The Facinating Flinders Ranges

What am I doing organizing this on Christmas
Eve.....not a care in the world have I...
Yet it bothers me that I have created this textile fibre book about the Flinders Ranges and want to convey how fascinating these ancient , eroded
and strikingly beautiful mountains are...
how they were invaded by a people two centuries ago, who were frankly not the least bit interested in the people who were already making a living there without destroying their habitat.

Yet the intrepid white people, with a philosophy
of needing to settle the land and make it productive, did an amazing job of exploring and
recording what they found.
Their  attitudes two centuries ago were so different to our present day of being aware of the delicate country side they were in. Of the delicate balance that keeps the ancient Australian eco systems from being destroyed....

The Ediacara ranges have revealed the most ancient and unusual fossils dating back to the pre Cambrian times....
In lake Callabonna in 1892, Fred Ragless found an amazing amount of scattered skeleton bones which proved to be a Diprotodon , the largest of the Marsupials and was mounted as a complete skeleton in the South Australian museum.

The Flinders Ranges were also explored for copper but none of the mines ever produced a great deal of copper and the arduous trek by bullock wagons didn't make it a worth while effort and so most of the mines which may have been started could not go on.
Still, the Flinders has the most poetic of name places ,Angorichina.. Wirrealpa..Umberatina..
Ical Icala..Moolooloo..Oratunga..Witchelina..
Wertaloona..Oraparinna..Hollowiliena..
Ediacara...
Here is my Christmas gift to you...I hope you will enjoy the spirit of it all.....

Textile/Fibre Artist book on Words

Words... We all use them, write them,
speak them, whisper them, shout them,
draw them, think them, imagine them,
invent them, organize them, forget them
dream them and wonder who on earth started them...... at least I do, wonder who was the first person to say something in words rather than
grunts
and who was the first person to draw a picture to represent a detail of the surroundings and objects they lived with...

What were the earliest hieroglyphs ever used?
A little bit of research on the web and you are inundated with information about the history
of the alphabet and how it can be linked back
to before the end of the 4th millennium BCE.
The Mesopotamian cuneiform and Egyptian
hieroglyphs.
By 2700 BC the Egyptians had developed the
hieroglyphic writing system. The logogram
represents a word denoting an object pictorially
depicted by a hieroglyph.

The phonogram represent the sound of a word.
The thing is though, that human kind drew images of the animals they were hunting on rock walls in caves before they could write. It was their way of letting others know that hunting was good in this area.
I was intrigued to find that the oldest rock art is in India at the Auditorium cave and this is very similar to the Acheulian rock art in the Kalahari desert in South Africa.

Our indigenous Australian aboriginal rock art is a little later at approximately 25 to 30 thousand years old.
I was given a book years ago, on the Lascaux Cave paintings which has wonderfully lively paintings of bulls and other animals which go back to the Palaeolithic era when Homo Sapiens was living and hunting in these areas of France.
It is fascinating to think how writing evolved from these early depictions.

The subject is really too huge to condense into a few sentences here and I am in no way qualified to do so anyway, but it is intriguing all the same.
Remember to click on the photos if you want a closer view. It contains a few sentences written in my mother tongue, relating a few of the sayings with which our parents would quote at times when we needed to think about what we were doing......
The covers are again knitted to fit, in mixed cotton yarns using a fair isle pattern....