Further detail: Boonwurrung Possum Skin Cloak
In the following section, Carolyn Briggs explains the designs on the Boonwurrung cloak.
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Craft - Carolyn Briggs (cultural leader during creation), Possum skin cloak: Boonwurrung, 2006, Koorie Heritage Trust
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This media item is licensed under "All rights reserved". You cannot share (i.e. copy, distribute, transmit) or rework (i.e. alter, transform, build upon) this item, or use it for commercial purposes without the permission of the copyright owner. However, an exception can be made if your intended use meets the "fair dealing" criteria. Uses that meet this criteria include research or study; criticism or review; parody or satire; reporting news; enabling a person with a disability to access material; or professional advice by a lawyer, patent attorney, or trademark attorney.
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© Copyright of Contact Koorie Heritage Trust for terms of use
© Digital reproduction copyright of Michael Carver: [email protected]
Photographer: Michael Carver, Regional Arts Victoria
We made our cloak from willert, which is the possum skin. If we prepared these possum skins in the traditional manner, we would have tanned them with the water bark and then carved the shell or the stone with images of maps of our Country. This is what a map would've looked like, with the seas, the rivers, the creeks. We've put symbols in them. We put the eel trap, where the eel used to journey our Country in a particular season. Then we had to note our Country’s boundaries so to do that we had to draw the language map of what was spoken. It first made me aware when my son said to me: ‘I reburied those remains at the heart and the lung of the Bunatalang Country.’ And, the heart and the lung was down here, near Western Port Bay. Then someone else said to me: ‘’Carolyn, when we did our boundaries, we just mapped out something of the Kaurna people, in South Australia, on our cloaks.’ They're the Western Red Kangaroo because the image that came out of this mapping of language showed them the map of who they are. ‘She said to me: ‘We're the Western Red, you're the Eastern Grey.’ When you start to map all those things out you will see how we belong to certain parts of the Country and what meat we can eat and what meat we can't eat. When my cousin said: ‘We're the bottom part of the emu’, I realised everything has to fit within the landscape. Like weaving, it's about the stories. Then we learnt the word Bunatalang. It means ‘Eastern Grey’ and this is what we've got. So when we're making these cloaks, we actually weave our stories using modern technology. This sewing would have been done with the sinews of the kangaroo, the tan of the possum skin with wattle bark, the tan, the skin, the blood of the Earth, the ochres would be rubbed into the skin and the fat. The ochres, the fat, the blood would all be massaged into the skin. Everything had a being, a thing, a place. It's about the flora and fauna, the rivers and creeks. The images would show that we had to travel through different places to get to a certain area and to get home.
