My first quilt for Cloth in Common, prompt – LINES.  I thought about lines of communication; lining up for warm school milk as a small child; the myriad lines that define us; life written on our faces in lines and wrinkles as we age, stretch marks, the repair lines on the bitumen road deck of an old bridge, the contrails of the jets as they criss-cross the intense blue Australian outback sky, the fence line of a 1,000 acre paddock, lines of vines, citrus and almond trees; power lines marching down a dirt road to the next homestead; a long straight flat road disappearing into the red earth ahead.

What coalesced in my thoughts were flood lines.  As a topic it was immediate, current, local, impactful and had lines in such abundance that I wrote three pages of notes about different aspects I could play with.  A series may have been born.

I live on a farm 30 km from a local town, Renmark, adjacent to a large national park, and perched on the banks of a river that is part of the Murray Darling basin system, the largest river system in Australia; and the entire system is in flood as I write, after a long, hot, tedious, and seemingly endless drought.   Life-giving water has fallen from the sky in abundance, over much of the continent.   The catchment is wet and soggy, the rivers are swollen and surging over the banks, the dams are full and overflowing the spillways; the wetlands are flush, and the Great Artesian Basin is having a much-needed recharge.  Of course, the floodplains are inundated and in some areas the flood waters have caused damage to property, with people evacuated from their flooded homes and living in emergency accommodation and animals attempting to get to higher ground, sometimes stranded.

As I finish this quilt, the river is beginning to recede, though it may take 3 or 4 months to return to its’ normal, sedate progress.  Our house was safely protected by a flood bank, or levee, that was built in 1956 and stopped a much higher flood than this one from inundating the property back then.

So, to my quilt Flood Lines.

Our local wharf has a flood marker that shows the depth of historical floods in the Murray River since the commencement of recorded white history, the earliest in 1830, but below the 1974 one shown here.  The biggest was in 1956 and it was a defining event in the town history.  The story goes that the original flood marker topped out at 27 feet (above sea level).  The ’56 flood covered the marker post, so an extension was made with an extra 3 feet on it and an intrepid soul swam out (with a rope around his waist so he wasn’t swept away by the flood) and attached the addition to the top of the old marker.   Sometime later, a local ‘wag’ snuck out and attached a sign at the 30 foot mark saying All Out After This, indicating that the town should be evacuated if the river rose to 30’.  The river peaked in Renmark on 22^nd August 1956 at 30’ 7 ¾”.  There were still several thousand residents living in the town, though many women and children had been evacuated when the hospital went under (water) and many local homes were threatened by the floodwaters.

Flood Lines reflects the intent of the marker (though not with accuracy) and the colourful history of floods in our town.  I included an impression of the local Paringa Bridge, a suspension bridge built in 1927 with both road and rail laneways and a lift deck to allow larger river craft to pass below it.  The lines of the bridge were a major inspiration for the quilt.

The other panels were impressions of the lines running through the river in flood: the whirls and eddies of the backwaters; the frenzy of fish breeding and feeding in the flood water; the slow advance of the water rising and inundating the floodplain; and my interpretation of an indigenous fish trap, historically made by the local Latji Latji people, woven by the women from locally gathered grasses.

FLOOD LINES

Bronwyn Cant, January 2023

Dimensions:      41” H x 48” W        1040 mm H x 1225 mm W

Material:            Cotton quilting fabric, thrift store fabric, hand printed cotton, Ikea fabric, handbag stiffening, jeans rivets, fabric paint, permanent marker pen.

Techniques:      Machine sewn pieced ground, hand lettered labels rivetted in place, raw edge machine appliqué strips of fabric with double sided Vliesofix adhesive, raw edge reverse appliqué, longarm quilted.