About Flax
Harakeke fibre has a wide range of uses...
In the past, harakeke (flax) was used for many everyday things including clothing, mats, plates to eat off, baskets and ropes. It had a big role to pay in hunting and gathering food. Bird snares, lashings, fishing lines and nets were all made from flax.
Even children’s toys were made, like rattles for babies. None of these practices have been completely lost – you can still find many examples used daily.
Other parts of the plant were also used. Floats or rafts were made out of bundles of dried flower stalks (kokari) and the nectar from the flowers was used to sweeten food.
There were also many medicinal uses. Flax produces a sticky gum that was applied to boils and wounds and used for toothache. Flax leaves were used to bind broken bones and leaves were used as dressings. Flax root juice was applied to wounds as a disinfectant.
More recently, the most well known use of harakeke is for kete (kits or bags), which are still used for gathering kaimoana (seafood) storing vegetables and as everyday carry bags. Much more decorative ones have become readily available in galleries and craft shops. Today, flax is used in soaps, hand crèmes, shampoos and a range of other cosmetics. Flax seed oil can also be found for sale, and there have even been experiments to make flax into wine.
Fibreactive Creatures makes beautiful small sculptures of indigenous creatures from the stripped fibre, and also uses the dried flax flower stalks in some of the bodies.
Harakeke (New Zealand flax) is indigenous to New Zealand and Norfolk Island. Indigenous means it originates from here. These are the only two places in the world it originates from. However it has been taken overseas, so there are now large plantations of harakeke elsewhere in the world, especially in France, Italy and South Africa. Apparently the Japanese grew harakeke a lot during the First World War and they used to use it to make backpacks for their soldiers.
No fibre plant was more important to Maori than flax. Traditionally when harakeke leaves are removed from the plant, only the older leaves on the outside are taken because it is believed the three inner layers of the plant represent a family. Te rito (the shoot in the middle) represents the baby, with the two leaves either side being the parents and the two leaves either side of them being the grandparents.
The Maori people have used the fibre of harakeke for hundreds of years, using a mussel shell to scrape it ready for weaving or plaiting. Each pa or marae typically had a pa harakeke or flax plantation. Different varieties were specially grown for their strength, softness, colour and fibre content, and still are in some places.
Between the 1820s and the 1860s flax fibre was traded between Maori and Europeans. Most of it was exported to rope makers in Australia and Britain but after 1840 a small industry was established in New Zealand and several rope makers began to produce ropes and twines for the local market and for export.