Track 1: Indigenous Storytelling

Possum skin cloaks are traditional to Indigenous tribes of south-eastern Australia. They prove these groups had a culture that was distinct from Indigenous people elsewhere, and the designs are rich with meaning about the wearer’s country and identity.

In the earliest days of colonisation Europeans traded blankets and other items with Indigenous people. From this time on the craft of making possum skin cloaks began to wane among Indigenous people, but it never died out.

To this day artists such as Vicki Couzens have kept the tradition alive, and cloaks are made as a way of remembering and passing on culture.

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Illustration

Richard Daintree and Antoine Fauchery, Group of Aboriginal men, some wearing possum skin cloaks and some wearing blankets, c 1858, albumen silver photograph from Sun Pictures of Victoria album, H84.167/48

Transcript

Welcome

Welcome to the State Library of Victoria and to the exhibition The Independent Type: Books and writing in Victoria. My name is Ramona Koval, from The Book Show, which you can hear every weekday on ABC Radio National at 10am and 8pm. As you walk around the gallery, I’ll talk about some of the works on display. Just press 'Pause' if you need more time to look at an item before moving onto the next. Look out for the corresponding audio tour track number which will be marked on the label for that particular object.

Part 1: Indigenous storytelling

Possum skin cloaks give us an insight into the lives and storytelling traditions of Aboriginal people. Each cloak is unique and the stories of its owner are incised into the skins on the cloak. The designs symbolise the owner's country, its geographical features, such as waterholes and lava flows, the natural environment, such as the markings of lizards and snakes, or technology, such as the design of eel traps. The possum skin cloaks were both waterproof and versatile: they were used for bedding, as slings for babies, in ceremonies as drums, for storytelling and to pass on knowledge.

This magnificent contemporary possum skin cloak has been made by Vicki Couzens, a Gunditjmara woman from the Keerray Wurrong language group of Western Victoria. It tells the story of the Tuuram Gundidj, one of the 21 clans of the Keerray Wurrong. The personal history of Couzens's family is inscribed in the pelts. One skin depicts a map of the Framlingham Reserve in 1935, showing the houses where Couzens's grandparents and other relatives lived and another pelt shows a fish trap near the reserve. The last panel of the cloak depicts Massacre Bay near Peterborough, where people were driven off the cliff to fall to the beach below. The Tuuram Gundidj's campsites, meeting places and their boundaries are all depicted on this cloak.

In 1999 Vicki Couzens and her sister Debra saw for the first time a cloak that had been made in their grandmother's country. This nineteenth-century cloak known as the Lake Condah cloak is held in the Museum of Victoria collection. Vicki and Debra Couzens decided to research the early cloak-making tradition and replicate the cloak. It was the beginning of the rejuvenation of the cloak-making tradition in Victoria. The long-term aim is to make cloaks for the 21 clans of the Keerray Wurrong language group.