“I always thought the hands would go first. Turns out it was my eyes.”Why a 72-year-old Port Fairy weaver is letting go of her last 46 hand-woven shell handbags at a fraction of their price, before the loom on the verandah goes quiet for good.

Annabel Rourke

Contributing writer at The Shipwreck Coast Review, covering coastal craft and heritage across southern Australia.

Maureen Kerrisk is 72 years old. She has woven 2,299 shell-shaped handbags on the same Port Fairy loom her mother used in the sixties. Forty-six of them are sitting in her cottage right now. After those, there will be no more.

She isn’t stopping because the loom broke. She isn’t stopping because she got tired. She’s stopping because a specialist in Geelong told her this autumn that the dark patches in her eyes have spread to the left side. The magnifier she’s used since 2024 doesn’t help her thread the pearls any more.

“I always thought the hands would go first,” she says, without looking up from the loom. “Turns out it was my eyes.”

The 46 handbags in her cottage are the best she has ever made. River-mouth-cured cotton. Traced off the same Spengler’s triton her father brought up in a cray pot off Julia Percy Island in 1963. Finished with 134 freshwater pearls strung by hand on a wire thinner than a strand of hair. She is selling them for a fraction of what they would fetch in the craft tents at the Port Fairy Folk Festival. And she isn’t making any more.

The Last Hand-Weaver On The Shipwreck Coast

There are three commercial hand-weavers left between Warrnambool and Portland. Maureen Kerrisk is one of them, and the only one still making handbags. The other two — Dawn Tarrant in Koroit and Val Lanigan in Yambuk — weave tea towels and throws.

In 1963, when Maureen’s mother Eileen was at the loom, there were forty-one registered weavers working along that stretch of coast. By 1988, there were nineteen. By 2006, eight. As of this autumn, three.

It isn’t because nobody wants the bags. Maureen sells out every batch. The reason is simpler: nobody under sixty wants to learn a craft that takes forty years to get right. Maureen’s granddaughter Sienna — 29, a graphic designer in Brunswick — has watched her grandmother for two decades. She says openly that she could never do the work herself.

“I can’t even fit the bronze clips the way she does,” Sienna says. “I’ve had a go. It’s not the same. There’s something in her wrist that took forty years to build. You can’t shortcut it.”

When Maureen closes the loom this summer, the coast loses its last commercial handbag weaver. Not its last weaver. Its last handbag weaver. The pearl-strap pattern her grandmother Bridget worked out in 1936 goes with her.

Three Generations On The Same Verandah

Maureen’s cottage is about eighty-five square metres of bluestone on Gipps Street. Her grandmother Bridget took it on in 1934, when the town was still half in the habit of calling itself Belfast. The back verandah faces the Moyne River, not the surf — too much salt on the ocean side, Maureen says.

At the western end of the verandah, where the light holds longest, stands a four-shaft floor loom a Geelong cabinetmaker built in 1953. There is no maker’s plate on it, just A. RITCHIE · GEELONG · 1953 burnt into the breast beam. Cotton spools in fifteen colours hang off nails along the weatherboard — bone white, salt khaki, sand brown, channel blue, mustard yellow. The air smells of rush, of the lavender in the tub by the step, and of the linseed oil she rubs into the frame so the salt doesn’t crack it. The loom is older than the woman sitting at it, but only by a year.

She is the third Kerrisk woman at that loom, and the last who ever will be. Bridget started weaving rush baskets on this verandah in 1934, selling them for a shilling apiece to daytrippers who came down the line from Koroit. Maureen’s mother Eileen kept it going through the fifties and sixties, and added the pearl strap in 1963 after Maureen’s father came home from a run off Julia Percy Island. Maureen sat down at the loom for the first time in 1977, at twenty-three. She has not stopped since.

She weaves one thing now: a hand-sized handbag in the silhouette of a Spengler’s triton — the spiral shell that comes up in the cray pots along this coast. It is not a beach bag. It is built to be carried on the shoulder or across the body, with the pearl strap that became her signature.

“Every bag is woven off a real shell,” she says, tilting her head at the window ledge. An eighteen-centimetre triton sits there in the morning light. “Dad brought that up in a pot in 1963. I was nine. He said it was the best one he’d ever seen come over the side, and I asked him if I could keep it.”

What Forty-Nine Years At The Loom Builds Into Every Bag

Six things make a Kerrisk bag a Kerrisk bag. None of them can be taught in under a decade. None of them survive a factory floor. They are why a 1968 Kerrisk — Eileen’s era — is still hanging on a peg by the back door, carried through forty-one summers and counting.

1. The Moyne River Weave

A three-layer cotton technique on the 1953 loom Maureen inherited from her mother. The structure gives the bag its shell-like firmness without making it stiff. Press it flat in a suitcase, drop it on the back seat, set it down on a verandah table — it springs back into the triton silhouette in seconds.

2. The Triton Shell Silhouette

Every bag is woven off the same eighteen-centimetre Spengler’s triton her father brought up in a cray pot off Julia Percy Island in 1963, when she was nine. The shell has sat on the verandah window ledge since 1977 and is the silhouette template — traced in pencil onto butcher’s paper before each batch. No two bags have a different shape. They all come from the one shell on the ledge.

3. The Hand-Strung Pearl Strap

Every bag ships with two straps. The first is a braided cotton top-handle for the shoulder — the same braid Bridget worked out in 1934 to carry her husband’s gear up from the wharf. The second is a cross-body pearl strap: 134 freshwater pearls strung by hand in the pattern of Bridget’s 1936 wedding necklace. Bronze clips at each end let you swap between the two depending on the day. The pearls run 4 mm to 8 mm, sorted by lustre in three old chemist’s chests in the back bedroom.

4. The River-Mouth Cured Cotton

Before weaving, the cotton sits twenty-four hours in a galvanised tub of seawater carried up from the mouth of the Moyne. The salt tightens the fibres and makes them hold their colour through a full coastal summer. Eileen worked it out in the sixties, after early bags came back from the stalls faded in a single season.

5. The Open-Top Architecture

No closure, on purpose. Taken from the open triton itself. The grab is quick — phone, lipstick, sunglasses, purse. No fighting with a zip. No groping around the bottom of a deep bag. You can see what’s in it at a glance, which matters on a restaurant chair.

6. The Gipps Street Ledger

Every bag gets a hand-stamped number in the lining and a matching line in the leather ledger Maureen started in 1977. She began at #001. This final batch is #2,254 through #2,299. Number #2,300 will never exist.

The Hour Of Quiet On The Verandah

On the morning she finished bag #2,299 — one of the bags still sitting in the cottage right now — Maureen walked out to the front step with a cup of tea and sat there for an hour without saying anything.

Her granddaughter Sienna was down for the weekend. “I asked her how she felt,” Sienna says. “She just pointed back at the window ledge and said, ‘That shell is older than the loom. It’s older than me. It’ll be here after I’m gone.’ That was all she said about it. Then she finished her tea and went back inside.”

The shell stays on the ledge after Maureen stops weaving. She’s already written it into her will. Whoever lives in the cottage after her gets the shell. It’s the only thing she has named in it.

The Drift In Her Right Eye

There is one word Maureen asks her granddaughter not to use in interviews. Not because she’s embarrassed. Because the word makes her sound weaker than she is. The word is macular.

Here’s what it means on her verandah: Maureen can still see the river. She can still see Sienna’s face from the other end of the boards. She can still read the front page of the Warrnambool Standard. What she can’t do is look at something smaller than a ten-cent piece from fifteen centimetres away and see it clearly. Threading 134 freshwater pearls onto a fine steel wire is exactly that kind of work.

It first hit her on a Tuesday morning in November 2023. She was stringing pearls for bag #2,241. The wire blurred. She blinked. Blinked again. She tried with her mother’s magnifier, the one Eileen had used since 1972. The wire still blurred. She set the pearls down on the ledge beside the triton and stood up. She didn’t tell Sienna for another month.

The pearls were her grandmother’s contribution to the design. Bridget started with glass beads in 1946. Eileen switched to freshwater pearls in 1963. Maureen won’t send a bag out without them.

The last 46 bags are sitting in her cottage right now. All woven. All finished. All strung with pearls. They are the last 46 that will ever exist.

Why The Price Is Wrong On Purpose

A hand-woven bag this size usually goes for four hundred and thirty to six hundred dollars. That’s the price in the craft tents at the Port Fairy Folk Festival, at the Sunday market in Lorne and on the Rose Street stalls in Fitzroy. Maureen sold hers at those prices for twenty years.

She isn’t pricing this final batch anywhere near that. She’s pricing it at a fraction of it. The mortgage went in 1993. The pension covers what she spends. Sienna runs the website for nothing. The money isn’t the point.

“I want these out in the world,” Maureen says. “On somebody’s shoulder at the Koroit market. On the deck of the Queenscliff ferry. At a wedding up at Mount Macedon where the bride’s mother put hers down in the grass because she’d finally kicked her shoes off. Not in a display case. Not in a collector’s wardrobe. My gran sold baskets to daytrippers for a shilling in 1934. I’m not weaving these so they can sit on a shelf.”

The low price is a filter. It’s meant to get the bags onto the arms of women who will actually carry them. Not the sort of buyer who collects expensive things to put behind glass. If you carry one of Maureen’s last 46 bags through a coastal summer and it comes home with a spilled drink on the strap and a story attached, you did exactly what she wanted.

What Three Women Said After Carrying One For A Summer

Three Questions Sienna Gets Most Often

One More Look At What Owners Say

Note: This article is a sponsored editorial and contains advertising. The product featured was carefully selected. Prices may vary depending on availability. The story is based on real events; some details have been condensed for editorial clarity.