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Marilyne Elizabeth Nicholls is an Indigenous weaver and painter based in Wood Wood, Victoria. The fourth of Letty and Bevan Nicholls’ eight children, she was born in Swan Hill, a Victorian town on the Murray River close to the NSW border, in 1957. Nicholls has Watti Watti (Victorian, also spelt Wadi Wadi), Yorta Yorta, Barrapa Barrapa (also spelt Baraba Baraba and Barababaraba) and Dja Dja Wurrung heritage on her father’s side, and Ngarrindjeri heritage on her mother’s side. Her father’s father was Sir Douglas Nicholls (1906-1988) – the renowned and much loved sportsman, pastor and campaigner for Indigenous rights, and the first Indigenous Australian to receive a knighthood (in 1972).

Nicholls’ ancestry connects her with both the fresh water people of the Victorian Murray River and the saltwater people of the Coorong coastline in South Australia. Nicholls’ maternal great-grandparents were forced to leave the Coorong in the early 1930s when they heard that the state nurses were coming to take the grandchildren and grand nephews and nieces away: the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was common practice at the time as governments across Australia sought to assimilate the Aboriginal population into white society. The family travelled north via Donald to the Murray River in a horse and cart with Letty and her siblings, navigating carefully so as not to trespass on the territory of other Aboriginal clan groups. A sense of being displaced has always been a burden for Nicholls’ mother and grandmother, and the Nicholls family have only recently started discovering and building connections with their Ngarrindjeri relatives in South Australia.

Nicholls’ early childhood was spent with her family in a tin house on the northern (NSW) banks of the Murray River, while her father worked on a country homestead in the region. The families who lived on that part of the Murray netted crayfish, caught rabbits, kept chooks and grew vegetables, but to get other supplies they would have to walk across the bridge to Swan Hill. In 1964, when Nicholls was eight years old, her family moved into one of seven houses that had been especially built for Aboriginal families in Swan Hill as part of a government trial that sought to compel Aboriginal people to assimilate into white society. These houses were in the outskirts of the town, and Nicholls recalls that the Aboriginal families who were brought together under these circumstances supported each other and shared a great deal. At this time Nicholls began attending school in Swan Hill. In 1968 her family’s life again changed direction as a result of government policy: as part of a trial by the federal government that sought to encourage Aboriginal people to develop farming skills, the Nicholls family was encouraged to move onto farm land on Watti Watti territory. They went on to run a mixed farming business for six or seven years, a period of time which Nicholls recalls as being extremely tough, partly due to the devastating effects of a locust plague. However Nicholls has fond memories of the farm, and feels that she and her siblings benefited greatly from learning how to manage the land, grow crops and take care of sheep and cattle. Nicholls attended senior school in Tooleybuc, a town on the NSW side of the Murray River. After she finished school she moved to Melbourne and began a career as a nurse. She remained in Melbourne for sixteen years before returning to Swan Hill with her husband and two children. Since 1991 she has worked at the Swan Hill District Hospital as an Aboriginal Hospital Liaison Officer.

Nicholls’ artistic training took place in the home: from the late 1960s, when she was around eleven or twelve years of age, she remembers watching her grandmother Emily Karpany (nee Pinkie) weaving mats and baskets and making feather flowers. Emily would make baskets and demonstrate weaving at town events to supplement the family’s income. Nicholls’ mother Letty also took up the practice and eventually Nicholls herself began to explore weaving.

Emily and other women weavers of her generation from the region, such as Emily’s friend Lucy Williams Connelly, traditionally wove with leaves from the Cumbungi plant. These leaves are three to four feet long, very thin and tapered at the end. Once they have been collected, they are dried off and then wrapped in a damp cloth so that they become soft for weaving. Cumbungi is an important food source for Aboriginal people. The roots provide a natural staple starch food and are prepared for eating by being roasted on the coals of a fire. Their fibrous quality means that they can also be rolled into a kind of twine or rope, out of which Nicholls’ father and brother have made duck nets. In later years the women of Emily’s generation also began to weave with pine needles, using the long needles that fall from old pine trees.

Besides pine needles and Cumbungi, Nicholls has learnt to weave with basket grass, which is a long, thin, strong grass that can be found in wetland areas. The grass, which is collected from the flood plains and banks of rivers and creeks, needs to be picked firmly from its base, as the base is stronger than the tapered end, and thus serves well as the part that enters the weave. Once picked, the grass is left to cure for a few days so that it is tighter and less likely to shred. Basket grass has a very important place in Nicholls’ art making because the same grasses grow in the Coorong and are used by Ngarrindjeri weavers to make open coil weavings. This means that Nicholls is able to forge a connection to her maternal ancestral country by way of technique and fibre choice. The Dreaming story for the creation of the Murray River, which revolves around the Murray Cod, links communities from all the way along the river including fresh water people in Queensland and river clans in NSW, Victoria and the Coorong in South Australia. These connections are at the forefront of Nicholls’ mind as she weaves.

Nicholls used basket grass for the work 'Perception of Spirit From the Land’, a large mat which received the Deadly Art Award at the 2008 Victorian Indigenous Art Awards. For this work she explored the open coil weave, which involves periodically deviating from the conventional concentric coil so that gaps form as the thread is looped away from the inner circle. She also began to split the strands of the weave and braid in new 'stakes’ (the new grasses that are regularly introduced to ensure that the thickness of thread remains consistent) at these points so that multiple threads emerged, following different contours which created a second layer. This approach brought a fine lacework appearance to the mat and the result opens up possibilities for future experiments with marrying different weaving techniques in her art. The judges described it as “a dramatic and many-layered work, utilising the traditional technique of coiling to weave a contemporary description of connections to the land.” (Victorian Indigenous Art Awards 2008 Catalogue, 10) The work grew to over one metre in diameter before Nicholls felt it was resolved.

Nicholls’ explorations of different weaving styles has also led her to learn to make a rustic variation of the ancient walnut basket (the vessel which Moses was placed in as a baby on the river Nile in the bible) under the tutelage of her friend and mentor, non-indigenous fibre artist Gita Amor. Weaving with grape vine while it is still green, the walnut basket is made by creating two half spheres which are then joined at one point with the diamond shaped god’s eye weave – so-called because it resembles the shape of the eyes of the Pharaoh as depicted in ancient Egyptian art – so that when closed, the lids meet like a walnut.

Nicholls has also painted for a number of years, working with acrylics, inks and ochres which are collected from a riverbed in Watti Watti country close to her home. Her paintings reflect on the knowledge and skills she has accumulated over the many years she has lived by the Murray River, and also sometimes represent the totems of her ancestors: the brown snake of her father’s people, and the willy wagtail and black crow of her mother’s people. A collection of Nicholls’ paintings has been acquired by The Koorie Heritage Trust and published as postcards and posters. Exhibitions have included 'Monash NAIDOC Week’ (2005) and 'MARA MARA’ (1998), both at the Highway Gallery in Mount Waverley.

Marjorie Walker, the director of Highway Gallery, has been another important mentor for Nicholls. Nicholls has also regularly conducted workshops: during the 2008 Swan Hill Go North Arts Festival she, along with her mother and older sister, provided a feather flower workshop, and during the Rare Trades and Skills Festival at the Pioneer Settlement in the same year she provided a basket weaving workshop. In 2010 she attended the Indigenous Weavers Invitational Weaving Symposium in Rotorua, Aotearoa New Zealand as part of a delegation of Victorian weavers. While there, she observed that Maori weavers were carrying on the tradition of creating twine from plant fibres, which can then be used to make dilly bags for instance, in a manner that had much in common with Indigenous Australian weaving methods. Though Nicholls is aware of twined dilly bags made in her region historically and familiar with those produced currently elsewhere in Australia, there is a great sense of loss associated with the fact that she has not been the recipient of this kind of intergenerational transfer of knowledge about plant fibres, preparation and weaving techniques, due to the dispossession and social fragmentation her family and community experienced in Victoria as a result of colonisation (pers. corres. 2010).

Writers:

Fisher, LauraNote:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed