While attending the local college, they had dreamed of full-time work that would harness their Aboriginal creativity. In support of this goal, a partnership between the Toomelah Co-Operative and the New England Institute of Technical and Further Education (NEIT) provided funding, equipment, and training. This partnership was awarded three national awards this year. The wonderful journey of becoming papermakers and paper artists has strengthened self-confidence and community pride. Young Goomeroi people now look to their hard-working papermaking elders as role models. Different groups have been brought together: That local cotton farmers are now working with Aboriginal papermakers is nothing short of a social revolution. Euraba's unmistakable handmade papers have both regional and cultural integrity. The papermakers produce beautiful watermarked certificate papers for universities and national professional associations. They create artist papers for other Aboriginal community artists and annual report cover papers for corporate   Australia. They have pulped the rags of the past to form a positive future for themselves and their communities. The Euraba Paper Company is located in a flat landscape of brigalow, ironbark, and Queensland box trees. There are no mountains, just sporadic ant hills. The mill is close to the mighty McIntyre River, the natural border between New South Wales and Queensland. This waterway has been the focus of Goomeroi Aboriginal life for millennia. For more than a century the district has been intensively cleared and farmed for cattle, sheep, and wheat. Today it is dominated by cotton. For most of the local white-contact history, the Goomeroi were pushed off their traditional lands. They were moved between three government run missions (reservations) in the twentieth century. Sad stories abound: white shopkeepers sent poisoned flour to the missions; government welfare agencies forcibly removed light-skinned babies from Aboriginal mothers, producing the "stolen generation”; Goomeroi language and tribal ceremonies were banned on the missions; and young girls were forced to work on local homesteads as domestic servants. In the early 1970s, after sixty years of highly regimented mission settlements, the mission manager and his wife were hastily removed and the community had to fend for itself. In 1987, almost two decades later, Justice Marcus Einfeld awakened the nation to the appalling, third-world conditions of Toomelah. There was no electricity or running water, sewage flowed in the dirt streets, and children were dying of preventable diseases. Things changed. Governments poured money into the communities. Health, education, and basic services were improved. The Euraba papermakers are now determined to break away from generational welfare dependence—impressive, given their recent social history. Our dream of a community paper mill and book arts center was partially inspired by a white government surveyor who repeatedly visited local Goomeroi tribes in the last three decades of the nineteenth century. He recorded seeing the Aboriginal women weaving baskets, a traditional women's craft practice extinguished during the early days of the government mission era. In 1996, I began teaching at NEIT, Boggabilla campus. My class was made up almost exclusively of senior Goomeroi women. When I asked them what they would like me to teach them, they told me,   "Well, Westie, we want two things: to stay together and to laugh. Let us do that and you can teach whatever you like. " They had been completing annual certificate courses for over ten years and, as we now joke, had expertise in everything from French polishing to artificial insemination. Together we recognized that they had a heritage as fiber workers, weaving baskets. As a society with a badly disrupted culture, the Goomeroi have a firm taboo on revisiting remnants of the traditional past, a no-man's land because of the absence of initiation into its secrets and dangers. So we agreed to explore new forms while maintaining a link to the craft practices of female ancestors. We decided to establish a center of excellence for works on paper, rather than imitating the acrylic on canvas "dot paintings" of the central Australian desert communities. The Goomeroi women felt uncomfortable that they were printing and painting sacred stories on French and Italian mould-made papers. Why, they questioned, were their images forced to live on European land? Was there no Aussie alternative? We thought: "Let's make our own paper. It can't be too difficult." Along with Charlie Binge, a Goomeroi teacher of traditional carving, we set up a backyard mill at my home in Boggabilla. We cut a forty-four gallon drum in half, supported it on two old bed irons, and placed it over a fierce open fire. We cooked everything from scotch thistle to sunflower stalks. On the back and front concrete verandahs of my house the women sat in a line. Loudly they pounded the washed cooked fibers with a menacing arsenal of wooden clubs fashioned from the amputated legs of old school chairs. Our first papers were chunky shingles, veggie felts formed with a production motto of "if you can't see the fiber the sheet won't survive." In our first year we were less a plant fiber paper workshop than a palliative care hospice for kitchen blenders. Our vat was my infant daughter's white plastic babies bath and we couched onto blue merino wool blankets (an engagement present that went missing from my marital bed). After a homemade pressing, with large river rocks and human bodies providing the pressure, we dried the sheets on a clothesline. The papers cockled and were attacked by curious Lousy Jack birds. Over the next two years we worked with others to learn papermaking. Juliette Rubensohn, Sunny Wright, and Sherry Cook, at Primrose Paperworks in Sydney, provided us with much of our early knowledge and skills. We also invited paper artists and crafts people to conduct workshops at our site. Such visitors have included Vibeke Bak Hanson (surface decoration), Olive Bull and Melodie Pike (book arts), Katherine Nix and Juliette Rubensohn (cotton paper), Sunny Wright and Jenny Francis (plant fiber papers), Paul Pulati (watermarks), and Paul Miller (pulp painting). Our first workshop was a former office administration classroom, where women had once learned to type. With the help of the Toomelah Co-operative, we   moved the workshop off campus, into the Old Euraba Store at Toomelah, in November 1998. It was not ideal but it marked the start of a transition. With the arrival of a Hollander beater and a restraint drier, both from David Reina, we could tackle the local king of fibers—cotton—vast fields of which grow just a spit from the site. Our early experiments dealt with the formidable raw cotton obtained from a local gin. The very long fibers would wrap around the beater roll so, more and more, the women turned to cotton rag. The women now patiently cut up the rags with dressmaker's scissors, Dickensian work for which we are desperately trying to find an alternative. To this end we are working closely with an Australian mattress manufacturer, testing their industrial rag cutters. In early 2000 the mill moved into Boggabilla. Seven of the nine women live in Boggabilla and were tired of the daily bus ride to Toomelah. We leased a large corrugated iron shed, formerly a car mechanic's shop, on the Newell Highway, an important inland road between Melbourne and Brisbane. Two interior rooms are being constructed for the beaters and drying papers, signs are being tacked to the building's outer walls, and a temporary building will serve for a display room and paper storage. A 1950s Ford Customline car, believed to have once belonged to the mission manager at Toomelah, has been cut in half and attached to a wall in the papermill. The engine removed, we have housed papermaking vats under the bonnet and in the trunk. Most exciting has been the gradual acquisition of equipment. The present Euraba production space contains a large stainless steel boiler, acquired from the confectionery industry. A new ten-pound Reina Hollander beater will soon join our faithful two-pound Reina beater. We have three production vats, constructed from marine plywood and fiberglass. Our double-ram wet press was constructed in South Australia and has an automated hydraulic system. Each of the fifty metric ton (about 55 ton) rams press individual platens measuring 3 x 2 meters. It is possible to synchronize the platens to press 6 x 2 meter sheets. Along with the Reina restraint drier, we have constructed two driers that use the industrial fans made for wheat silos. (Our College’s welding teacher, Peter Blomley, created these at a very fair cost,   in exchange for me driving a tractor on his farm. We affectionately call them the "Blomley Blowers.") We have recently installed water filters and dehumidifiers. Like Australian men, Euraba papers are strong, yet sensitive and ruggedly handsome. The 100% new cotton rag provides a defining characteristic of an incredibly tough surface, not dissimilar from a space shuttle tile. This makes it suitable for repeated surface treatments. The water from the McIntyre River is slightly alkaline and luckily is a good hard water for papermaking. Filters for iron, carbon, and small particulates now support our quest for archival paper production. We color the papers in several ways, firstly from the natural fiber color of the commercially dyed rag off-cuts that arrive at the mill from the local cotton clothing manufacturers. (This means we are able to produce papers with the seasonal colors of the Australian fashion industry.) Secondly, we use commercial ceramics ochres to pigment the papers. To these Australian earth pigments we add ochres dug from local ochre pits that less than a century ago were used for body painting in tribal Bora ceremonies. Both the fiber and the colorants speak powerfully about traditional and contemporary connections to the land. The surface texture of the papers has changed along with the mill's felts, from old woolen blankets to felts used on intaglio printing presses. We like to create a variety of textures and we are now exploring loft-drying racks and a calendering press for different results. In support of the revival of the Goomeroi Aboriginal language within the communities, the papers have been given traditional names: the dense black Bangalaa (darkness), the ruddy Bawurra (red kangaroo), and the vibrant Dhagaay (yellow belly fish). The naming of the papers has strengthened feelings of community ownership and pride in the mill. Euraba papers have four specific applications. Firstly there are the certificate papers. Twenty-one by twenty-nine-and-a-half centimeter sheets of Muraay, (white cockatoo) with watermarks have been developed for university and professional association clients. We are promoting the idea that Australian university degrees should be printed on handmade paper created by Aboriginal women, the progenitors of the country's wisdom and knowledge.   We have developed a series of artist's papers for watercolor, printmaking, and drawing. Our dream is to make custom paper for the internationally successful Central Desert Aboriginal art communities. To this end, the National Australian Bank is flying a group of Euraba papermakers to Melbourne, where they will make a presentation of their work to the Australian Print Workshop (APW). This national print media studio has collaborated exhaustively with the Central Desert communities to produce fine art prints on Italian and French mouldmade papers. Our challenge (and great opportunity) will be to convince the APW of the merits of Aboriginal prints on Aboriginal paper. Thirdly, Euraba makes stationery sets and a range of cards called "Johnny Cake" cards. The Johnny cake is the stable Aboriginal flat bread, cooked over an open fire. From a distance the Johnny cake looks like a bulky white sheet of paper. Finally, we are developing a range of uniquely Australian Aboriginal book cover papers. The integrity of these papers is being pitched to Government agencies and corporate Australia for annual report covers. The browns of macadamia nut hull dyes and the yellows extracted from wattle tree roots compliment the red and oranges of the ochre pit pigments. The challenge is to make these labor-intensive sheets economically viable. Beyond its focus on the craft of handmade paper production, the Euraba Paper Company has encouraged its papermakers' artistic expressions. Queensland papermaker Christine Ballanger has conducted several pulp painting workshops. A series of extremely large works made by Euraba women were included in the paper art exhibition at the Santa Maria Della Scala, as part of the IAPMA congress in 2000 in Italy. Since August 2000, Melodie Pike has facilitated the development of site-specific paper art. Inspiration for images has increasingly been drawn from recent social history and local environments, such as Boobera lagoon, a Goomeroi sacred site.  Australia's former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, once suggested that Australia was at "the arse-end of the world" and, indeed, living down-under and out-back, Aussies experience a tyranny of distance; flights abroad tend to be painfully long and expensive. So when I was awarded a Winston Churchill Fellowship for 1999, I was determined to cram as much as possible into a five-month, round-the-world journey. The fellowship allowed me to study hand paper mills in indigenous communities and their partnerships with "Western" training and marketing institutions. I was able to improve my papermaking skills and establish enduring networks of creative and technical exchange. My family and I were hosted by great-hearted and loving paper aficionados, many of them members of the Friends of Dard Hunter. In America we visited home workshops, university book and paper arts programs, galleries, equipment manufacturers, merchants, and productions mills.   I spent time at the feet of Amanda Degener and Bridget O'Malley at Cave Paper in Minneapolis and Pat Almonrode at Dieu Donné Papermill in New York. At Cave I saw the potential of surface treatments to create beautiful book cover papers. At Dieu Donné I helped pull enormous thick cotton linter sheets using the mill's new Tim Moore sixty-by-forty inch mould and deckles. We received a lot of interest and encouragement about our Australian Aboriginal paper mill project and many people suggested ideas for collaborative projects. In Ecuador we traveled with South African printmaker and papermaker Kim Berman to the CARE Ecuador Cabuya pulp making plant and mill. There we saw remarkable production equipment and work practices, the result of a very successful partnership with American papermakers and educators. My main interest was in teamwork and worker interaction. It was obvious that the community relied heavily on the economic success of this mill and that more energy needed to be spent on marketing and promoting the beautiful, robust papers. In England, I was interested in Wookey Hole Papermill's equipment and its interaction with regional tourism. Gillian Spires told me about her work developing papermaking programs in Africa. We also saw two small hand mills, Two Rivers Paper Company and Griffin Mill, sophisticated operations in small spaces for niche markets. In London I visited Clifford Burt of Burt & Co., the United Kingdom's oldest and largest importer and distributor of fine papers. He wished to initiate me into the cold hard facts of selling handmade paper: Supermarket baggers are financially better off than hand papermakers because of the high wage expectations and production costs of the first world. He told me about third-world papers flooding the market—unusual, fun, and striking—from India and southeast Asia. He described them as very inexpensive but of inconsistent quality. Burt thought that it would be difficult to sell a national characteristic outside the country of origin; Europeans would have less empathy for an Australian Aboriginal paper than Australians would. He encouraged me to concentrate on the Australian markets and to employ an imaginative, lateral-thinking promotions officer to create opportunities within Australian corporate and government sectors.   In Egypt we visited the Association for the Protection of the Environment papermaking workshop in Mokattan on the outskirts of Cairo (thanks to the facilitation of Marjorie and Harold Alexander, who have contributed much to the success of the project). More than twenty young Coptic women, the daughters of garbage collectors, produced handmade paper and products from recycled paper waste. The papermakers worked confidently, pulling sheets from deep bathtub vats, and explored many decorative techniques to enrich the papers' surfaces. As in Ecuador, we felt uncomfortable seeing the low prices paid for hard work in a third world economy. I was able to show the papermakers on my camcorder monitor the similar work of the women in Ecuador. They were fascinated with the thought that others in poor communities around the world are making paper. The strongest message I gained from our journey was to develop a unique Australian indigenous handmade paper with integrity and to market it to a discerning Australian audience.  The mill is the expression of nine extraordinary senior Goomeroi women: Joy Duncan, Maureen Mischlewski, Margaret Duncan, Gloria Woodbridge, Marlene Hinch, Stella O'Halloran, Adrianne Duncan, Isabel Karkoe, and Auntie May Hinch. For years they raised families, children, and grandchildren with part-time work chipping cotton or cleaning school. For them the mill is the first opportunity for full-time work (with the exception of Joy and Isabel, who were forced into domestic service on local homesteads in the late 1950s). The women's lives are a rich amalgam of family, fishing, and faith. Many of the women are devout Christians. Every Monday morning the papermakers join hands in a circle as Auntie May and Adrianne pray robustly for everything from workplace safety to future orders. It reminds me of John Whatman's son, a strong Methodist, who conducted working men's temperance meetings at the Wookey Hole Paper mill. The women have made great improvements in their paper in extreme weather conditions—cold feet in winter and heat fatigue and flying insects during the searing Aussie summer. While enduring the high physical demands of production work, the women are looking to a new generation to eventually take their place. Euraba in the Goomeroi language means place of healing and the Euraba Paper Company has a growing presence in the communities as an alternative to youth crime, substance abuse, and welfare dependency. As Auntie May says, "We want to be role models for our community and make people think: 'well, if my nan [grandmother], sister, and auntie can do it, then so can I.’" The women are also the company's board of directors and have the controlling say in determining the practice and direction of the mill. Karen Backus and Andrea Slacksmith work alongside the women on a daily basis. Both grew up on large farms in the district and both completed undergraduate degrees in fine arts at the University of Southern Queensland in Toowoomba. Andrea specialized in textiles and digital arts while Karen's interests were in intaglio printing and artist's books. While teaching within the Aboriginal arts program at the Boggabilla college (NEIT), they experienced a baptism of fire. The second month of their teaching coincided with my departure overseas. During my absence they navigated their way through the challenges of cross-cultural education. In May 1999, all of the women graduated from the Boggabilla College and, with Karen as their production manager, they established the Euraba Paper Company. The task of creating a paper mill out of nothing has been greatly assisted by the work of Christine   Ballanger. Christine has been a valued member of the Euraba management team, conducting workshops in design and paper arts. Her mature practice and networks have prompted the rapid evolution of the mill, especially in the areas of paper quality, promotion, and marketing. At the end of July, 2000, as demand for Euraba paper increased, Karen stepped into the position of project coordinator. Melodie Pike replaced Karen as the Production Manager. Melodie came to us after teaching as a lecturer in papermaking at the Canberra School of Art at the Australian National University. Melodie had visited Boggabilla twice before to conduct workshops, and has a strong background in papermaking, book arts, and printmaking. Christine Porter is a celebrated water colorist and printmaker from Goondiwindi. Her success has come partly from her efforts to become the court artist to the wealthy Australian cotton industry. In the land of cotton, Christine has made some exquisite etchings of cotton boules (bolls). She is interested in Euraba handmade intaglio paper because it is made out of cotton grown within a hundred mile radius of Goondiwindi. Her images of Aussie cotton can be printed on the real thing. Christine has generously tested and critiqued our papers, sending us examples of her prints on Euraba and Hahnemuhle paper for comparison. This has led to improvements; our papers are now more receptive to delicate gradations and marks. In early 2000 the Euraba Paper Company received its first big order. The Noosa Regional Art Gallery, Queensland, along with Asialink and the Melbourne University, organized a touring exhibition, "Art and the Land," with works by Australian artists, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. We were commissioned to produce the catalogue covers, two thousand A3 (297 mm x 420 mm) sheets of 260 gsm dhawun (earth) paper. The exhibition is now traveling through southeast Asia—Thailand, Laos, The Philippines, and Singapore. When it returns to Australia, it will tour nationally. Because the mill's paper store is on the great Newell highway, which meanders through the otherwise sleepy village, we are planning to install large billboards with an image of Auntie May pulling a sheet from a vat. The billboards' text will suggest our mill as an interesting tourist side trip. We hope to lure some of the thousands of   retirees who pass by on their annual migration North for the winter (a Southern hemisphere ritual). This year the Euraba Paper Company was chosen as the national winner of the Prime Minister's Award for Excellence in Community Business Partnerships. I traveled to Canberra by plane with Auntie May (her first experience in the air), to receive the award from our Prime Minister, John Howard, at a dinner in the Great Hall of Parliament House. After the dinner, large orders for paper were promised by corporate CEOs and government officials. We have visited the exclusive Cotton Store (in the Sydney tourist mecca of Darling Harbour), which sells products made from Australian cotton and has an educational gallery concerning cotton production. The store is owned by the Australian cotton growers co-operative, Cotton Australia. After the women met with the chief executive officer, Cotton Australia agreed to become Euraba Paper Company's major corporate sponsor, with Euraba paper to be used for business cards and Christmas cards, pulp paintings for the cover of their annual reports, and large pulp paintings for their board rooms. The store has an enormous video display about cotton and will soon include a film clip of the Euraba project. The store will also display our papers in time for the Sydney Olympics tourist deluge. A former federal politician once told me that "cotton growers and Aborigines share much in common. " "What!?" I exclaimed in disbelief. "Oh yes. A huge proportion of the Australian population hates both groups," he replied. One of the joys of the Euraba journey has been in bringing together two very disparate social groups who live in each other's backyards. Sam Coultan, a local cotton grower, set up the Goondiwindi Cotton Company to expand into clothing manufacture. He has supported Euraba by donating the cotton fabric off-cuts that had previously been used only as oil rags and landfill. Another cotton garment manufacturer, The Cotton Collection, in the rural Queensland city of Toowoomba, donates huge bags of cotton rag off-cuts.   The women have promoted racial reconciliation in Australia. Despite the palpable racial tension in the predominantly white township of Goondiwindi, the nine papermakers set up a stall at the town park's monthly markets. They were initially viewed at a distance, but their persistent return, month after month, has won them respect and honor. For many white people the possibility that Aborigines could run a successful small business and get off welfare was beyond belief. The women sell only a small amount of paper but the social ramifications for the district are significant. Our future hopes of growth and continued success depend upon inspired problem solving and other acts of God. In the flat landscape of Toomelah and Boggabilla it can be uphill work to resolve the diverse problems of a community development project. The government is encouraging Aboriginal leadership and expertise in the mill, through training and support. Already we are attracting younger, more educated women and the older papermakers have gained in self-esteem and confidence through new opportunities, such as radio interviews and interstate flights, and through the quality of their craft. We are developing culturally sensitive work practices that respect the family obligations of funerals, court days, and other ceremonies. We face the difficulties of living in an isolated rural community; things move more slowly in the country. However, the example of Twinrocker, in Brookston, Indiana, teaches us that we do not have to be in a city to be a successful hand papermill. We dream of establishing a cultural place, papermill, and gallery on land between the Newell Highway and the McIntyre River. This land has tremendous significance as a documented Aboriginal settlement. It hosted one of the last great gatherings of the Aboriginal tribes, in the 1890s. The settlement was broken up when the government took the land for returned World War One servicemen. A keeping place could be built to house the extraordinary black and white photographs of local white-contact history, as well as tribal artifacts. It would also act as a focus for the Goomeroi language program and the Australian Center for Indigenous Book Arts. Connected to the papermill and gallery a series of wooden and corrugated iron huts, overlooking the river, would accommodate visiting artists and crafts people involved in internships and collaborations with Goomeroi colleagues. Such are our dreams together. Our Euraba paper dreaming has and will continue to be gadhabal, wonderful.