Cuttings, Combings, Fettlings and Flock: Gender and Australian Wool ‘Waste’, 1900–1950

ABSTRACT As Australia's wool industry produced vast amounts of fine fleece from the nineteenth century, the wool processing and clothes manufacturing industries generated waste – products like cuttings, combings, fettlings and flock. Salvaged and then sold to waste merchants, these and other materials had a second life. This article explores how the products and handling of wool waste are connected to gender: the work, including that defined as noxious for its dust and stench that made some processes apparently more suitable for men or women, and the use, with some goods aligned to purity and others to pollution.