For a tartan glimpse click above ........ Last update: PM Tues Feb 7
The Tasmania Tartan was originally designed by Scottish born Isabella Shorrock, who had learned to weave with the help of members of the Handweavers, Spinners and Dyers Guild of Tasmania, of which she was a member at that time.
 

The tartan was originally presented to the Waverley Woollen Mills in Waverley, Northern Tasmania. The owners were enthusiastic but were not going through a very positive financial period. Isabella visited Scotland and on her return opened a very successful weaving shop and studio in Bothwell where she produced both woollen and alpaca Tasmanian tartan scarves which were much sought after.
 
Tammie Fraser & Isabella Shorrock with the Tasmanian Tartan at the 1999 SPINin
It was at the 1999 Bothwell International Highland SPINin that Tammie Fraser, wife of the past Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Fraser, opened The Bothwell SPINin and presented the tartan for the first time.
 
Unfortunately Isabella retired several years ago, the shop closed and the Tasmanian tartan was, for a while, not heard of. Mike and Dot Evans, who are new residents to Bothwell and who have a history of tourism in Port Arthur, have bought the tartan and now it has returned home. The Tasmanian Tartan is back in Bothwell! It will once again be on show and available for sale at The Bothwell SPINin 2007.
 
If Tasmania is to have a tartan then Bothwell is its natural home. The Tasmania tartan draws upon Tasmania's, and in particular Bothwell's, landscape for its colours. The blue-green-grey, the rich red and the yellows found in Tasmania's Highland and Midland landscapes with their deep red soils, the blue gums and the wattles all of which are all so familiar to people who live in Tasmania.
 
 
But more than that, with Bothwell's colonial history so linked to its early settlers' Scottish homeplace and heritage, it's unsurprising that a Tasmania tartan should emerge in Bothwell.
 
But what's in a tartan? For centuries tartan has functioned as both a personal and cultural identifier and it has remained so. On ancient battlefields tartans helped distinguish between friend and foe. Elsewhere, tartans served to denote who was who and from where. The act of wearing of one's tartan is packed with meaning – and in thick layers. And, it's also 'serious weavers' business'!
 
And what's more, tartan is the kind of thing that today becomes a serious business when people wish to assert their identity in a world that's largely careless about their individuality, their stories and just what it is that makes them unique and who they really are. Something other than some assumed lowest common denominator.
 
It was said by Edmund Burke (1729 –1797) that "no man can tell when day passes into night, but every man knows the difference between night and day". Likewise, nobody can tell you when a check becomes a tartan but everyone knows the difference between the two! Both are 'grid structures', and 'the grid' found it's way into the imaginations of 20th Century Modernist painters, – Mondrian et al – but in the end a tartan carries somewhat different cultural cargo to that of a mathematical grid – with all its musings – or a check might.
 
Equally, tartan wearers know their tartan's stories and they're are able to read a tartan like a book. This is as true of the Tasmanian tartan as much as any other.
 
A tartan is woven from threads which cross at right angles and the pattern, of necessity, it has to be rectangular, albeit with infinite machinations. It's a series of stripes which – although exceptions are not uncommon – are generally the same in both warp and weft and are expressed as repeats, reversing as it goes, along and across the cloth, so as to be the mirror image of its neighbour – which in turn introduces supplementary and unbreakable rules.
 
If it's true that the Scots are gifted mathematicians it's probably because they've became hardwired to the mathematics inherent in their tartans in order to distinguish between friend and foe and in order to weave their stories into their tartan and visa versa. If weavers too are storytellers; and mathematicians; and cultural custodians; then tartans too provide them with the stuff that makes them the weavers of cloth – and the spinners of yarns. Each cloth that they weave is full of stories, their stories and at their best, shared stories.
 
Tartan is bound up in storytelling, identity, placemaking, mythmaking but most of all a tartans is about distinctiveness and placedness. It's little wonder that the Scots and their descendents, and others, have invested the meanings that they have in tartan, their tartans. Or, that people all over continue to do so! When New Yorkers start to celebrate 'Tartan Day', and they have, it tells you something.
 
For Bothwell to be the Tasmanian tartan's home, and for it to be the spiritual home of Tasmania's spinners and weavers as well, somehow it all seems to have been almost unavoidable – almost etched in stone. Likewise, after you've thought about it for a little while, and you've turned over a few rocks in Bothwell, neither is it all that surprising that it's the spiritual home, in Tasmania & Australia, for golf, for the Angus Breed, for the Ronaldsayrona Whites' bloodline and so much more. But, as they say, they're all stories for another time.

 

Sara Nye & Ray Norman February 2006
SOME TARTANlinks
• ..http://www.tartans.scotland.net/
• ..http://albanach.org/tartanresources.html
• .. http://www.houseoftartan.co.uk/interactive/designer/index.htm
 
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