A standard Jewish joke tells of Chaim, visiting Italian relatives. They take him to a blessing in St Peters Square, but there’s so many fancily dressed priests, Chaim can’t figure out which one is the pope. ‘The guy in the white yarmulke’ his relatives advise.

The skullcap is a promiscuous article of faith. It is a revered symbol of religious difference, which happens to be shared across so many different faiths and cultures. Australia has its own secret alliance of skullcaps. In the centre, there’s a form of headdress which is shared between the otherwise irreconcilable Western and indigenous cultures—the beanie.

As a form of skullcap, the beanie lies at the bottom of the hierarchy. It does not have the prestige of the papal zucchetto, the dash of the French beret, the passion of the bullfighter’s montera, or the elegance of the Chinese silk boa. The beanie has a more humble lineage that begins with the calotte worn by artisans of Ancient Greece. The modern crocheted version was made popular by the American mechanic of the 1940s, though it soon became suburbanised as the dinkie, or propeller beanie, of the 1950s.

In Australia, the beanie represents the long tradition of English popularism. In the English Civil War, Cromwell’s roundheads defied the wigged cavaliers of King Charles. In the Australian civil wars—the time of open air home and away football—beanies proclaimed an almost tribal loyalty to one’s suburb.

These days, the most zealous beanie wearers are the ferals, found at organic food stalls and alternative country towns. For devout ferals, the beanie has become a sacred item, made on a mountain top and worn over the chakra.

But less well-known is the indigenous beanie tradition. The Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte peoples trace beanies back to a time before white people. The mukata were worn as ceremonial headdress, made from human hair and emu feathers. Old men would often store sacred objects under their mukata. Elders are still known to keep a car key or photo of a grandchild under their beanie.

The indigenous and Western beanie traditions intersect almost magically in Alice Springs. It’s the weather. The Centralian winter is both cold and dry—a perfect time to camp out with a swag and beanie.

On its own, this shared use of beanies would remain a curious cultural coincidence. However, one beanie lover was inspired to use this cultural intersection as a bridge between the two cultures. The result is what’s known today as the Alice Springs Beanie Festival.

The Beanie Festival began six years ago when an education officer started using crochet as a way of winning the trust of women in an Aboriginal community. Adi Dunlop found that more beanies were being made than could be used. She decided to put the excess beanies on sale at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs. They sold out instantly, encouraging her to initiate a regular event. Word began to spread around the fibre world and beanies were soon flooding in from all over Australia.

Beanie Festival co-founders, Mez Hughes and Adi Dunlop

In its current form, the Beanie Festival includes a market, prize exhibition, parade, workshops and concert. The festival is based entirely on volunteer effort and receives no outside funding. The Beanie Festival takes the current fraught politics of reconciliation off the beaten track and promises an opportunity for genuine exchange between Aboriginal and non-indigenous Australia.

Could such an opportunity be realised? When I visited the Beanie Festival in late June, my first impression was hopeful. The beanie spirit was all over Alice. You find the most outlandish beanies being worn down the street, in bank queues or supermarket aisles. It was all the talk: ‘Are you wearing this year’s beanie?’ ‘That’s a real wicked one.’ The parade of exotic headdresses out on the street seemed like one of those miraculous wildflower blooms that occur in the desert after a downpour.

The main venue for the festival intensified this carnival spirit. The Witchetty's gallery at Araluen Art Centre was filled with a large web structure, on which were pegged thousands of knitted headpieces. Appended to the web was a quote from Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, ‘The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together.’

The competition beanies were sorted into categories, such as ‘Best Embodies Spirit of the Land’, or ‘Cutest Beanie’. They included beanies made from recycled lolly wrappers, beanies with dreads, beanies as volcanoes and ziggurats. In a particularly clever act of irony, the ‘Most Sculptural Beanie’ was an elaborate crown, handknitted by a republican in Tasmania.

The festival climaxed at the official award ceremony. There was a concert of local talents, the prizes were announced and paraded by bodies of all shapes and sizes. The evening concluded with the Beanie anthem, sung with great gusto, followed by a passionate rendition of ‘My beanie just cares for me’.

But despite this heartfelt participation, there were relatively few Aboriginal people present. I spoke with one young man from Blackstone who was in Alice doing a car mechanic course. He seemed there for the same reason as me, hoping for an event where relations between races were relaxed. But as the only Aboriginal man, he looked self-conscious and left early.

It turned out there has been an alternativeversion of the Beanie Festival the previous weekend. The Beanie Bash was a rock concert with lots of cheap beanies for sale, but the ratio of whites and blacks was reversed. Non-indigenous were a token minority.

The division into two festivals was as much about gender difference as racial separation. In Centralian slang, the bash was for ‘mob’, and the festival was for ‘ladies’.

The ‘ladies’ seem to fit in with the white world a little better. This year, they were from Ernabella. During the weekend, the elderly Pitjantjatjara women sat in the gallery spinning, using a traditional technique originally developed to produce threads out of fur and hair. Mission life, which came late to Ernabella, was under the benign rule of the Scottish Presbyterian Charles Duguid. Women learnt crafts for using the wool that was grown on their land. 

Pantjiti Lionel from Ernabella with her award-winning beanie

One of the ladies, Pantjiti Lionel, won first prize for ‘The Craziest Beanie’. Her beanie was made from a mix of turquoise wool and small emu breast feathers, crowned by a crest of long emu wing feathers that were dyed bright red. With several front teeth missing, Pantjiti did not look the image of an artist, though her offbeat creations showed an inventive sense of humour.

The indigenous audience was limited. A few Aboriginal women joined the beanie-making workshops, but they were mostly from other parts of Australia. There was certainly a willingness to engage from the white participants. Adi’s instructions were pitched for a broad Aboriginal audience; she had developed a special story—a kind of beanie dreaming— that translated the various steps of beanie making into a story about three brothers and a sister.

By the end of the weekend, the Beanie Festival was heralded as an unprecedented success. More than 2,000 beanies had been sold, helped by temperatures that plummeted to minus six overnight.

Despite this wonderful success, it was clear that the festival had some way to go before it became a truly reciprocal event. But it’s a challenge that the festival director is willing to face head on.

Adi Dunlop is particularly distraught by the situation facing Aboriginal communities in central Australia, where art centres are being radically de-funded. ‘I know Australia spends a lot of money nurturing our athletes. We maintain that Aboriginal art is a national treasure, and it is a resource that everyone would be proud of. There must be a continuing responsibility or commitment to maintaining those skills through hard times.’

Success has emboldened her. Adi recounts the story of facing an education bureaucrat, in the early days of the festival, requesting funds to work with a community in Hermannsburg. He slid the application back across the desk, ‘My dear, we have important things to teach Aboriginal people—beanie making is not on the list.’ But today, Adi is more self-assured, ‘I could go back much more confident, and I would hold my ground and I would not leave that office until I’d achieved something.’

The plight of Aboriginal communities has stimulated people like Adi to take things into her own hands. The Alice Springs Beanie Festival is the first step. Others are becoming inspired. In Canberra, an artist is knitting a house cosy. There are plans for a scarf festival in Melbourne as a satellite event. Tired of talk, knitters are taking the future into their own hands and threading together a divided world.