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.

Bilum – a souvenir to promote Papua New Guinea’s tourism industry

by PETER S. KINJAP 

While PNG is focusing on its upcoming general elections in a few months’ time, the world over has celebrated the International Women’s’ Day last week to give significance to the existing our womenfolk, motherhood, sisters, aunties, wives, daughters and female colleagues. Women have been somewhat regarded as second class race in the male dominated world although some significance contributions have made by women in many facets of life. In traditional PNG, women’s primary role is bearing children, looking after domestic animals, making food gardens and household chores. These responsibilities are tough especially when the mother is to feed a good number of domestic animals and many small children. In the midst of their daily struggles, they virtually constructed the concept and skillfully netted strings bags known as bilums which were used make their ease the loads in their chores. 

To date no-one knows and can confidently explain how and why those ropes were twisted and looped to obtain a robust string bag which was very handy even today in the contemporary society. Prominent British anthropologists and couple Marilyn strathern and Andrew Strathern whom spent years in the highlands of PNG have thought that bilum was made through ritual practices in spirit worships, and woman loop the ropes while singing ritual chants. Moreover, Marilyn in her book titled The Gender of Gift never denied that Melanesian women were strong and equal to men, a point she compared with the European perspective on gender and feminist issues and later attracted a new dimension of perception on Melanesian women. 

Many other articles written about bilum say PNG women first started to make bilum to relate to the womb, bilum is the ‘outer’ womb when a baby is born from the ‘inside’ womb. This conception is evident today in the Tok Pisin language when womb is described as “bilum blo pikinini”. Having said all these one would wonder where would be the origin of making a bilum in PNG. Who was the first woman to have the idea and started to teach other women the knowledge and skills of looping and making patterns and passed on? But that’s not the purpose of this article to investigate it’s originate. The origin of making the bilum remains mysterious and the first PNG woman to curve the knowledge into twisting the ropes is unknown.

Melanesian woman have been physically strong, jam-packed with courage to conquer and fearlessly contest in the male dominated world.

Weeks ago, we learn that 30 courage PNG women will contest the 2017 general elections. Politics in PNG has always been a men’s willing. All the best to these mamas. 

In some areas, they are unbeatable when it comes to label against menfolk. Such is the toughest job of caring and love giving in their homes. Not only they are hard at work but also unrecognizably acquired with special skills and knowledge. Sometimes, their creativity puts them in a special place within the society. Unarguably, this is where the creator placed and blessed them. 

Turning their imagination into creativity is what makes them uniquely special. This is so, when it comes to looping and twisting the wool ropes into a cultural material, connoting their attributes of care and love. The aesthetic qualities of their bilum and its uniqueness has transformed greatly finding its way into the cash economy. Undoubtedly, bilum resembles the courage and determination of PNG women. 

Pretentious and exceptional words to describe women are not easy to find on the Mothers’ Day or the International Women’s Day. But those are words they deserve every day. 

In Goroka and Karkar Island in Madang, every year round bilum festivals are held. These events hosted not only to recognize the cash-value of their creativity but also acknowledging and displaying their adorable self-taught looping skills.

In Madang, festival chairman Pholas Yongole says activities include a bilum show and the process of how Karkar bilums are made. In Goroka, festival chairlady Florence Jaukae said the festival is staged to celebrate ancient skills and designs of bilums and also about preserving, protecting the skills and designs.

These annual events held respectively in Madang and Goroka not only to display the colorful woven bilums that attracts tourists and by passers but they hold the events hold the meaning of bilum making and creativity from womenfolk. 

Changes can inevitably occurred in any given society and in PNG society development took place since the island was first discovered in 1526-27. Bilum is believed to be centuries old from then on until it was formerly first recorded by G. Landtmann in 1933, a record found in the Museum of Finland. From traditional to contemporary, the patterns, designs and selection of colours to make bilum by women have changed. Today it is a souvenir serving as a national identify to the international community. In 2005, supported by the Australian government, an association known as PNG Bilum Export and Promotion was created to help PNG women export the bilum product. This organization is helping PNG women to export bilum products to Australia and other parts of the world. The bilum has also find its way into the fashion world. 

Today the weaving of a bilum is a skill that is commonly shared by women across the country; a skill or traditional knowledge that is passed from one generation to the next generation. It is knowledge that is learnt from Grandmothers, Aunts, Mothers and friends. 

Bilum designs vary from one to the next – no two bilums are identical. They can be seen on the streets of Sydney, New York, London, Suva, Apia or anywhere in the world – just a simple indication of how far this unique product travels.

In all these places, they still remain as a PNG souvenir and a national identify. To the PNG Government, this is only a cultural material but it plays a greater role in the arena of tourism promotion with its aesthetic qualities and uniqueness to the outside world that needed to be emphasized.

Photo captions: Different bilum patterns and designs sold in Tambul, WHP. Photos by Bianca Barry / March 2017.