René van der Sluijs and Geoff Naylor travelled to New Zealand in April 2009 on the invitation of the Textile Institute to present papers on the Australian Cotton Industry. The year 2009, has been declared by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization as the International Year of Natural Fibres. In response to this the Textile Institute of New Zealand and the Textile Institute branch of New South Wales combined to host the conference on ‘Natural Fibres in Australasia’ which was held at the Otago University in Dunedin in New Zealand.The conference was held over three days. The three daily themes were Protein Fibres, Cellulose Fibres and Natural Fibres in cultural artefacts. The conference was attended by 87 delegates. Presenters were mainly from New Zealand and Australia; however a wider international interest was evidenced by papers from Iran, Croatia and The Czech Republic.Rene van der Sluijs and Geoff Naylor were the only two delegates that presented papers on cotton. Rene’s paper was entitled ‘Australia’s position in the global cotton industry’ and Geoff Naylor presented a paper on ‘The Measurement of cotton fibre linear density and maturity and its potential value to textile processing’. Both papers were well received with a number of questions raised during the question and discussion period.