Floating life: contemporary Aboriginal fibre art

76 Opposite Lola Greeno Palawa people TAS b.1946 Sea mother 1999 Maireener shells collected from Lady Barron and Flinders Island, with double strength quilting thread 203 x 1.5 x 1.5cm Acc. 2000.130 Purchased 2000. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Green maireener necklace 2007 Green maireener shells with double strength quilting thread 180 x 1.5cm Acc. 2008.087 Purchased 2008. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Grant Left Aunti Corrie Fullard Palawa people TAS b.1931 Traditional Palawa shell necklace (detail) 2007 Large golden star and blue maireener shells collected from Flinders Island, with synthetic thread 168 x 1.5cm Acc. 2007.203 Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Right Charles Alfred Woolley Australia 1834–1922 Portrait of Truganini c.1866 Hand-coloured photograph 14.2cm x 8.7cm Collection: National Library of Australia Endnotes 1. Penny McLeod, ‘Spectacular reef discovered’, Mercury , 19 January 2009, <http://www.themercury.com.au/article/2009/01/19/50401_tasmania-news.html> , viewed May 2009. 2. For further information on the history of shell necklace making see Lola Greeno, ‘Maireener: Tasmanian Aboriginal shell necklaces’, in Amanda Jane Reynolds (ed.), Keeping Culture: Aboriginal Tasmania , National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra, 2006, pp.45–58. put the lie to the notion that Tasmania’s Indigenous people and their culture are entirely lost to the past. Two necklaces each by Aunti Corrie Fullard, Lola Greeno and Jeannette James feature in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, and their works are comprised variously of black crow, golden star, green maireener and penguin shells. The golden star and, in particular, the green maireener shells possess an iridescent inner surface. Their lustre has an otherworldly beauty that the makers know needs just the simplest presentation. Greeno’s strands feature only the radiant maireeners, each one cupping its neighbour in a herringbone pattern that is elegant in its simplicity. Fullard similarly presents a strand of golden star shells, which have a lighter, more ethereal glow, and another that matches them with paler green maireener shells. James’s two necklaces include black crow and penguin shells as a foil to the green maireeners. The beauty of these necklaces is that all their complexity resides in the natural objects, with their perfect geometry and miraculous colours. Perhaps it is this subtlety that kept the Indigenous shell necklaces in relative obscurity for much of Tasmania’s history. One must be grateful, however, that something so brilliant has emerged from so sombre a past.