Introduction

From ancient times, in many civilizations, woollen fabrics have clothed merchants and seamen, diplomats and soldiers, peasants and royalty. Depending on quality and cost they served as everyday garb and courtly attire, gifts and bribes, rewards and punishments. They marked status – everything from the penal servitude of Australia’s transported convict settlers to the power and privilege of a Maori chief. Wool has often served too as the fibre of choice in clothing armies and preparing for war.

From the 1830s, decades after the mechanization of cotton textile manufacturing, the woollen textile industries joined the Industrial Revolution. New machines designed to handle wool fibres turned out yarns and fabrics more quickly and cheaply than ever before. At the same time, new territories suited to sheep raising opened up via imperial and colonial action. Faster transportation and communication technologies helped settlers and colonists searching for a source of income spread sheep around the globe, stoking the demand for cheaper wool. Commercial and Colonial activity sharpened disputes, both over boundaries and resources, and the need for wool-clad soldiers grew.

Between the Crimean War of the 1850s, and the Korean War of the 1950s, wool was a vital material in the conduct of war. During that period, Australia and New Zealand together supplied more wool to world markets than any other country or region. Arguably, Australasian wool underpinned the very existence of the mass cold climate warfare that characterized that hundred years. So not all about the history of wool is warm and fuzzy . . .

Even before industrialization, wool drove commerce. The guild of wool staplers in medieval Britain, for example, controlled a massive international trade. From at least the 1500s, European nations regulated exports of wool fleece that might be used to clothe an enemy’s military. By the 1600s wool was the most valuable commodity in the world, the Golden Fleece.In turn, the sheep and woollen industries were central to many nations’ cultural and economic development.