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Article published in Textiles Clothing & Footwear digest 06/04/01
SINGAPORE
DREAMING
By Colin Read
During a recent business trip to Singapore I happened to walk into Raffles Hotel. I found my way into a small seating area complete with wicker chairs and timber tables overlooking a courtyard. The city of Singapore was completely obscured by the original colonial building to my front and right and a wall of vegetation to my left. Palm trees flanked the courtyard and the only discernable obtrusion was the endless hum of the traffic penetrating the vegetation.
I stood there dressed in my lightweight wool blend suit, polished shoes and all the other external symbols that make up the façade of respectability. In my hand my brief case containing my lap top computer and organiser, my coat pocket the mobile phone, international roaming and infa-red enabled.
I was the living embodiment of the nature of business in the new millennium. A man linked to the world and ready to obey without question, the call of technology.
It was 3.30 pm, it was hot and humid and I was tired from the day. I sat in one of the wicker chairs and imagined a past era of early Colonial development in the fledgling trading port; Somerset Maugham sipping Gin and instead of a kilometre of land-fill and commercial development; the gentle lapping of the beach, that once was just over the road. I even managed block the noise of the traffic and indulge myself in fantasy…..
As for me, I was born and bread on a sheep farm in the Western District of Victoria, I crutched, dipped, injected, yarded, butchered and lived off the producer of what must be one of the most remarkable fibres that nature has ever produced.
When I finally left home I thought that I had said goodbye to farm life and the wool industry forever; as sheep don't graze in Collins St. Little did I know then that the best part of my working life was going to be selling wool. You see I belong to a diminishing number of people who have made a career from Wool Felt.
Wool Felt was first made by the Mongols who rolled up raw fleece in cow hides, soaked them in water and dragged them behind horses. The result was a hard felt blanket that was used for clothing, tents (Yurts), hats, boots and other things.
Today felt is made by a process that has not changed in its mechanics since that time.
Nature has ensured that the wool fibre will only felt one way, and no matter of modern technology has been able to reproduce or alter what today is still a useful, viable and efficient medium that is used in thousands of applications covering nearly all facets of our hectic lifestyle and is still being chosen for components in our latest electronic computer gismos.
Somewhere in my blissful state it dawned on me how privileged I was to have chosen and enjoy a career in an industry that has not changed since almost before Ayres Rock was a stone.
What comfort and serenity you can feel when you realize that technology has not yet changed everything in our lives.
Copyright Australian Felt Specialists Pty Ltd 2001
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