I have spent the past 18 months buried in local history, much of it around the Jamberoo Dairy factory and the families who built our community.
The deeper I went, the more I learned to be careful with certainty. One story about the dairy industry can quickly split into three versions, each told by someone who is sure they have the right one. They cannot all be right.
So when Sue Brian told me her PhD was on cabbage tree hats, I had the predictable reaction.
Four or five years on hats?
Then she started talking.
I was sitting in the Jamberoo Youth Hall at a cabbage tree hat making workshop held over two days, three weeks apart on 6 and 27 June, so people had time to do the plaiting between sessions. Our village sits below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand, and it is now where they are being planted back. The workshop promised a rare chance to learn from a master hat maker and leave with a finished piece of living Australian history. I left with something more useful than a hat. I left with a different understanding of the palm, the craft, and the people needed to bring it back into the landscape.
Sue has been making traditional plaited and sewn hats for years. She learned the craft on Norfolk Island and brought it home to the cabbage tree palm, the same palm that gave eastern Australia one of its most familiar nineteenth century hats.
The hats are slow to make. The unopened leaf spear is boiled, dried, dipped again to take out the crinkles, shredded to width with a tool a bit like a rasp, plaited into long sennit, then sewn with a running stitch.
Sue can plait a little over two metres an hour on a wide pattern. The sewing takes about as long again.
You can see why people did it at night by the fire. In Australia plaiting was first taught as a convict skill, something to keep men occupied after dark, and the craft was still being practised in some prisons into the 1930s.
Sue has also corrected parts of the story that have drifted over time. I had assumed the plaiting was a First Nations skill. I was wrong. It came here by sea. It is a simple four-strand plait found across the Pacific, in the English straw-hat trade, and in parts of the United States. Whalers carried it around the Pacific during the idle stretches between catches. It reached Norfolk Island through the Pitcairn Islanders.
It was also a man’s hat, despite what is often repeated. Ladies’ cabbage tree hats were first advertised in 1900. Before then, when women appear in the records wearing cabbage tree hats, Sue says they were usually wearing their husbands’ hats.
A quarter of a million palms, cut for the fashion
Behind every hatmaker is a husband happy to be the mannequin.
Then comes the part that turns a small craft story into something much larger.
Sue has gone through the shipping records out of the Illawarra. Between 1840 and 1870, she can document more than a quarter of a million cabbage tree palms cut for the trade. The leaf spears were shipped to Sydney and turned into hats.
By the 1840s, readers were already writing to newspapers complaining that the palms were becoming rare.
It is easy, from this distance, to blame the settlers. The truth is more uncomfortable and more useful.
Clearing was the law. A land grant required it. A felled palm also brought in cash, about ten shillings a hundred in 1850. Tell a settler to clear the land or lose the grant, then pay for the palm on the way out, and the palm comes down.
The farmers did what they were told, and they were paid for it.
In today’s version farmers are being invited to partner with Landcare to replant the palms.
Planting them back needs the farmers. Slowly the palms are now going back in.
Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project comes to Jamberoo
Landcare Illawarra is working with local property owners in the Jamberoo area to preserve this unique species, replanting cabbage tree palms, with seedlings raised in a local nursery and planted in the riparian corners of private properties.
Planting is the easy day. The years after planting are the hard part.
Young palms need to be fenced from stock or they will be eaten. They also stay small for a long time before they become the tall, spiky trees people picture when they think of a cabbage tree palm.
On some properties there is an easier way. Where there are already fruiting palms, fencing them off from cattle can allow them to regenerate on their own within a few years.
The barriers will be familiar to anyone who has farmed this country. Kikuyu is an important summer feed for cattle, which is why farmers value it. It is also a headache for Landcare groups, because it can smother young native seedlings before they get going. Mature cabbage tree palms can stand above it. New ones need help.Deer are another growing problem.
Fence off an area, shade out the kikuyu with fast pioneers such as bleeding heart, keep the stock off, and the palms have a chance.
What the project needs now is farmers and a small section of their land.
There is a neat loop in all of this.
The same farms that cleared the palms under government order now hold the creek lines, gullies and corners where the palms can come back.
If the project reaches those farmers, the hat that helped strip the Illawarra of cabbage tree palms may become the reason a few hundred of them are planted again.
I began by thinking a PhD on cabbage tree hats was an odd way to spend four or five years.
Then I spent months inside the dairy industry’s history and watched one story fracture into a dozen confident, competing versions
This is where the value of PhD research can never be overestimated .
A topic can sound small until someone spends years following every thread. That is how old assumptions are tested. It is how family stories, local legends and confident retellings are put beside the records and asked to hold up.
Sue has gone through the shipping records out of the Illawarra. Between 1840 and 1870, she can document more than a quarter of a million cabbage tree palms cut for the trade. The leaf spears were shipped to Sydney and turned into hats.
By the 1840s, readers were already writing to newspapers complaining that the palms were becoming rare.
The well researched version, the one with shipping records behind it, is usually the one that stands up.
Whether the palms get back into the landscape in time will depend on something much less academic.
It will depend on someone turning up at the gate to talk to farmers about cabbage tree planting partnerships.
Further reading:
Cabbage-tree hats through history
Jamberoo welcomes the Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project
