The Culture · July 2026
It started with grief.
Not my grief — or not only mine. In September 2012, a woman named Jill Meagher was raped and murdered walking home in Brunswick, Melbourne. Tens of thousands of people marched in her name. And I sat in my home in Naarm — a Sāmoan woman, a mother, a maker — and asked myself the only question I knew how to answer with my hands: what can I do to keep the conversation alive and not just a reaction?
The answer was a star.
An eight-pointed woven star, small enough to hold in a palm, made from paper or ribbon or whatever a person had nearby. I began teaching people to make it — in community halls, in lounge rooms, at kitchen tables. The idea was simple and it was this: every star made was a reminder. Of the values we want to live by. Safety. Dignity. Respect. A commitment, made in the act of making, to end all forms of violence.
I called it One Million Stars to End Violence. I wasn’t worried about the name or the number. I just wanted to weave with as many people as possible.
What Weaving Does to a Room
What I didn’t understand at the beginning — what I couldn’t have understood — was that I wasn’t building a project. I was building a gathering place, online, in person, locally and internationally.
Community is one of those words that gets used so freely it starts to lose its weight. We say community and mean an audience, a following, a market segment or even people that we like. But what happened with One Billion Stars wasn’t any of those things. It was people turning up. Sitting down beside strangers. Making something small and repetitive and meditative together — and finding, in the process, that they had things to say to each other that they hadn’t been able to say before.
Weaving does that. It creates a particular quality of attention — hands busy, mind open, guard lowered. I have seen it happen hundreds of times. A woman in a circle of ten people she has never met, her fingers working through the folds of a star, and suddenly she is talking about something real. Something she hasn’t said out loud. The star gives her somewhere to put her hands while her heart does the harder work.
This is what One Billion Stars taught me: that community is not built through declaration. It is built through the act of making, side by side, over and over again.
A Pasifika Weaving Movement, Star by Star
The movement grew in ways I could not have planned. I didn’t set out to start a movement or to be an ‘activist.’
Fifteen countries. 2.4 million handmade stars. Schools and prisons, hospitals and galleries, community centres and corporate offices. Workshops facilitated by people I had trained, who trained others, who trained others still — a methodology passed hand to hand across oceans and languages. World Star Weaving Day, held every December 2, now observed in communities I have never visited and may never visit.
In 2018, One Million Stars came home to Brisbane. A landmark installation in King George Square during the Commonwealth Games — millions of stars, made by hands from across the country and beyond, gathered into something you could stand inside and feel. That installation was not mine in any singular sense. It belonged to every person who had made a star and sent it in. That is the nature of this work. You begin it and then it exceeds you, an artist’s dream really.
The Question That Started Everything
Long before One Billion Stars had a name, I made a breastplate.
It was 2009. I repurposed worn woven mats — materials that had already held things, already done work, already passed through hands — and wove them together with old shell necklaces. I called it Fa’amolemole, pe mafai ona tatou lalaga fa’atasi? — Sāmoan for Please can we weave as one? or Please can we weave together?
That question is the heart of my practice. It’s what makes my work invitational, inviting people to the mat, to talanoa, make and dream. Every workshop facilitated, every star made and sent, every circle of strangers who became something more — all of it has been an answer to the question I first asked in 2009. This breastplate now lives in the permanent collection of the National Gallery of Victoria. I was the first Pacific artist to show contemporary work in the Oceanic Gallery. But what matters more than where it lives is what it carries: not a statement, not a declaration — a question, extended in all directions, still being answered.
Sāmoan Weaving as an Act of Connection
One Billion Stars is not over. It is not a chapter I have closed. It is the foundation everything else is built on — the proof that craft, offered as invitation, can move across cultures and languages and decades and still mean something. That a star small enough to hold in a palm can carry the weight of a value, a commitment, a question asked across a room or across the world.
I will forever hold dear, that art can heal and communities thrive through participation.
Fa’amolemole, pe mafai ona tatou lalaga fa’atasi?
Please can we weave together?
I am still asking. I am still making. And the answer, from all directions, keeps coming back: yes.
Maryann Talia Pau is a Sāmoan-Australian weaving artist and the founder of One Billion Stars. She is based on Quandamooka Country, Brisbane, and is the founder of Fetū Studio.
World Star Weaving Day is observed every December 2.