What extraordinary history these quilts tell us: from Mozart, at the age of eight playing the piano for George III, to a quilt copied from the altarpiece of Luther’s church in Wittenberg, to the history of the release of Venice from Austria to become part of Italy. What binds all these patchworks together is they were made by a technique called intarsia (which is like marquetry in wood). They are made out of a broadcloth, a heavy woollen cloth always used for military uniforms in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The fabric does not exist today.

Each story quilt, some showing scenes quite often of everyday life, involves some piece of military history. The stunning arrival of giraffes in Europe in the 1820s is illustrated in two of the quilts. Not only was the arrival of the giraffe documented in textiles, but it altered the whole cultural scene of Paris, London and Vienna at the time with printed fabrics with giraffes and hairstyles piled high up like the neck of the giraffe. There were Giraffe chairs and even Giraffe pianos … not to mention its influence on food: Giraffelnpastries and Giraffentorten.

Then there are the more serious, important and emotional quilts made by the men at war from their military uniforms.
Thus, the quilts fall into two groups: those that have been consigned and made for important people, and those made by soldiers. The thing that holds them all together is the material, as these quilts are all made out of military fabrics.
My military collection started accidentally with someone from Gympie who rang me and said ‘I’m peeling my beans over the Gympie Times and there’s a quilt here with a double headed eagle’. This made me aware that immigrants had brought extraordinary old quilts from their homeland when they came to Australia, the double headed eagle representing so much of Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. And of course, other quilts reside here from British wars as well.

So I started to look for them. The second one turned up at Christie’s in London at auction. I expected to bid against every museum in the world. However, I was the only bidder. At that time no one really understood what these intarsias were.

Over the last fifteen years I have collected them and I have been privileged that my collection of quilts has taken me all over the world. First to an exhibition in Berlin ‘Tuchintarsien in Europa von 1500 bis heute’ held at the Museum Europäischer Kulturen. Then the quilts were shown in an exhibition in the famous textile museum Musée de l’Impression sur Etoffes in Mulhouse, France. And three years ago at an exhibition ‘War and Pieced’ at the American Folk Art Museum in New York. The New York Times reported it as the second best exhibition in that year, only second to MoMA. And my first Wartime Quilts book totally sold out.

Every piece of the jigsaw involved so much research and I think it’s the excitement of the chase and the extraordinary history that has fallen out from all of these quilts which has kept me fascinated and excited.

192 pages
hardcover, colour illustrations

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