13 hours ago
Alice Springs Beanie Festival draws a crowd with 7,000 woolly creations on display
It took almost half a decade for Tim Henderson to sweep up and collect enough of his dog's fur to craft a woollen hat.
The Alice Springs eye specialist had made a "mad suggestion" to one of his patients to collect his pet's hair, to make it into a beanie.
When his patient passed away, Mr Henderson felt he had to keep his promise.
"She told me I had to do that. So in her honour and memory, I did," he said.
After years of collecting, knitting, and trial and error, Mr Henderson's beanie, made entirely from his dog's fur, is on display this weekend — among almost 7,000 unique creations — at the Alice Springs Beanie Festival.
The quirky beanie festival was born from humble beginnings in 1997, in the remote Indigenous community of Yuendumu in Central Australia.
The aunt of Jo Nixon, the organiser of this year's event, had been making beanies with the women in the tiny — at times, freezing cold — desert community while holding an English workshop.
She would return to Alice Springs later that year with almost 100 hats.
Not knowing what to do with them all, Ms Dixon said her aunt chose the obvious route and held a party.
"We hung these 100 beanies from the roof … and we invited all of our friends and had a band and made pumpkin soup," Ms Nixon said.
"We sold out of beanies within an hour."
She said from there it "snowballed", growing into an official festival that now attracts thousands of people from across the country over three busy days.
While knitting has had a recent resurgence in popularity among younger people, finding a new generation of volunteers to run the festival has been difficult.
"We're victims of our own success," Ms Nixon said.
Ms Dixon said next year's festival, which will be the 30th event, is expected to be the last ever, unless someone else comes forward willing to carry it on.
Joy Downs, who travelled from Moss Vale in the Southern Highlands of NSW to Central Australia exclusively for the beanie festival, said she was devastated the event was coming to an end.
"I get a lot of alpaca fleeces which I turn into beanies, and I thought I just had to come up and have a look because it's just such a unique [festival] that I hadn't heard of before," she said.
Deb Taylor Thompson, a previous festival winner and volunteer who made two warm hats this year, has been knitting since she was four.
She said it was unlikely the art of knitting would die out, as she was seeing younger people take up the craft, motivated by its therapeutic benefits.
"I teach a lot of people … and knitting is becoming a much more popular trend in parts of Melbourne," she said.
Ms Nixon, who's been at the helm of the beanie festival from day one, said she still couldn't believe how the once-niche gathering had grown into a widely celebrated event.
"There is a joy in wearing a beautiful beanie and walking into the supermarket and people saying 'are you wearing an Alice Springs Beanie Festival beanie?'," she said.
"Beanies are a wonderful way of wearing a piece of art."
