Guna Kinne was born Guna Klasons on 6 June 1923 in Riga, Latvia. Her father was a seagoing captain and accountant. Her mother was an archivist in Riga’s Latvian State Archives. Guna was born and went to school during Latvia’s brief period of independence between 1918 and 1939. Latvians had been oppressed by foreign rule for more than 700 years until independence was declared on 18 November 1918. As Guna was growing up, the Latvian Government emphasised the importance of Latvia’s 1000-year-old heritage by teaching national dressmaking in schools.
The first part of the dress to be made was the white linen blouse, decorated with red and grey cotton cross-stitch embroidery. The material was purchased in Riga in 1937 and was cut, embroidered and sewn by Guna at high school in 1939 under the supervision of the handiwork teacher. As Guna told me in an oral history interview in 2007:
I made the blouse at school. I had no particular feelings. It was a task we had to do, so I did it. We could actually pick what type of blouse we wanted and from which national region. I picked a particular one from the district of Nīca. But later I was really emotionally involved…I think I was seventeen years old then…my father gave me the material for the skirt, the jacket and a ready-made crown…I thought, my God, this is very rich, great gift, a national dress! But because I was at that age, I also said, ‘My God, all that work which has to go into it?’[19]
The honour of having a national dress ensured Guna soon began the process of assembling its different components. She also acquired the publication Novadu Tērpi (District Gowns), which contained the patterns for the various national dresses, drawn from regional costume.[20]
By choosing the Nīca dress, Guna was continuing a regional and a national tradition. Guna made up the red wool skirt while still at high school in Riga in about 1941. The women of Nīca began making red skirts for their national dress in the nineteenth century.[21] The Nīca jacket fabric is believed to have originated during the reign of Duke Jacob of Kurzeme in the seventeenth century.[22] In this period, the creation of the costume was a way for Nīca to express its own identity. By the early twentieth century, the regional styles were established and documented during the period of independence as ‘national dress’ in publications such as Novadu Tērpi. As Guna Kinne reflected in her letter to the museum:
The keeping ‘alive’ of the National Heritage seemed to assure that our nation was important enough to have a place amongst other nations. In this light the Latvian National dress became very important, and to own and wear one showed the owner’s pride in our small, insignificant and struggling nation…It became the custom to wear the national dress at any important national function but also as an alternative to an evening dress. It was the dream of any Latvian woman, specially a young girl, to own a national dress. It was very complicated to make and costly to buy.[23]
The relationship between national dress and Latvian identity, founded during the country’s brief period of independence, continued to evolve throughout the period in which Mrs Kinne made and wore her dress. In the 60 years since she chose it, the Nīca dress has become a symbol of the Latvian nation as a whole.[24]
Latvia’s independence would not last long. It was invaded three times in the space of five years: the Soviet Union invaded in June 1940; the Germans invaded in June–July 1941; then, between July 1944 and May 1945, the Soviet Union forcibly reoccupied the country. By the end of World War II, Latvia had lost one-third of its population: executed, killed in war, murdered in the Holocaust, allowed to die by deprivation in prison camps, deported to the Soviet Union and Germany and scattered in prisoner-of-war and displaced persons camps across Europe.[25]
Many Latvians, including Guna Klasons, fled Latvia as the second Soviet invasion was coming. Fearing her country’s destruction, she took with her the remnants not only of her personal life but what she knew as the Latvian nation. The unfinished dress, pattern book and some photographs were all she took when she fled Latvia in about 1945 with her mother and sister. As she wrote:
At that time the dress, including the Latvian jewellery, was my most important possession, sentimentally and materially, and I took the dress and the unfinished jacket with me in my suitcase on a ship to Germany [Gdansk, now in Poland] while fleeing the USSR army.[26]
Her way of preserving and continuing her nation was to preserve and continue to make her national dress. The jacket in particular was made at this time. When she had worn the unfinished dress in Latvia, she had borrowed a jacket. She was able to imagine the finished jacket and, despite her difficult circumstances, was able to draw the pattern onto the material from the pattern book and then embroider it. It was finished in 1945 in Germany in the Russian Zone, as she noted in her 1989 letter:
It was in the suitcase also when I ran to catch the last Red Cross train carrying wounded Latvian soldiers from Gdansk to Berlin. Neither the suitcase nor the dress was harmed in the Berlin bombardments, and later I took it to Parchim, in Mecklenburg which on the close of the war became part of the Russian zone. There, desperate to find my family, always short of food, fearing deportation back to Latvia, obtaining false documentation, forced to find new lodgings because of a Russian officer’s rape attempt, I finished the jacket.[27]
National Museum of Australia: nma.img-ci20082088-076-vi-vs1.jpg and nma.img-ci20082088-055-vi-vs1.jpg.
The jacket is especially significant to Mrs Kinne because of the difficult and unusual circumstances in which she made it. Possibly as an expression of her individual taste and circumstances, the embroidery is slightly different to the pattern. The coiled pattern is larger and more free-flowing than that shown in the pattern book. She has also extended the pattern further up the left shoulder. Her 1989 letter continued:
I had the completed costume in my only suitcase when I fled the Russian Zone. I was then thrown off the train at the border by Russian soldiers but in the dark, rainy night I, still holding the suitcase, fell down the railway embankment and was able to crawl back up to reach the last freight wagons of the train before it started to move and thus escape to the English Zone.
I wore the dress with great pride for the first time there at the Geestacht (near Hamburg) Latvian Displaced Persons Camp dance in December 1945 and met my future husband on that day. The dress was worn at many other dances during that period in [displaced persons] camps in the English and American Zones.[28]
Performances of traditional dance and song were arranged in the displaced persons camps and in Australia as ways of continuing the traditions of the Latvian nation outside its occupied borders. The performative aspects of Mrs Kinne’s national dress were to continue, albeit in a different form, in Australia.
Guna Klasons married Arturs Kinne in 1946 in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany. She and her husband left the port of Bremerhafen in October 1948 and arrived in Sydney a month later. The dress was worn again in Wangaratta, mostly at Latvian gatherings.
It was in Wangaratta that Mrs Kinne made the last piece of the dress according to her pattern book, in about 1957, when she felt too old to wear the crown. In Latvian tradition, once a woman married, her head covering changed to a head cloth or bonnet, thus completing her passage from adolescent maiden to married woman. Mrs Kinne was able to make that cultural transition by making the bonnet in Australia.
In September 1959, Mrs Kinne was invited by a Good Neighbour Council to join other ‘New Australians’ in national dress greeting Princess Alexandra of Kent when she visited Wangaratta. In an interview, Kinne answered my question about the events of this day:
How did I feel when I wore my Latvian dress? Well, in a way I was proud to show off the dress, because it was unusual, being red and all. But otherwise the reception was rather boring…it was standing around for hours and waiting and waiting and then—in two minutes the princess drove past.[29]
Photo: Arturs Kinne, National Museum of Australia: nma.img-ci20061760-002-vi-vs1.jpg.
Photo: George Serras. National Museum of Australia: nma.img-ci20082088-086_to_087.jpg.
Figure 17.5: Good Neighbour Council group in their national costumes waiting to greet Princess Alexandra, in Wangaratta, 1959.
National Museum of Australia: nma.img-ci20061760-001-vi-vs1.jpg.
Wearing the dress in Australia also enabled Mrs Kinne to be overtly politically active when she wore the dress in two Melbourne rallies. The first rally involved walking in a procession to St Paul’s Cathedral in 1968 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of Latvia’s declaration of independence. The second rally was in the 1970s to protest against Australia recognising the incorporation of Latvia into the Soviet Union:
[This occasion] was a lot more emotional. Again we grouped together in St. Kilda Road, but then we walked up Bourke Street. In Bourke Street there were lots of people and some cried out, ‘You Nazis, you Nazis!’ We were so angry. How could they call us Nazis? The Nazis occupied us as well as the Soviets.[30]
The rally was probably worthwhile because [Prime Minister Malcolm] Fraser cancelled [former Prime Minister Gough] Whitlam’s decision. Usually we felt as second grade citizens in Australia, we all stood out only in a bad way. This was sort of standing out in a good way, even if only externally.[31]
Photo: Arturs Kinne. National Museum of Australia: nma.img-ci20061760-003-vi-vs1.jpg.
In 1989, Mrs Kinne made the decision to finally part with her dress because ‘I have no female descendants I wish to donate the costume to an institution, preferably the National Museum’. This was a poignant moment in her life and the life of the dress, given the significance she had placed on the ‘putting aside of this important banner from the past’.[32]
Guna Kinne’s dress connects Latvia and Australia, and the protests on the streets of Riga at the time of the Soviet invasion with protests on the streets of Melbourne 40 years later. Interwoven with her personal biography, the biography of her dress connects Riga, Gdansk and Geestacht with Wangaratta and Melbourne. Their shared biography offers insights into the relationships between occupied and displaced people, material culture and national and personal identities.
[19] Interview by Karen Schamberger with Guna Kinne, Noble Park, 8 January 2007.
[20] It was issued by the Latvijas Lauksaimniecības Kamera (Latvian Agricultural Camera) in 1939.
[21] Apinis-Herman, A. 1993, Latvian Weaving Techniques, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, p. 98. This book contains a detailed technical description of the material, techniques of manufacture and diagrams of the Nīca skirt (pp. 98–104).
[22] Ibid., p. 91.
[23] Letter from Guna Kinne to Sally Fletcher, 23 March 1989, NMA, File 89/63, p. 3.
[24] Latvian National Costumes. Volume 2: Kurzeme, 1997, Museum of History of Latvia, Riga, p. 357.
[25] http://www.occupationmuseum.lv/lat/services/gramatu%20faili/3_okupacijas.pdf, accessed 15 November 2006.
[26] Letter from Guna Kinne to Sally Fletcher, 23 March 1989, NMA, File 89/63, p. 4.
[27] Ibid., p. 4.
[28] Ibid., p. 4.
[29] Interview with Guna Kinne, 8 January 2007.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Letter from Guna Kinne to Sally Fletcher, 23 March 1989, NMA, File 89/63, p. 5.