Woven work nets First Nations award

FOR the past few years, Yorta Yorta and Wiradjuri woman Fiona Burns has been strengthening her connection with her Indigenous heritage.

Growing up with her white mother, she said it was difficult to learn more about her ancestral culture inherited from her father.

Over the past decade, she’s been part of family get-togethers that have helped give her an insight into her First Nations background, and she took up traditional Aboriginal weaving in 2017.

Beginning with baskets, Burns moved on to eel nets about two years ago, and her second-ever piece is currently on display at the 12th Koorie Art Show, where she’s been named this year’s RMIT Emerging Artist Award recipient.

“It’s meant a lot,” Burns said. “I’ve wanted to learn weaving for years but couldn’t find anybody to teach me before I met [Keeray Woorroong and Gunditjmara woman] Aunty Vicki Cousens.

“When I won, I was just over the moon, and just amazed that our culture can go so far and we can get back what we lost.”

Burns completed the piece after six months of work, and it was previously displayed at Perridak Arts Ballarat.

She was encouraged to participate in the Koorie Art Show by a Koorie Heritage Trust representative who spotted her weaving an eel net during a NAIDOC Week march in Melbourne.

“I’d ummed and ahhed for ages,” Burns said. “Then at the last minute, I thought ‘I’m going to do this’.”

Burns said the actual creation of the award-winning net was centred around “a lot of time and heartache.”

Her father died during the making of the work.

“There were a lot of tears, I suppose, when I think of my elders past that had this taken away from them,” Burns said.

“There were a lot of emotions, just being able to do it.”

Burns was taught weaving at Camp Kangaroobie, where her family was involved with filming the Australian miniseries Women of the Sun during the early 1980s.

Themed around the Aboriginal flag, Burns’s piece is on display at Melbourne’s Koorie Heritage Trust until 23 February.