Drawing extensively on the National Library’s collections, Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War explores how, throughout history, heightened demand for wool in wartime existed in a vortex of negotiation, intrigue and anxiety.

The discussion will look at the concurrent rise of industrial production of woollen fabrics and Southern hemisphere sheep culture in the 19th century, and its influence on the enormous increase in the size of armies in the 20th century. It will also explore how warring nations jockeyed for access to the same limited resource, while they simultaneously searched for its elusive replacement, leading to the decisive rise of fully synthetic fibres after the Korean War, and our current plight of pervasive microplastic pollution.

Attend in person

Entry to this event is free but bookings are essential.

The authors will be available in the Foyer for a book signing after the event.

Watch online

The conversation will also be available online. Please make a booking and we will send you a direct link to the livestream event via email. Or you can join through the Library's YouTube channel.

About Fleeced: Unraveling the History of Wool and War

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.

About Trish FitzSimons

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.

She is first named of three authors of Australian Documentary: History, Practices, Genres (2011). Her exhibitions include Channels of History: The Women, Land and History of Qld’s Channel Country (State Library of Queensland and national tour 2003-2005) and Navigating Norman Creek (Museum of Brisbane 2015). Her broadcast documentaries include Snakes and Ladders: A Film About Women, Education and History (ABC TV Australia, Ch 4 UK) and Another Way? (SBS TV - Australia).

About Madelyn Shaw

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 held curatorial and administrative positions at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design; New Bedford Whaling Museum; The Textile Museum, Washington DC; and the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, NYC.

She has curated more than 50 exhibitions, and published widely on topics related to the development of the American textile and fashion industries, the China Trade, Slave Cloth, and Aviation clothing and popular culture. She received a 2022 National Library of Australia fellowship and a 2019 Australian-American Fulbright Commission Senior Scholar award for this project.