Jo Ritale: Yuma. Good evening everyone. It's my pleasure to welcome you all to the National Library of Australia. I'm Jo Ritale, assistant Director General of Collections here at the Library. Tonight's event is being held on the beautiful lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri People. I pay my respects to their elders past and present, and through them to all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

Thank you for attending this event, either in person or online. Before I continue, I would like to ask you to please ensure your mobile phones are turned off or are on silent.

How delightful to see so many of you here tonight for the launch of Trish FitzSimons and Madelyn Shaw's new book, 'Fleeced: Unravelling the History of Wool and War'. The book, which draws extensively on the National Library's collections, explores how throughout history heightened demand for wool in wartime existed in a vortex of negotiation, intrigue and anxiety. It is a fascinating and multilayered topic with repercussions from war victories through to today's contemporary consumer clothing culture. As we will hear soon, not everything about wool is warm and fuzzy. I have no doubt that tonight's conversation with facilitator Annabelle Quince, who many of you will know from her work on the ABC, will be both illuminating and memorable.

Our two authors bring a formidable array of talents and achievements. Trish FitzSimons is adjunct professor at the Griffith Film School, a documentary filmmaker, author, and exhibition curator with a passion for social and cultural history.

Madelyn Shaw is a curator and author specialising in the exploration of American culture and history and its international connections through textiles and dress. She has curated over 50 exhibitions and published widely on a range of topics.

This event is particularly special because earlier this evening, Trish and her family kindly donated a range of material to the Library collection, including letters, documents, photographs, and ephemera relating to wool buyer, Frederick Harper Booth, and his experience working in Australia's world trade. And I just spent a delightful half an hour with the family listening to stories about their grandfather. It was a really wonderful moment. And no doubt this collection will assist future researchers in their work and in possibly writing their own books. I thank the family for their very generous gift of knowledge to the Library. Without further ado, please join me in welcoming Trish, Madelyn, and Annabelle already to this stage. Thank you.

Annabelle Quince: Hello to everyone. I'll be asking the questions, but I want to start by saying a few things. And first off is that this book took over a decade to write and watching it emerge from numerous international trips, research trips, national research trips, endless family discussions, hours of interviews and hours of conversations about the interviews and enough research to fill half this library. And if you had to compare this book, the creation of this book, with a piece of clothing or a bit of fabric, it definitely isn't a piece of fast fashion. It's rather like a wool garment, organically grown, hand spun, probably on a wooden loom, dyed with plant-based dyes and sewed by hand in candlelight. In other words, it's a one-off.

And like all one-off garments or handmade garments. It was a labour of love by two people from different sides of the globe who cared enough about this story to get the history right, which is not something that happens all the time.

The story of the wool trade is of particular interest and I guess importance to us here in Australia, but it's bigger than that because it's a story about empire industrialization, modern warfare, the development of synthetic fibres. But in another way, I think it's got another message as well. And it's kind of a warning about what can happen if one nation controls the production and distribution of a vital commodity that basically we all needed. And sometimes that can have ramifications that are not always particularly good.

So before we get into the story, I just want to ask a simple question of the audience, which is how many of you here are actually wearing wool? Yep. Most of you. And I suspect that's because most of us are over 50 because the people under 50 are probably not wearing wool. Yes, I'm sure. And I think this is going to emerge about why some of us are wearing wool and why perhaps other of us aren't.

But I want to start with you, Madelyn, because it is a story about wool and there's something about wool that I guess makes it different from almost any other textile. And I'm wondering if you can explain to us the properties of wool and what that actually means in terms of how it's been used historically.

Madelyn Shaw: Well, wool is the fibre from a sheep. Not all sheep are woolly. Some are hairy, but woolly sheep, the fibre has a core that's empty that allows it to be insulating. And because it's a protein fibre, it doesn't melt. This is key. If you're in warfare. It has a crimp, so it can be spun and it can be felted. So it can be made to be fairly water resistant as a fabric. It wears crazy well, for those of us who have our 25-year-old wool slacks on. And it can be recycled. The word shoddy is actually, the original use of the term was for recycled wool fibre, and that comes from Yorkshire in about 1810, didn't become the meaning of inferior quality until the American Civil War. We talk about that a little.

Annabelle Quince: And it's also the property of warmth. Is there another fibre that is warmer than wool?

Madelyn Shaw: No.

Annabelle Quince: And so the thing is wool has literally been around for centuries and centuries, and yet really from the 1800s onwards, which is kind of when your book actually starts, it becomes one of the most, the globe's most valuable commodities. So explain what was happening at that moment, that wool suddenly become so much more valuable and important than perhaps it was before the 18th century.

Madelyn Shaw: It's really important that the Napoleonic Wars take up a good portion of the world because that throws Britain, it cuts Britain off from her resources on the continent. The Americas has a little bit of Canadian wool, but the United States has become the United States and not the British colonial area. And so they're cut off from sources of supply. Highland clearances were partly in order to clear people off the land for sheep because they needed the wool to provide uniforms for the military, the Navy and the army. And very early on in the settlement of Australia, they decide sheep would be good there. And that becomes a really important thing because that helps drive the industrial revolution in the wool manufacturing part, which happens about 30 to 40 years later than in the cotton.

Annabelle Quince: So the thing with Napoleonic Wars, in a sense, they needed a lot of wool for that war because it was one of the first wars, am I right in thinking that it was a war that went all year round? So they actually fought during the winter. They didn't stop during the winter, which to a large extent they had done before that.

Madelyn Shaw: Napoleon's retreat, I mean, I think that they went into Russia in the summer, but they didn't do so well, and they had to retreat in the winter. And this is something that happens again, World War II. So yeah, you can't survive in those climates without the right clothes, and you really needed the wool.

Annabelle Quince: So there was the Napoleonic War and also of course, industrialization. Those two things were happening round about the same time. So Trish, it's also as part of what the British did in terms of this, was that whole notion that Madelyn talks about, the expansion of the British Empire. The British came out and looked at what would work there, what would fit with what they wanted at home. How significant did Australia become in that story of war when they're wanting more wool and the creation of textiles? What part did we actually play in that?

Trish FitzSimons: So by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain has run out of land. There's been supply chain problems in the Napoleonic Wars. There's no more land in Britain. And Britain has the question of, well, what's going to happen to Australia when we're no longer a convict colony? John MacArthur is many things. One of the things he is is a great kind of marketer and showman. So when he's sent to Britain to be court marshalled in 1801, he's able to say, Hey, look, there's unlimited luxurious pastures over there. All they need is a few shepherds. John Big, by the time 1820 comes along and he's looking at the question of the future of Australia, he says, wool can be the staple. But it's also this great need. Britain's been burned. Like you were saying, Britain learns in the Napoleonic Wars what happens when you cut off from a key commodity. And somewhere there it's like, these colonies could be valuable to us.

We talk about the triple helix in the 19th century of definitely wool becoming industrialised in factories, which allows you to make wool much faster. It's sheep husbandry in Australia, people like the pepins who go through to the 1870s, but they're absolutely testing out what's going to be a fibre long enough to go into the industrial machines, but also animals that can survive.

And the third bit of it is frontier warfare. Britain cannot get the wool that it comes to have the stars in its eyes without the land. By the 1830s, slavery's been outlawed and people are talking about, we've got to treat indigenous people better. Well, now I think it's Governor Burke in 1835. He says, that's all very well, but we're not going to get the quantity and quality of wool that Britain needs if we pay attention to all this stuff. And Lindel Ryan in her work tells us that by, I think it's 1851, 2 Australian states, I'm assuming it's New South Wales and Victoria are providing fully half the wool that Yorkshire needs. It's not only Australia, New Zealand, South Africa. Eventually Britain is, are economic colonialists in places like Patagonia. And in all those places, indigenous people lose their land.

Annabelle Quince: And so without Australia, and what happened in that expansion of the sheep industry here, which of course had a huge impact on the indigenous community and also I guess the role that the indigenous community also played in the wool industry, could Britain and that whole, the industrialization of textiles and clothing, could it have happened without us?

Trish FitzSimons: I would say not. And we play with the hypothetical, and some in the room may roll their eyes, but that maybe the century of cold climate warfare could never have quite happened if there wasn't that huge expansion of woollen textile production based on a huge expansion as well of mostly southern hemisphere land. It's also, it wasn't that aboriginal people have been critical to the wool industry as well. [unclear] Bateman whose stories hold here, eight generations of her family have worked in the Australian wool industry and still, but two, it's often the same Aboriginal people, I'm thinking like Jan Demara in the Kimberley, the same aboriginal people that offer fierce resistance and warfare also have been absolutely critical. So absolutely critical to that wool industry. So it's, the 1830s in particular, I reckon are a fascinating decade in that regard.

Annabelle Quince: Madelyn, in the United States, wool didn't have the same story, doesn't have the same kind of resonance in terms of the kind of wool industry there, does it?

Madelyn Shaw: No, and that's a shame because it was really pretty big. But it's been really overshadowed by the story of cotton in the States. So there's really two sides of the American story. One is east of the Mississippi where there was small farmers who had sheep as a sideline, west of the Mississippi. Big ranges more like here, I think, but a lot on national forest lands. And again, indigenous people suffering all the way along as the colonists pushed to the Pacific Ocean.

Annabelle Quince: Yet wool played an incredibly important role in the US Civil War.

Madelyn Shaw: The shoddy scandals of the Civil War are one of my absolute favourite things ever. The US Army increased from about under 18,000 men in December 1860 to around 500,000 in June of 1861. That's the north, the Union Army. And they had no idea how they were going to outfit these people, but of course, they're getting contracts out and all of the uniform clothing manufacturers are saying, absolutely, we can get that fabric. And the textile manufacturers are saying, absolutely, we can give them that fabric. Oh, we don't have any wool. Oops. And so they start using shoddy, which as I said is the technical term for recycled wool, but they're using a little bit more than they had before, maybe more than a little bit more, and it does not go very well. And so the uniforms are falling apart and they're not waterproof. There are these gigantic investigations in Connecticut and Massachusetts and New York and Pennsylvania and a federal investigation, and that's called the shoddy scandals. And that's when the word shoddy changes from this benign textile term to deliberately inferior quality.

Annabelle Quince: So the wool that they actually got to make all these thousands of uniforms during the Civil War, where did that wool come from?

Madelyn Shaw: Some of it came from here, New Zealand, Australia. A lot of it came from the Western territories in North America. A lot of it came from places like unusual places like Lebanon, Syria, they were trying to get it from all kinds of places. The South had very much more limited access because of the blockade. Blockades are very effective at keeping the blockaded from getting the things they need.

Annabelle Quince: And I'm just wondering, what did it do in America to their textile industry? The whole making of those uniforms and the concentration of it, did it actually redefine textile making and cloth making in the United States?

Madelyn Shaw: Yes. The uniforms, when you're outfitting armies of millions, you need to streamline your manufacturing. And so sizes, there were three sizes, and it's kind of small, medium, large, but everything was started where originally it had been sort of workshop production and outwork. It began to be concentrated. And the same with textiles, really the textile industry, the woollen industry in particular grew hugely during the war. And it was inspired by the demand.

Annabelle Quince: With that demand. And especially as you get towards the 20th century, Trish, clearly we had a lot of wool. Other bits of the British empire had a lot of wool. But I'm just wondering who actually, I guess controlled and funded most of that production and trade in wool.

Trish FitzSimons: I think it's very interesting that the Australian government was much more involved in the wool industry here, and there was much more kind of, oh, well, the fact that the big report puts wool front and centre for Australia's future. One of the things we came, when my grandfather is learning the wool trade in America in the very beginning of the 20th century, he goes out to St. Louis and looks at the wool coming from the territories, and sorry Madelyn, but he says what rubbish, full of sand, wool from Hawaii was said to be full of rocks. In Australia wool classing develops as an absolutely critical, critical occupation, as does wool broking. And it's all you think about the inner cities of Australia. They're all, most of our cities have got this huge area that was for the wool trade. The wool auction was right in the centre of Sydney. So it's that phrase, Australia, I might be going out of too far here, shall I stop?

Annabelle Quince: No.

Trish FitzSimons: Australia riding on the sheep's back. We've tracked that back to the Sydney Easter show in 1924, and it's the Minister for Agriculture. And wool's been a real problem after the First World War, big stockpiles, he's saying, riding on the sheep's back. A year later, Australia is said to have come a cropper from that back. But the, although of course squatters are going beyond the realms of government, there's a lot of tacit acceptance of what's going on.

Annabelle Quince: But I'm just wondering who actually funds it, because I can't believe we had the money in the colonies to fund the industry.

Trish FitzSimons: John MacArthur, when he goes back to Britain at the beginning of the 19th century, he says, we need men of capital and in 1824, we need men of capital and we need labour. In 1824, the Australian Agricultural Company, which is neither Australian nor agricultural in its central workings, gets given a million acres of Australia and they get to choose it. It includes the [unclear] who sold MacArthur's wool, the land they choose, Oxley'ss gone west, and so they choose the land around Newcastle, discover it's useless for wool, but it's got rather good coal. So they get give half of it back and then choose 300,000 acres around Tamworth, Gargano. Ditto, Tasmania, the Van Diemonds Land Company, which is full of wool buyers. So it is given about 300,000 acres of land. Don't have a clue how to be run wool Well, so it's the empire.

Annabelle Quince: So a lot of the money comes from Britain.

Trish FitzSimons: Absolutely. Yeah.

Annabelle Quince: So when you get to the beginning of World War I, how much, just globally, when people were going to make a uniform, if you're going to go to war and have make a uniform, does everyone look towards wool? Is that at that point wool is the thing that you want when you're going to go to war.

Madelyn Shaw: Absolutely.

Annabelle Quince: So just Madelyn, give us an idea of how much wool is required. If you're going to outfit one soldier at the beginning of World War I, how much wool would you need and how many sheep would you need to get that wool?

Madelyn Shaw: I can tell you how many sheep, I'm not sure I can tell you how many pounds of wool that relates to. But in the beginning of World War I, they assumed that it would take 20 sheep to outfit a soldier once. World War II, it went up to 26 sheep.

Annabelle Quince: That's just once. If you had a soldier working.

Madelyn Shaw: That's once, so that could outfit a person their first full outfit. So that would be including their blankets and their overcoat and their uniform and probably their socks and their undershirt and their regular whatever was underneath their regular uniform, was mostly wool. There may have been some cotton in the undershirt or a shirt, but that was it.

Annabelle Quince: And so if I'm right in thinking there was something like a million soldiers in the First World War, is that?

Madelyn Shaw: Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no. 60 to 70 million.

Annabelle Quince: 60 to 70 million. Okay. No, sorry. Yes, that's right. Okay.

Madelyn Shaw: That's a lot of sheep.

Annabelle Quince: That's a lot of sheep. That's a big demand. So Trish, clearly we would've been incredibly important in that if the Brits are going to war, our wool would be incredibly important. So did the Brits say, okay, we'll pay you heap load of money for your walkers. We need it now.

Trish FitzSimons: Early on in the first World War, Britain is trying to work out how to control the wool of its dominions. It blockades Germany so that wool can't get through. It makes, by 1915, wool has been named as contraband. Probably it would like to have immediately commandeered at all, but it doesn't. Instead, one of the documents associated with my grandfather in 1915, the British are afraid that Australian wool will get through the United States to Germany via a back door. So there's three levels of complicated bureaucracy.

By December, November, 1916, the Brits say, right, that'll be our wool, and we'll shut down the auctions. We'll pay you 15 pence a pound. It must be said Billy Hughes, our then Prime Minister was very keen about this. Initially things became much less keen as the price of wool kept on inflating and the price the farmers were being paid for it did not go up. So there's a lot of argy-bargy in the First World War. New Zealand is in the same boat. Britain commandeers their wool as well. But one thing that makes Australian farmers accepted is that they are paid for their wool at source, whether or not that wool, whether they can get it onto a ship, because of course shipping is a huge deal. There are those who say Britain was buying Australian wool to kind of stockpile in Australia. So those bastards over there couldn't get the wool they needed for their soldiers. I couldn't possibly say.

Annabelle Quince: Well, Madelyn, I was going to say, what did that mean? Because clearly Britain had a huge advantage having the empire in which they could source their wool. So what did that mean for the central European powers, Germany and the Austria-Hungarian Empire? What did they do? How did they cope?

Madelyn Shaw: Substitutes. And one chapter, one whole chapter is about the [unclear] that Germany primarily, with some Austrian help, develops in many different ways using many different things. Not just shoddy, because shoddy is after a wool and you have to get the rags to make the shoddy from, so they're not getting much of that. They do nettles, stinging nettles, they do milkweed fibre, they try to do that. They do cattail fibre, they try to do that. There's a seaweed that's called [unclear]. They try that, but they can't get it from New Guinea either. So that doesn't work out so well. They use up that stock pretty quickly.

And actually the most important substitute they had was paper. So spun paper yarns that have been around since about 1907. They were used for sacks for wool, actually, because they didn't put fibre into the wool of the way jute would. And they were made into matting and wall coverings and stuff. And then during the war, they became first used for civilian things to allow all the wool to go to the military. By the end of the war, the National Museum of American History has this collection of about 40 objects that were military objects. So trench tool covers and feed bags for horses and all kinds of things that were made out of spun paper yarns.

Annabelle Quince: And how good were those textiles compared to wool?

Madelyn Shaw: Not so good. You don't want to be caught in too much rain and mud even though they had a little bit of waterproofing added to them, but they lasted surprisingly well. There are a couple of pieces in the Smithsonian collection that were used, and they're still in good shape. But no, there's no absolutely no comparison. But they had literally nothing else.

Annabelle Quince: I know it's a big call, but how significant do you think the Brits and the allies access to wool and the ability to actually clothe their army in a very professional way meant in terms of the fact that they won in the first World War?

Madelyn Shaw: I think that's really hard to answer, but I would think that, well, I know for example, we know that the British were also experimenting with paper yarns in 1917, 18. And the Americans were very happy to have access to the German, the stuff that was left over to check it out after the war. Because if the war had lasted another year or two, the British might've been wearing paper too. They couldn't get the wool from Australia at that point. You've got this huge extended supply chain. And I think, I don't know how we answer that is the short answer.

Annabelle Quince: What do you think, Trish, that people learned from that? That experience where clearly for one side having access to a commodity like wool was so valuable, and for nations that didn't have that access, what did that mean?

Trish FitzSimons: I mean, it meant that they weren't going to be caught like that again. We talk a lot about the wool have-not nations, and I think we should throw to Madelyn to talk about rayon because it becomes so central in the interwar period. But basically, our book traces this sequence of conflicts through the 20th century where the have-not nations, manufacturing nations that don't have their whole supply chain secure. They can't let it keep happening. So they have to find alternatives.

Annabelle Quince: So just before we even to rayon explain what rayon actually is.

Madelyn Shaw: Rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre. That means that you take the cellulose from trees or whatever else you can find, and you turn it into a slurry and add chemicals, and then you shoot it through something that looks a lot like a shower head, and it makes thousands of filaments as it goes, and it goes through either another chemical bath on its way out of that shower head, or it goes through some kind of air system, which hardens it up into this thread. And so while it's called a semisynthetic, because it is not naturally occurring, but it's made from a natural source with chemical help. So that's what it is.

And it's been around since at least the 1870s, 80s, but it wasn't commercially viable until about 1911. And it was originally a French discovery invention. It was rapidly adopted in the interwar period. What we found so interesting was that the big push to look at rayon and to try and figure out could rayon replace wool was Germany, Italy, Japan, the US, all of which had been suffering in World War I from not having access to wool and the UK which had suffered because of the supply chain length.

So all of these countries are looking at ways to try and turn rayon, which was originally artificial silk and really shiny and clammy, and it was a terrible fibre, trying to make it better and trying to make it something that was not shiny and that could be spun into something that would resemble cotton and/or wool.

Annabelle Quince: And was there a whole different, I guess, production cycle? Because it seems to me that the producing and the marketing of wool was a certain way in which they did it, but rayon somehow seemed to be different.

Madelyn Shaw: It's very different because it's not the same kind of family oriented business. Rayon involves a lot of chemicals, a lot of chemical companies like DuPont became very important in the rayon industry, making the fibre, and then from the chemical companies creating fibres, then it went over to the textile companies.

Trish FitzSimons: I think it's worth coming in here to say that wool is the most variable fibre of any. I think it's something like in 1903, Australia recognises 801 different kinds of wool. And rayon as the semisynthetic and then the synthetics, although you can keep changing their formula as you try and work with their weaknesses, the capacity to sort of standardise and to have a much simpler supply chain, but also production chain, is a critical part of what eventually brings synthetics to the fore.

Annabelle Quince: It was very clear, especially in the beginning, that those or rayon particularly didn't have the same qualities you talked about right in the very beginning that make wool so substantial. So I'm just wondering, how did these companies go about selling this material that wasn't nearly as good?

Trish FitzSimons: Well, DuPont had very deep pockets from selling gun powder to both sides in the First World War. And they, even before the First World War, they had started to have deep research laboratories in Delaware and brilliant chemists like Wallace Carruthers who just get given years and sometimes decades to develop things. But also the marketing that synthetics have on their side is absolutely striking. And it's especially striking when you look at some of the internal documents being in the DuPont Archive at the Hagley Library, looking at what they're saying about all on in the 50s, basically how crap it is. Whilst, meanwhile there's fabulous glossy advertising. So yeah.

Annabelle Quince: When we get to the Second World War, the second big war in the 20th century, I'm just wondering, was there the same demand for wool as there was in the First World War?

Madelyn Shaw: There was more because there were now a hundred million people serving in the armed forces around the world. That made it even more difficult because sheep had not, there weren't that many sheep. There hadn't been that many sheep in the first world war, and there certainly weren't that many after a decade of depression. But what happens is that Germany, Japan, and Italy, all of them in about 1937 start mandating blends of rayon with other fibres, especially wool. So if you bought, and they could market it as a hundred percent as a wool fibre, a wool fabric, even though it was 30%, 20%, 25, 30% wool rayon. That also happens in the uniforms. So in 1939, German uniforms were 15% rayon and 85% wool. By 1945, they were the opposite. 

But the idea of mandating blends for civilians, that I think is really one of the key things in terms of marketing, because it means people have become accustomed to having these blended fabrics and they're marketed is lighter weight and everybody has central heating, and we don't need all that hot wool. And so together, I think those make a big deal, make a big difference.

Trish FitzSimons: But it is interesting that in the Second World War, US quartermasters are still hanging out fundamentally for wool, as I think Madelyn said before this time, they need 26 of them. So there's no question that the people who are charged with the responsibility of keeping soldiers alive know where quality lies. But that isn't how it works out as if you don't have the clothing.

Annabelle Quince: Yeah, and I'm just wondering, you mentioned in the very beginning that one of the incredibly good properties of wool was the fact that it's is very resistant to flames and things like that. And so what did that mean if you had uniforms that had large percentages of rayon or synthetics or whatever in them? Did that make them more dangerous to be worn if you were an air pilot or in a submarine? Was there a fire anywhere? Did it make it more dangerous to wear those kind of uniforms?

Madelyn Shaw: I think it probably did. I can't imagine that suffering through a Russian winter in a uniform that was half-rayon was a good idea or very helpful. I've lost my train of thought. Sorry.

Annabelle Quince: Well, just going back to the politics of it as well, because clearly we heard in World War I, the Brits cornered off their, the wool from the colonies for themselves. Did we see a similar pattern in World War II?

Trish FitzSimons: Absolutely. But this time, right from the beginning of the war. So whereas in World War, it takes them a couple of years to sort of work out their bureaucracy. World War II, you've got a central wool committee in Australia. You've got wool declared contraband in Britain. You've got a fixed price again, this time less than the World War I price, although it does go up, I think by 1942, it's at least back to where it had been in World War I. But yes, there's quite a lot of rerunning in World War II. Everybody knows what the game is, I guess. Yeah.

Annabelle Quince: With the end of the war, this is both in the First World War and the Second World War is, because you've said there's this huge amount of demand where everything ramps up in this sort of textile industries to clothe these soldiers. What happens at the end? Was there that kind of boom and bust cycle with wool?

Trish FitzSimons: There absolutely is. There's a huge, in Australia, at the end of the First World War, I think there's 2 million bales here, there's another big stockpile in Britain and a bloke called Billy Gaunt buys all the British stockpile for 1% of its cost, much to the dismay of his colleagues. But there's great fear that this stockpile will create a real problem. But actually there's quite a clever bureaucracy both times in World War I. It's called Bawra, B-A-W-R-A, and the stockpiles clear much faster than expected. After World War II, we start to get into beginnings of Cold War Korea and kind of fear that war is going to break out again as well as of course, the actual Korean War. So there is a problem with booms and busts, but there are solutions.

Burtons, Montague Burton, who's a Jewish man, I think his name's Meshe Osinsky, comes to Britain in World War I. By World War II he's, I think he's creating 30% of British uniforms. He convinces the British government to give every soldier a demobilisation full wool suit with all the kind of, get rid of the austerity, tailoring. And that becomes Burton's, which is the biggest men's wear, biggest men's wear department store in Britain for many decades. So you can see that clever business persons work out how to kind of ride these waves.

Madelyn Shaw: I also wanted to just say that wool was used for so many other things besides just uniforms. And we do touch on that a little bit in the book. At one point I told her, I'm going to bring this, I wanted to put this in the book, but I lost the piece of paper it was on, and I only found it a week ago, and this is it. So you can see why I would've lost that in my acres of files. So in World War II, this is from the National Archives, wool was used to make air raid shelters, fill inner tubes. It was a substitute for kpac. It was packed behind armour plating as insulation and fire protection, and it was compressed itself to use as armour. And 545 rolls of wool, garnished, wire netting, camouflage were sold to the Australian army in 1944. Thank you very much.

Annabelle Quince: The other interesting thing, you mentioned Trish before about the sort of giving suits to people at the end of the war, and it wasn't just in Britain a lot of places, that whole notion that suddenly at the end of the war people wanted suits, they wanted to dress differently. And we almost started to change the way tailoring happened because wasn't there a sense that beforehand you would go and get a suit made for you, and then suddenly you would have readymade, you could go and buy stuff. And I'm wondering what part that sort of played.

Trish FitzSimons: A huge part, I'll throw to Madelyn, but just to say that with Burton's, I think the Burton suits during World War II are 75% made to measure. Those statistics quickly shift once it becomes a retail empire after World War II. But Madelyn's got a much better fix than I do on the shift to ready to wear.

Madelyn Shaw: And that's different in every country. So in Britain and Australia, it tends to be a little bit later than it is in the States. So in the US it is really the Civil War that transforms ready to wear men's wear. If you could afford it, even up through into the 20s and 30s, you would have your suit made to order. You could also buy made to measure where you sent your measurements to what was called a merchant tailor, and then they would make a suit and send it back to you, and it sort of fit. Or you could just go to the department store or the men's wear shop and buy a suit off the rack that sort of fit. And that's where we are mostly today.

Annabelle Quince: World War II was clearly a period where we started to see the nylons and synthetics being blended. So was there a fear or was there a sense that these synthetic fibres could actually take over from wool after the war?

Trish FitzSimons: Absolutely. And even back into the 30s, Senator Guthrie, who's an Australian senator, can really see that we could lose our national industry here. We don't talk about Malcolm Gladwell's tipping points, but I think our book shows the example of how there's a tendency towards change in a system for a long time before it actually sort of pivots. So it's not until the mid-50s that really synthetic start to take off, but the R&D is going on very extensively between the wars and also in the war. So polyester begins as Lene developed by ICI in Britain with chemists that have got DuPont connections. Meanwhile allon starts out as fibre A then gets called allon, then it just becomes acrylic. But you've got these sort of subterranean, those synthetic manufacturing bastards, says she who, I am passionate, I love wool for all it's for all its problems. But yes.

Madelyn Shaw: I'm wearing polyester. Oops.

Annabelle Quince: So it's interesting then as you say in the 1950s, it starts to take off. So in a sense, was the Korean War a bit of a boom for wool? Was it kind of the last blast where suddenly war was, again, incredible demand?

Trish FitzSimons: Absolutely because the Korean War is a minnow. There's only 6 million soldiers in the Korean War compared to hundreds of millions in World War ii. But there's fear that hot war could break out in Europe as well. American quartermasters want wool. They think that Australia should give them wool with a privileged kind of relationship the way Australia had given Britain wool like that. Australia and New Zealand don't see it like that, especially New Zealand. They'd started selling a lot of wool to Russia, this kind of diplomatic argy-bargy. And meanwhile, Congress just basically tells the quartermaster, buy at whatever price you need. We'll sort it out later. For the Summer Street, Boston wool manufacturers and wool buyers, this is a disaster. As Charlie Massey told us in a beautiful interview he did, they buy up here, the price crashes. It's not actually, it's not the end of all wool because the Cold War ends up being a surprising new market.

But it's a, the Korean War is a time that many Australian families might remember as the first Mercedes. I heard of a family that, not that we ever had any Mercedes, but anyway, we didn't grow wool. I heard of a family that paid off two thirds of their mortgage from one year's wool. Helen Closier tells lots of stories from Western Queensland of what that money meant. But for the industry as a whole, it's an absolute disaster because by the time of the Korean War, wool is not the only way to keep somebody warm. And that started, down and synthetics, have started to really get their toes in. Madelyn.

Madelyn Shaw: Parkas and sleeping bags.

Trish FitzSimons: Yeah.

Annabelle Quince: So how quickly after the Korean War, which was clearly a boom time for wool, did that start to change? When did we start to see the tipping point where a good wool jumper became polar fleece or became a down jacket?

Trish FitzSimons: Well, wool keeps growing in raw kind of terms. The world keeps getting more wool till I think about 1970. But meanwhile, because rayon and then synthetics are cheaper, we're seeing the roots of the current fast fashion disaster. There's just more and more textiles. And wool's percentage is collapsing or is tending down.

When it really comes to a head is in the 1980s. We have the breakdown of the Soviet Union, Tianmen, the breakup of Yugoslavia. These Eastern block countries actually had continued to use a lot of wool. Meanwhile, we've got Australian, the wool price reserve scheme keeping the wool price artificially high. It all kind of collapses around 1989, 90. And meanwhile over in the Malden mills in Massachusetts, Patagonia working with Malden has developed polar fleece, which is a form of polyester that really gives wool a run for its money. And so you get a kind of changing of the guard.

Annabelle Quince: So Madelyn, explain that. How did that come about? There must have been a huge amount of research to get something that started to compete with wool. And was that always the standard? Is that what they were, the holy grail?

Madelyn Shaw: Absolutely. The standard was how do we compete with wool? I mean, starting back with paper in World War I. So what they have to do is figure out how to make polyester keep you warm. And so polar fleece is knitted fabric. That is, it's got to have a nap on it so that it holds air to be in insulating and they find amazing ways to do this. 

We did a podcast, a YouTube podcast with a woman named Tricia Nguyen in the US and she was one of the engineers, the textile engineers who worked with Malden Mills on the development of polar fleece polar tech. And it's fascinating, her stories about it. It's not something that, I can't really explain how they do it, but I mean everybody, they're on the cover of the book that came from my closet. I'm going to get stoned. But everybody has half a dozen fleece jackets or vests or something because you can throw them in the wash and they come out. And what they don't do is not melt on you. I mean, if you want to be warm and flame resistant, you must have wool.

Trish FitzSimons:
And it's also because people are in cars with heaters because there is central heating, because there are clothes dryers. Wool and clothes dryers don't go together so well. So the whole kind of surrounding context comes to be based on synthetics. I was an exchange student in the 70s, and when I showed my American host mother my natural fibre wardrobe, let's just say she wasn't happy.

Annabelle Quince: And how much did price also play in that? The ability for these companies to make these new manmade fibre so much more cheaply?

Madelyn Shaw: It's a huge thing. Even back in the thirties, there's one of the chapters is titled 'Mary has Two New Dresses', and to be able to get 2 for what you used to have to pay for 1 because the fabric is so much less expensive. There's also another issue, which is that in the marketing of these things, they're pushing people towards wearing things for far shorter periods of time. So style changes ramp up. They're trying very hard to make you consume more at a lower price and then throw it away and buy more. So the roots of fast fashion are not 10, 20 years old. They're back into the 20s, the 1920s.

Annabelle Quince: And in this essence, I'm just rounding up, we're going to run out of time, but do you think it was almost inevitable, because of the way the wool industry was structured, because of the control that say Britain had over so much of this industry, that inevitably people were going to look for alternatives? Or could it have been different?

Trish FitzSimons: I mean, I don't think history is ever locked in an absolutely teleological lockstep. But you can see big tendencies pushing that way. When I was thinking about today, I think from the minute from the Napoleonic Wars, when Britain's supply chain problems get them to look to their dominions, think land, there's land, are prepared to oversee a form of invasion and colonialism, that that is about taking away sovereignty from aboriginal people. And all that then flows from that. Some version of this, it seems to me is likely, but I don't think you can ever say it was all locked in.

Madelyn Shaw: And also the population of the world gets bigger and bigger and bigger all the time. And there simply are not enough sheep to clothe everybody. We can't go back to only having natural fibres. It just won't work. There are too many of us. But what we strongly believe is you just have to buy less. You have to buy better quality, you have to take care of it, and you have to wear it longer, and you have to learn to sew.

Annabelle Quince: And look, I think we've got time for maybe a couple of questions. If anyone has a question.

Audience member 1: How did you work together? [unclear]

Madelyn Shaw: It kind of fell out naturally in terms of our peculiar interests.

Annabelle Quince: The question was how did these two and from different sides of the world work together?

Madelyn Shaw: Yeah, and let me just tell you that that was not altogether easy because one of us was drinking coffee and the other one was drinking wine whenever we zoomed. So yeah, it came out kind of organically in the end, I think, depending on which chapter. But what was really great about this for both of us is that we found that our writing got better as we worked on each other's work. So we each drafted four chapters and then we sent the chapters to the other one to add, to edit. And this of course did not just happened once endlessly, but in the end I think it's better for having had both of us work on it.

Trish FitzSimons: I totally agree. And we had different strengths and different areas of knowledge, but respecting each other and then being each other's first kind of, first critic really for what we'd written was torture sometimes. She's tough.

Madelyn Shaw: We also have very similar senses of humour. This is key. And very similar work ethics, which is also perhaps even more key.

Annabelle Quince: One of the other interesting things is, and we mentioned at the beginning that it was 10 years or 11 years since you two actually met. But I'm wondering, could you have focused as keenly on this issue if in some ways both of you weren't to some extent personally invested. Because you have a family connection through textiles and the creation of textiles. And Trish, you have a family connection in relation to trading and making a lot of money out of wool. So I'm just wondering how significant that was, do you think, for each of you in terms of being able to stay with a project like this?

Madelyn Shaw: I think we're both just a little crazy. We enjoyed it and we learned so much and we kept learning, dragging each other out of rabbit holes constantly.

Trish FitzSimons: I think as well, I mean at the beginning, we weren't going to write a book. We were going to make an exhibition, an international travelling exhibition. Anyway, along the way, we did a whole lot of things with this topic, but I for one, wouldn't be sitting here having written this book without Griffith University's critical support early on. Equally, I don't think I would be sitting here having written this book if I hadn't become adjunct professor 4 and a half years ago. Like I'm glad the productivity commission isn't looking at the output of our labour. It was a labour of love.

Madelyn Shaw: And I had a fellowship that Griffith gave us to see if the idea had legs. Then I had a Fulbright here in Australia, thank you, Fulbright commission. And then I had the National Library Fellowship in 2022, and Trish had a Queensland Smithsonian Fellowship in 2019. We kind of overlapped. I left for Australia while she was in Washington.

Trish FitzSimons: Australian Wool Innovation, Australia wool innovation gave us money early to make a film 'Fabric of War: Why Wool'.

Madelyn Shaw: We had fabulous support in a lot of different ways. And friends and family.

Trish FitzSimons: Family and friends put up with us, put us up, put us up to things where we've had enormous support for this project.

Madelyn Shaw: Which is why the acknowledgements take so long in the book.

Annabelle Quince: Are there any other questions?

Audience member 2: Thank you for that. Clothing moths can destroy wool. So has there been any adverse impacts on relying on it so heavily in war and other uses on [unclear]?

Trish FitzSimons: That's a great question Becky.

Madelyn Shaw: So is the question whether moths were a problem during the war? No. They didn't stand still long enough to acquire the moth. They may have done in the storage because not only was there something in reserve behind the lines, there was something coming to the reserve behind the lines, and then there was something in storage on the other side of the ocean, and then there was something being made. So somewhere along the line, there may have been some moth issues, but they were very, very careful because the wool costs so much.

Trish FitzSimons: I think as well that when wool has got lanolin in it, I don't think that moths attack it. And I think that was part of why wool was such an ideal export industry for Australia because it could get to the other side of the world and go through its difficult processes. But moths in Brisbane are extraordinarily bad. And if the whole story had played out in Brisbane, I think it might've been quite a different story.

Annabelle Quince: One more question. Oh, sorry. I'll come there next.

Audience member 3: Thanks for that. It was very interesting. I take it the title of your book 'Fleeced' refers to the fact that the mother country fleeced colonies. Is that part of the connotation or?

Madelyn Shaw: It has many different aspects to it, yes, but that is one of them.

Audience member 3: One of them. Okay. Well, more prosaic question. So in the years when war was in great demand and the colonies were trying to grow more, what was the main factor limiting the extension? Was it the clearing of the land, the improved pastures, or was it the graziers?

Trish FitzSimons: Well, sheep husbandry is absolutely critical to what creates the Australian wool industry, but it has its limits. You cannot expect to have sheep alive in the just [unclear], and I think we had the Griffith Taylor map up there, didn't we? So families like the [unclear] on the Murray spent a good decade more really breeding sheep that could survive in the Australian climate, whereas the original Spanish merinos couldn't possibly have survived in the outback. But yes, there are limits. So just as Britain, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars has no more land for sheep to go, I think Madelyn's right that with the 8 billion in the world right now, it's not like that there's some magic place where we could all be clothed in wool. So yeah, it's a complicated mixture of geography and sheep husbandry.

Annabelle Quince: One more question at the back.

Audience member 4: Kia Ora. Hello. Nice to see you all. Thanks you for coming. Usually I don't talk at these things. I guess you could say I'm a bit sheepish. Look, the question I had was mostly, and it might be more of a post-war industry, but it's around how sort of these more niche wool markets came around. So things like your Irish cottage industries, cashmere, that sort of thing. Is this something that plays into the wider picture of 'Fleeced' or is it something that really has come after the war when they've sort of tried to go into these niche markets, luxury markets, and that's now where wool lives in a sense.

Madelyn Shaw: In the states, there's a huge number of sheep and wool festivals around the country all the time, and they're very popular. Knitting is very popular. Hand weaving is very popular as craft work. But it's not a big, it makes big money for yarn people and whatnot. But it's not the kind of scale that the textile industry in the states used to be, the woollen industry. And I think the same is true here.

Trish FitzSimons: Going back, I mean there were kind of alternatives to sheep as a major industrial textile in the 19th century. Salt air, for instance, in just near Bradford in Yorkshire, it was set up based on, now I'm having a brain blank. Is it cashmere?

Madelyn Shaw: Alpaca.

Trish FitzSimons: Alpaca. Thank you, Madelyn.

Madelyn Shaw: And mohair, sorry.

Trish FitzSimons: So there's exploration of alternatives, but essentially sheep and wool work so well, and in the case of Australia, as I say, get a lot of support. But coming to Ireland, Britain is controlling or trying to control the wool of its kind of internal dominions, if you like, for a long time. And we haven't said, Britain has 600 years when wool is the heart of its economy before it even gets to the 19th century and the fact that these dominions can expand it. So chapter 2 of our book is a kind of race through a much, a couple of thousand years of wool history. But I dunno that you'll find all the answers that you're looking for, but you might find some starting points.

Annabelle Quince: Which is a plug to say, go and buy the book.

Jo Ritale: I'm sorry, I am going to have to call an end to questions for now. So thank you Trish and Madelyn for that wonderful discussion. And to Annabelle and our audience for those well considered questions. The authors are now going to make their way to the foyer where copies of the book can be purchased for signing, and you can ask some more questions there, I'm sure. I hope you enjoyed tonight's event. Remember to check the Library's What's on page for more great upcoming programmes and events, and please join me again in thanking our guests tonight. Thank you.