Winner Shares Skills

2007-06-18

Yolngu women from Yirrkala worked with last year’s Design for a Sea Change competition winner to share their skills in weaving. The Carpentaria Ghost Nets Programme hosted the Design for a Sea Change competition last year which received some wonderful and inventive ideas for reusing ghost nets including fruit bowls, carry bags, stabilisation in mud-brick walls for earthquakes, and hammocks. The competition was judged at last year’s Garma Festival by Mandawuy Yunupingu, Barbara McCarthy and Mitra Gusheh.

Chantal Cordey won the competition with her original guitar strap design made from ghost nets. She visited Yirrkala on the 29th and 30th of May and taught staff from the Women’s Resource Centre, Landcare and other interested community members how to make handbags from ghost nets. After two days of unravelling and weaving the old nets collected by the Dhimurru rangers, two gorgeous handbags were completed. This might not sound like many, but it is a long, painstaking job to construct one of these bags. The Women’s Resource Centre hopes to make more bags to be sold at Garma. In July this year, Chantal will travel to QLD to run the same workshop with the locals in the Torres Straight. “It’s great to see such beautiful and useful products coming from ghost nets” said Jane Dermer, NT Project Facilitator for the Ghost Nets Program.

The Carpentaria Ghost Nets Programme is an alliance of Indigenous ranger and community groups working together to remove and reduce the large amount of ghost nets (old discarded fishing nets) that currently float around in the Gulf of Carpentaria. There are currently 18 groups involved from NT and QLD and so far have removed over 64,000m of net over the past 2 years. Dhimurru and Yirralka rangers together have removed over 2,500 nets from the local coastline.

The Ghost Nets Programme would like to thank QANTAS, the Walkabout Lodge and the Arnhem Club for generously donating flights, accommodation and food for the competition winner. Your generous contributions were very much appreciated by all