Sonja Cook defies easy definition. She is a fashion designer turned “roadkill collector”. A Slovakian city girl, and a Tasmanian with a fondness for self-sufficient rural living. We meet on a sunny Sunday morning at Sonja’s house in Franklin, where bushland opens out into undulating green fields. Her quaint, 1.5ha property is home to chickens, cows, a brightly-painted wooden caravan, fruit trees, vegetable patches, and flowers in vibrant full bloom. It feels like Europe.
Then Sonja yanks open the lid of a large plastic tub and pulls a wet wallaby hide from murky brown liquid – salvaged roadkill, currently in the process of being tanned with boiled eucalyptus bark. It smells surprisingly pleasant. The roadkill theme continues inside Sonja’s charming timber home where dining chairs are adorned with wallaby pelts.
Passing through to Sonja’s studio, her custom-made leather bags are not what you expect when you hear the word “roadkill”. They are one-off, stylishly-constructed pieces, made with practical, everyday use in mind. Only subtle signs of wallaby life, faint scratches from fights betraying their origins. Sonja has also crafted a pair of leather lace-ups from roadkill, and simple slide sandals with soles fashioned from old tyres.
Throughout the house that Sonja shares with her Australian husband, Peter, and their daughters, Anika and Katja, are works of art she has painted, created, transformed, sewn. We settle in by a wood stove on a couch covered in cozy sheepskin rugs she tanned herself. “Somebody asked me recently, ‘What are your hobbies?’ And it took me aback,” she says, “I think everything I do is my hobby!” Sonja is vivacious, veering from vehemence to amusement in one breath.
It’s ironic that Sonja Cook has spent 20 years living in the Tasmanian countryside. “I’m from Bratislava, and I’m totally a city girl,” she declares. "I grew up on Sunday walks in town, going to the theatre, concerts and exhibitions, and slowly, bit by bit, I turned into this … corpse collector!” She laughs heartily.
Sonja was born in 1968, a month after the Soviet Union led an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her parents were Slovak lawyers, “very educated, very cultured people, who made less money than any butcher, any greengrocer, essentially because they were intellectuals and considered to be … well, scum.”
Growing up during the Cold War amidst an onslaught of Russian propaganda and the ever-present threat of nuclear war, Sonja dreamed of moving to Australia. In her childhood imagination, faraway Australia was unreachable by any war. “I was just playing it safe,” she confesses. “It was purely based on my fear of being bombed one day by Americans, and Australia was safe. I didn’t think of it as a western country.”
A highly-imaginative autodidact, Sonja has dyslexia and barely scraped through school. "My spelling is very creative,” she tells me. “I put double letters everywhere I can just for good measure.” She was drawn to, and excelled in, anything artistic. She attributes much of her good taste to growing up with parents who “were able to, from very, very little, create a really classy environment using classical designs, modern Danish – the things that people like at the moment. I grew up with that, and it gets into your blood.”
Sonja leaps off the couch to retrieve a wad of Slovak magazine clippings she has saved from the 1990s. Around the time of the Velvet Divorce, when Czechoslovakia was dissolved into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Sonja was making a name for herself as a fashion designer. She shows me magazine spreads of women in diaphanous pastel blouses, and power suits with shoulder pads, all designs from her fashion label, Jazz Boutique.
“When I grew up you couldn’t buy fashionable clothing,” she says. “It was just grey, drab. I couldn’t buy nice things so I started to make them.”
In the late 1990s, Sonja met Peter through a mutual friend in Slovakia. The attraction was immediate. Within three days they were living together. Sonja didn’t speak English, only Russian and Slovak. Peter had been teaching English in the Czech Republic for three-and-a-half years and was fluent in Czech. “Czech and Slovak are very similar,” Sonja explains. Sonja says she is lucky that Peter has a deep understanding of her culture, and they share a similar sense of humour. “Peter even knows sayings that the whole nation memorises from our movies,” Sonja tells me, beaming.
Despite his interest in Czech and Slovak culture, Peter missed life in Australia. Three months after they met, Sonja travelled with Peter to Australia. Her idea of Australia had evolved from the utopian dream of her childhood to “the total stereotypical image of sharks on every corner, and snakes jumping at you, everything trying to kill you”. They arrived in Peter’s hometown of Brisbane during the summer and had to camp in a tent in Peter’s parents’ garden. The contrast between Bratislava and Brisbane couldn’t have been more striking. It was a particularly difficult adjustment since Sonja didn’t speak any English.
While in Brisbane, Sonja happened upon a book about Tasmania. “It had old buildings, beautiful mountains, and seasons. So I thought, ‘I’d like to go there’.” Peter also had an affinity for Tasmania – he was an avid bushwalker, and his parents had grown up on the island. “Peter’s mum was Miss Tasmania in 1964, I think!”
When Sonja and Peter were shown through their Franklin property 20 years ago, it immediately felt like home. But Sonja’s exposure to country life was limited. “I had no idea what was grass, what was a weed, and what was a flower.” While sitting outside their new house with its previous owner, Sonja heard a noise and asked, “‘What sort of bird is that?” “It’s a frog,” he replied.
Sonja began learning how to garden and grow her own food. She also threw herself into creative projects, making sleeping bags and beanies to sell at Salamanca Market. Later she turned to bag-making, first using fabric from old skirts, then integrating leather cut out of clothes from op shops. Amidst all of this, Sonja gained fluency in English, and gave birth to her two daughters.
About 17 years ago, Sonja walked into Country Leather in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, desperate to find someone who could teach her basic leatherwork skills. The shop’s owner at the time, Paul, patiently explained how to get started. She left the shop crying, so touched was she by the kindness of this stranger. After much practice and rejection, Sonja’s leather bags became sought-after in Hobart boutiques. She has recently stopped supplying shops and now sells bags directly, often to people already familiar with her work. She laments that the overproduction of leather goods in sweatshops has generated unrealistic expectations. “You wouldn’t get out of bed for the amount of money I make per hour making these bags,” she says.
Although Sonja was sourcing high-quality leather from an Italian factory with sustainable practices, the transportation to Australia bothered her. The idea of using roadkill leather had been on her mind for years. “But there is the smell, there is the ‘eurgh’ element, so I was never brave enough to do it,” she recalls. “But I saw how much there was on our street, and I always felt sorry it was totally wasted.”
Earlier this year, during lockdown, Sonja was walking her dog, Tess, when she came across a large wallaby carcass on the road. She mustered up her courage, dragged the wallaby home by the tail, and Googled “How to skin a wallaby.” In less than a year, Sonja progressed to tanning wallaby hides using the boiled bark of various trees. Willow bark produces light-coloured, supple leather. Black wattle produces firmer leather. Eucalyptus-tanned leather is very dark, and surprisingly soft. She also runs workshops including how to vegetable-tan roadkill pelts.
I was surprised to learn that the collection and use of roadkill requires a permit. Sonja’s permit is restricted to the road outside her house, and only allows her to collect wallabies. Even so, she finds more carcasses than she can make use of. Neighbours often text to say there is fresh-looking roadkill outside their property, not too badly beaten. When Sonja collects roadkill, it is not only the animal’s pelt that is used. After skinning and gutting, the wallaby meat can be used for composting, or legally fed to a pet.
. . .
Does this city girl miss Slovakia? Sonja tells me that in the early days of her life in Australia she was so consumed with making a new life for herself that she ignored her homesickness. It wasn’t until a few years ago that she went through a crisis and considered moving back to Slovakia for part of each year. Peter was supportive, recognising that "he’d had his turn”, and now it was hers. They were looking into buying a tiny house in Slovakia, when Sonja had a realization, a “gut feeling of I don’t want to escape from Australia, I don’t want to escape my family, I just miss Europe, the old tradition, the old cities. But it is essentially nostalgia. If you were there you’d have to deal with everyday life. Suddenly this great relief came and that was it. I didn’t buy a tiny house! I’m so glad I had this epiphany. I’m very happy where I am. I realised how lucky I am, and we have a great life.”
Before I leave, Sonja takes me to a wooden shed where colourful sheets of leather are hanging from the rafters. She rummages around and pulls out a suitcase, a work of art she exhibited at Franklin Church Gallery about 10 years ago. Inside the suitcase are items belonging to her family, as well as linen, books, and other objects representing migrants’ difficult choices of what to bring when moving to a new country. The objects that were left behind are, in a sense, just as significant as what made it into the suitcase.
Sonja arrived in Tasmania armed with abundant creativity and resourcefulness. But I get the sense that her positivity and tenacity are underpinned by a particular type of resilience common to migrants, a strength born from leaving behind an entire life, and making sacrifices in exchange for a fresh start.
On the drive back to Hobart I count at 15 dead animals, grisly piles of fur stuck to the asphalt. I once read that Tasmania more animals die per kilometre of road than in any other place in the world. Given the impact of vehicles on Tasmanian wildlife, Sonja Cook’s roadkill creations are also a reminder for us to slow down.
More information about Sonja Cook’s creative work and her classes can be found at www.instagram.com/sonja_c_handbags
Stephanie Jack is an Australian Singaporean actor and writer. She has lived in six countries and on board a yacht. She is a graduate of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater Institute, and the creator of 'Mixed Up', a YouTube series exploring mixed race identity. Her artistic work is propelled by a keen desire to bridge cultural divides. Having returned to Tasmania during Covid-19, Stephanie is finding island life immensely rewarding. More about her can be found at www.stephanie-jack.com.
