Each bilum bag from PNG is a woman's story and the designs are a visual language

by CLARE PRESS - www.smh.com.au

"Why does anyone buy a beautiful bilum bag?" says Caroline Sherman. "It's not just to put your wallet and keys in, is it?" True, that. The allure of the covetable fashion accessory is all tied up with status and desire. I've "invested in" bilum bags because they were good quality, or irresistibly pretty, but also because magazines assured me this was the latest "it-bag". I once bought a ridiculously expensive clutch because it matched my new shoes.

If Sherman has her way, there will be a lot more Australian women buying the bilum bags from her Among Equals label. Perhaps they will do so for the reasons above but there is a better one, she says: "These bilum bags can change the lives of the PNG women who make them. What put it in perspective for me was when I found out that one of the weavers we work with was able to buy walls for her house with the payments she received. She literally had no walls. It's quite common to have no electricity and no running water in the areas we're working in."

Possum fur bilum made by a woman from Tambul, Western Highlands Province.
Image: Elizabeth Bonshek / 2007.

Among Equals is a collection of Bilum - hand-woven Papua New Guinean bags "of deep cultural significance" made the traditional way by women in the mountainous region around Goroka. Back in Sydney the bags are embellished, or as Sherman describes it, "given a contemporary twist", with tassels and painted wooden beads. She does this bit herself. "I spend a lot of time on the floor making pompoms."

A textiles designer by trade, Sherman was wandering around a government trade fair in 2014 when she "saw this flash of amazing colour and pattern bilums from PNG". It was a group of indigenous women from PNG demonstrating traditional weaving techniques. "I sat with them for hours, I was so excited by their craft. I'd never heard of a Bilum."

"PNG is our closest neighbour," she says. You can fly there in an hour from Cairns. "But like most Australians, I'd never been. All I knew was the war stuff, the Kokoda trail stories. In terms of design it was unchartered territory for me."

A "big-shot" bilum design made by a woman from Tambul, Western Highlands Province. The big-shot is one of the latest patterns or designs in the year 2016 and 2017.
Image: Bianca Barry / 2017.

Making several trips to educate herself and meet weavers, what Sherman discovered was that while PNG is resources rich, it's reliant on foreign investment and jobs for locals are scarce. It's common for women to be the main breadwinners.

In remote areas weaving and selling bilum bags is one of the only ways to make a buck, but without a sustainable market, sales often depend on the whim of tourists – and there are precious few of those in places like Goroka. In the patrilinial societies which abound here "they don't allow divorce and there are serious and endemic problems with domestic violence," says Sherman. "Rape is frighteningly common. Their worlds are complex and often violent and insecure." She figured a sustainable income could only help, and finding an Australian market, based on repeat business, was something she could contribute.

Sherman's initial idea was to commission her own designs, "but the bilum bags lost something that way. I realized is each bilum bag is a woman's story and the designs are a visual language."

A grandmother from PNG living in Sydney, Australia is making a bilum. Her design and patterns is a language of love to her grandchildren who would be using this bilum. Image: Arosame Wawe / 2017.

A year on, she sells them online and through small exhibitions – there's one in Sydney at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in Paddington (art world philanthropist Gene Sherman is Caroline's mother-in- law). What the brand does is present these bilum bags to an international audience as artisanal luxury items, allowing Sherman to pay the weavers a premium. 

She runs Among Equals as a social enterprise, ploughing her profits back into weaving communities, which she works with through the government organisation like Pacific Island Trade and Invest (PTI). Her dream is to partner with a charity to build a workshop similar, in ethos if not perhaps in scope, to the one New York-based luxury brand Maiyet and not-for- profit outfit Nest has planned to improve working conditions for the silk weavers of Varanasi, India.

It's not about scale, she explains, but providing a safe, clean, well-equipped place that the weavers can call their own. "Among Equals can never be a production line. It takes the ladies weeks to make the bilum bags. It's a really grass roots process, it's slow, and that's why it's lovely."

PNG girls and women love their bilum bags. This photograph is a collection of bilums owned by a young girl displayed in her room wall. Image: Dante Bii / 2017. 

Not everyone in PNG is agrees. As the modern world encroaches on places like Goroka, slow can read as old-fashioned, and the younger generation tends to be less keen on learning traditional skills. Others feel protective over their craft and its heritage. But weavers like Florence Jaukae, who calls herself a Bilum fibre artist, are fearlessly reinventing the medium. The first time she sewed her Billum cloth into a dress, her peers thought she was at best off her rocker, at worst being unforgivably subversive. "Everybody would say 'Look at that! Is she all right?'" she said last year. 

"'A Bilum is something we carry our food in. Who is she to wear that?' So I was really breaking through customary beliefs.'" It worked.

Jaukae's designs have taken her as far as New York, where as part of an International Trade Commission program she worked with the students from Parsons and the London College of Fashion. On September 1-2, 12 local designers will have the chance to court global fashion when PNG holds a catwalk event called Runway in Port Moresby.

"We used to say 'global' in the fashion industry to mean London, Paris, New York, but that's an outdated view," says the event's official photographer Sandhya Dusk Devi Nand, a Sydney-based Fijian former model and TV presenter, who is a passionate advocate for ethical fashion.

Tourists with bilums in Goroka, Bird of Paradise Hotel. Image: Peter Kinjap / 2008.

"Our own region has so much to offer in terms of creativity and inspiration, there's a lot to get excited about here. Who is to say the next big fashion name won't come out of PNG? But also fashion can work as a form of feminism in the Pacific," she says.

"It can be a tool for expanding horizons, taking something that comes naturally to females - dressing up - plus creative skills they already have - sewing or weaving or printing fabric - to establish independence and sustainable business."

• Clare Press is a slow fashionista, and the author of Wardrobe Crisis, How We Went From Sunday Best to Fast Fashion.

PNG School girls in traditional attire and with their bilums. Every girl in contemporary PNG society loves a bilum bag. Image: Diikenz Dii Dykes / April,  2017.