kind of wars they fought. Demand for wool to outfit the tens of millions of men and women involved in fighting the war or supporting those who did grew way beyond what could be accommodated by any nation’s normal supply. The contrived wool shortages of this war had a lasting impact – nations subject to supply chain difficulties began the search for substitutes that led first to the semi-synthetic rayon, and ultimately to the plastic fibers such as polyester and acrylic that dominate today’s world of fast fashion.
Each chapter of Fleeced begins with a surprising object, document or image that takes us into this fascinating and previously untold history. Change is not necessarily progress.
Fleeced explains how competition for wool in wartime helped create our current unsustainable and environmentally disastrous reliance on petrochemical fibers.

Trish FitzSimons is adjunct professor at the Griffith Film School, Griffith University, Brisbane Australia. She is a documentary filmmaker and exhibition curator with a passion for social and cultural history. Her doctorate brought together her earlier degrees in social history and in filmmaking to consider how oral histories could bring an exhibition to life.

Trish will be in conversation with Geordie Williamson. Geordie has been chief literary critic of The Australian since 2008. He is publisher of the Picador imprint at Pan Macmillan, a former editor of Island Magazine and Best Australian Essays, and author of The Burning Library, a collection of essays on neglected figures from Australian literature.

Join Trish and Geordie at the Afterword Cafe.