Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia 9781350069626, 9781350069657, 9781350069633

Table of contents :
Cover page
Halftitle page
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Setting the Scene: Gold Rush Victoria
Topsy Turvy: Class in the Colony
Class and Gender in Gold-Rush Society
Peeling Back the Layers
1 Women, Work, and the Needle
The Gendering of Needlework
Women’s Work / Women’s Employment
Convict Sewing: Punishment and Control
Dressmakers, Needlewomen, and Outworkers: The Needlework Industry
Genteel Paid Labor: Challenges and Contradictions
Conclusion
2 Making Women: An Education in Needlework
A Correct Education
Needlework: The Fundamental Female Activity
Practical Lessons in the School Room and at Home
Marking Samplers: The Measure of Girlhood Education
Genteel Accomplishments: Ornamental Skills
Shaping the Body and Mind
Conclusion
3 Constructing the Genteel Woman: Fancywork and Femininity
Defining Fancywork and Femininity
Leisure and the Genteel Woman
Performance in the Parlor
The Contradictions of Fancywork
Creating a Comfortable Home
Maintaining Gentility on the Edges
Conclusion
4 Industrious Women: Duty, Virtue, and Plain Sewing
Plain Sewing: Work for All Women
A New Colonial Femininity
The Home as Haven: Comfort in the Home
Hidden Practices, Hidden Products
Charitable Needlework: Sewing for the Poor
Conclusion
5 Dressing the Part: Dressmaking in the Home
Dress, Class, and Identity: Genteel Good Taste
Dress in the Colony: The Evidence of Daily Garments
The Extended Lifecycle of Gowns: Second-Hand Clothing, Mending, and Refurbishing
Making Gowns Anew: Motivations for Home Dressmaking
Conclusion
6 A Good Wife and Mother: Clothing the Family
Clothing Children in the Colony
Pressures in the Colony: Time and Resources
A Mother’s Love and Devotion
Protecting the Male Body
Men’s Clothing in the Colony
Tailoring in the Genteel Home
Conclusion
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia Lorinda Cramer

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BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 Copyright © Lorinda Cramer, 2020 Lorinda Cramer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. ix constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Charlotte Daniels Cover image: Applique Quilt, 1843 (detail) by Martha Bergin, photograph by Jennifer McNair. (© Museums Victoria, HT 12340 / CC BY, https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1216698) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

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Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments

1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction Women, Work, and the Needle Making Women: An Education in Needlework Constructing the Genteel Woman: Fancywork and Femininity Industrious Women: Duty, Virtue, and Plain Sewing Dressing the Part: Dressmaking in the Home A Good Wife and Mother: Clothing the Family Conclusion

Notes Bibliography Index

vi ix 1 25 47 71 95 115 139 169 175 215 235

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List of Figures 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7

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E.T., Canvass [Canvas] Town, c. 1850s Samuel Calvert, The Gold Rush in Victoria: On the Road to the Diggings, Deserted Ships in Hobson’s Bay in 1852, 1888 Edward Gilks, The Digger’s Road Guide to the Gold Mines of Victoria and the Country Extending 210 Miles Round Melbourne, 1853 David Tulloch and Thomas Ham, Golden Point, Ballarat, 1851 W.H.O., Off to the Diggings, 1855 S.T. Gill, Lucky Digger that Returned, 1852 John Leech, Topsy Turvey, or our Antipodes, 1854 Unknown maker, The Flag of the Southern Cross (Eureka Flag), 1854 Henry Hainsselin, [Prospector’s Hut] Balaarat [Ballarat], c. 1853–54 Elizabeth Marsden, Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden, 1803 Unknown female convicts on board the Rajah, under the direction of Kezia Hayter, The Rajah Quilt, 1841 The Illustrated London News, Distressed Needlewomen Emigrating to Australia for a Better Life, 1850 Anne Trotter, Needlework Specimen Book, Collon, County Louth, Ireland, 1840 Unknown maker [daughter of Mrs E. Prince], Patchwork Sampler, 1850–77 Unknown maker [daughter of Mrs E. Prince], Patchwork Sampler, 1850–77 Margret Barber, Sampler [detail], 1661–63 Alice Winter, Sampler, “Remember Thy Creator in the Days of Thy Youth,” Melbourne, c. 1866 Alice Winter, Sampler, “Honour Thy Father and Mother and Forget Not All Their Kindness,” Melbourne, c. 1867 Rose Augustine Pellet, Embroidery Sampler, 1847

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6 7 10 11 16 21 31 34 38 42 53 55 56 58 60 61 62

List of Figures

2.8 Margret Begbie, Needlework Sampler on Woollen Even Weave Fabric Featuring Boats and the Text “Botany Bay,” c. 1790–1840 2.9 Maria Tilley, Sampler, “The Emigrants Farewell and The Emigrants Prayer,” 1854 3.1 Unknown maker, Gentleman’s Black Smoking Cap, With Blue Trim and Blue Tassel, nineteenth century 3.2 Maria Brownrigg, An Evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens, 1857 3.3 Charles Norton, Interior of CN’s [Charles Norton’s] Room at Tooralle in 1846, 1846 3.4 Martha Bergin, Applique Quilt, 1843 3.5 S.T. Gill, Provident Diggers in Melbourne, 1869 3.6 Unknown photographer, Bertha Hudson, 1860 3.7 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Berlin Woolwork Firescreen, c. 1860s 3.8 Dublin & Melbourne Portrait Rooms, Ernest Leviny and his wife Bertha (nee Hudson), 1870 4.1 Richard Daintree, View of Castlemaine Town, c. 1858 4.2 Charles Lyall, Digger Asleep, c. 1854 4.3 Paul Jerrard & Son, Newbold & Co, Christmas on the Diggings or the Unwelcome Visitor who Came Uninvited, c. 1860s 4.4 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Sheet for a Cot or Pram, 1875 4.5 Mary Isaacs, Drawers, 1857 5.1 Nicholas Chevalier and Frederick Grosse, Collins Street, 1864 5.2 George Lacy, Digger’s Wife in Full Dress, c. 1852 5.3 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Wedding in Melbourne, 1852 5.4 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo, 1869 5.5 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo, 1852 5.6 W. Parker, Unearthing the Welcome Stranger Nugget, 1869 5.7 Unknown photographer, Eliza Perrin and Children, c. 1860 5.8 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway Dunolly], c. 1861 5.9 Cuthbert Clarke, Our Tent Castlemaine, 1854 6.1 G.H. Jenkinson, Ch. of E. [Church of England] School Dunolly, c. 1861 6.2 S.T. Gill, Zealous Gold Diggers, Bendigo, 1852 6.3 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway, Dunolly], c. 1861

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64 66 74 80 84 85 87 88 89 90 102 103 106 107 110 118 119 120 124 125 126 127 128 131 141 142 143

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List of Figures

6.4 Unknown photographer, Dr Michael Minter and Family, c. 1855–57 6.5 Trood, Flora and Ellen Minter, 1855 6.6 Georgiana McCrae, Boy’s Jacket, c. 1840s 6.7 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Infant’s Shirt, c. 1860s 6.8 Unknown maker, Boy’s Dress, c. 1850s 6.9 Unknown maker, White Linen Shirt Worn by Joseph Brady, 1849 6.10 Eugen von Guérard, I Have Got It, 1854 6.11 S.T. Gill, Improvident Diggers in Melbourne, 1869 6.12 Walter B. Woodbury, Five Unidentified Men Working a Gold Mine Near Beechworth, Victoria, 1856 6.13 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway, Dunolly], c. 1861 6.14 G.H. Jenkinson, [Harper & Ferguson Store, Dunolly], c. 1861 6.15 Unknown photographer, Bush Homestead, c. 1860–65

143 144 145 147 149 154 158 159 160 161 162 163

Acknowledgments Many people have provided invaluable support, assistance, and encouragement to me while researching and writing this book. I would like to thank the staff of the following museums, galleries, libraries, and archives for supplying valuable information about their collections, generously allowing access to them, or for their kind permission to use images and quotes—this book is all the richer for them: Art Gallery of Ballarat, Buda Historic Home and Garden, Syndics of Cambridge University Library, Getty Images, Gold Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, Museums Victoria, National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, National Library of Scotland, National Museum of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, National Trust of Australia (Victoria), State Library Victoria, University of Melbourne Archives, and Wiltshire and Swindon Archives for use of the Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke. In building its foundations, I would also like to acknowledge a number of other institutions who patiently and helpfully answered my questions and allowed visits to their collections including: Benalla Costume and Pioneer Museum, Brighton Historical Society, Castlemaine Art Gallery and Museum, Cavalcade of History and Fashion, Costume Collection, Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society/Schramm’s Cottage, Eaglehawk Heritage Centre, Echuca Historical Society, Embroiderers Guild of Victoria, Flagstaff Hill Maritime Museum, Frankston Historical Society/Ballam Park Homestead, Geffrye Museum of the Home, Kyneton Museum, Maryborough Midlands Historical Society/Worsley Cottage, Moorabbin Historical Society/Box Cottage Museum, Osborne House, Royal Historical Society of Victoria, Springvale Historical Society, Stawell Historical Society, Stonnington History Centre, Swan Hill Pioneer Settlement, Whitehorse Historical Society/Schwerkolt Cottage and Museum Complex, Williamston Historical Society, and Yarra Ranges Regional Museum. Without the important work these institutions do to document, preserve, and share their collections, my research would not have been possible. This book comes out of my PhD dissertation which was supported by the Australian Research Council (DP1093001: Suburban Archaeology: Approaching an Archaeology of the Middle Class in Nineteenth Century Melbourne). It was ix

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Acknowledgments

encouraged by Dr Linda Young, for whose insight I remain deeply grateful. My colleagues at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization provided the ideal environment in which to prepare my manuscript, offering always-useful advice and gratefully received support, with thanks especially to Professor Andrea Witcomb. I have also greatly appreciated the enthusiasm of my partner, family, and friends, and their unwavering interest and faith in this project. I have built on my work from the following articles: “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria: Plain Sewing and the Genteel Woman,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 213–226 in Chapter  4; “Keeping up Appearances: Genteel Women, Dress and Refurbishing in Gold-Rush Victoria, Australia, 1851–1870,” Textile: Cloth and Culture 15, no. 1 (2017): 48–57 in Chapter  5; “Making ‘everything they want but boots’: Clothing Children in Victoria, Australia, 1840–1870,” Costume 51, no. 2 (2017): 190–209 in Chapter  6; and “Diggers’ Dress and Identity on the Victorian Goldfields, Australia, 1851–1871,” Fashion Theory 22, no. 1 (2018): 85–108 in Chapter 6.

Introduction

“I need not try to describe what I felt as the crowd on the pier became so distant that I could not distinguish John and you,” Maggie Brown wrote with sadness to her sister Jane in April 1854, as the SS Great Britain departed Liverpool; “I was losing sight of the last of my kind friends in Scotland and my heart was like to break, but the worst is past, the step is taken and I do hope it will be for the best.”1 Twenty-four-year-old Maggie was setting sail for the rapidly developing Australian colony of Victoria, formed just three years earlier. Once there she planned to marry her fiancé, James Hoey. Like thousands of other young men, James had joined the rush to the colony following the explosive news of Victoria’s gold discoveries. He left Scotland in July 1852 with his brother, Thomas, and brother-in-law, Andrew Hamilton, though they soon came to realize that digging was, as Thomas described it, “a rough life this with plenty of hard dirty work.”2 Travelling to the far side of the globe was a gamble, but one that offered the tantalizing prospect of a better life, and as Thomas mused: “what’s the odds? I might as well try and dig gold out of the bowels of the earth as accumulate it by the pursuit of trade.”3 Maggie arrived in Port Phillip Bay almost four months after waving Jane goodbye, and married James in September. From their modest cottage in Collingwood, an area housing many new migrants less than two miles from the center of bustling Melbourne, James was quick to reassure his new mother-inlaw of Maggie’s comfort despite their far-flung location: “I wish you could just see the three of us sitting round the ‘wood fire’ just after tea, enjoying our smoke and our crack [conversation] and Maggie sewing or knitting—you would say we were more to be envied than pitied even although we are 16,000 miles away from all old friends and associations.”4 This vignette in which James, Maggie, and Thomas sit together after tea is unremarkable, yet it highlights a number of critical factors that I explore in this book. First, despite the history of the Victorian gold rush being written largely by men, about men, they were not its only participants. Women, too, were part of the rush to be rich. While Maggie’s 1

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initial experience of Victoria was in its rapidly developing metropolis, a little over a year later she was enmeshed in the goldfields community of Bendigo—the site of one of Victoria’s richest diggings. Secondly, while fortune or failure became the dominant narratives of the gold-rush period, looking inside the home allows a richer picture of the realities of daily life to emerge. What instead becomes clear is that most gold-rush migrants experienced something between these two extremes, and that the nuances of these experiences can be explored in the recreation of domesticity. Thirdly, in the face of social and geographical dislocations brought about by the act of migration, certain behaviors remained critical. I aim to demonstrate that genteel women negotiated, maintained, adapted, or perhaps lost and made anew their identities in new colonial environments through what I argue is one of the richest and most revealing of domestic practices: their needlework. Throughout the nineteenth century needlework was, beside child-bearing and rearing, the defining work of women. It was a common thread that ran universally through women’s everyday lives whether they were at home in Britain, in the developing Australian colonies, or settling elsewhere across the Empire. Their sewing provides a starting point for considering women’s experiences in gold-rush Victoria, and for teasing out threads of opportunity and demand that migrants negotiated in finding their place within a strange, shifting new society. Its value lies in how needlework informs our understanding of nineteenth-century womanhood and constructions of gender and class identities. Beyond the practical applications of creating or maintaining a range of textile goods, Maggie Hoey and other genteel migrants used their needlework as a strategy for controlling the appearance of both person and home, managing social position, and performing the genteel self in the face of what could be severe fractures from past lives. I scrutinize the conventional moral, social, gender, and class implications of undertaking particular kinds of needlework, investigate how these were transferred from “home,” and consider if these were re-evaluated in the Antipodes—with implications for other colonial settler societies. I contend that genteel women deployed their everyday sewing to assert or stabilize identity keenly attuned to a peculiar entanglement: some sewing derived its value from being highly visible to an audience of peers while other forms were better left concealed, unspoken of in polite society even though the end products had consequences for a genteel identity. In searching for insights into this public and private divide I analyze women’s needlework as a cultural performance, taking the distinctive setting of the first two decades of Victoria’s

Introduction

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gold rush from the first of the discoveries that rocked the globe in 1851 as my focus. This was a time and place that was one of the most dynamic in Australia’s nineteenth-century history where women played a vital, if largely untold, role.

Setting the Scene: Gold Rush Victoria Until the spectacular discovery of gold, Australia was known throughout the British Empire as a prison outpost and a pastoral settlement. The first British convicts, their gaolers, and administrators arrived in 1788 as part of the First Fleet; shortly after, squatters began working the vast swathes of land that had been inhabited by Australia’s Indigenous people for 65,000 years. Free migration to the Port Phillip District (which in 1851 separated from the colony of New South Wales to form Victoria) in the early years of European settlement was steady, but with the news of gold an excitement spread around the globe that threatened to eclipse the Californian rushes of just a few years earlier. Potential migrants revised their understanding of Australia, stained by its convict past, as increasing gold discoveries provided a compelling motivation for new waves of migrants.5 So thrilling were the stories of gold that Melbourne’s newspaper the Argus reported, only partly in parody, of the madness unleashed: “Gentlemen foaming at the mouth, ladies fainting, children throwing somersets [somersaults], and all this on account of the extraordinary news from Buninyong.”6 Adventurers from across the Empire and beyond boarded sea-going vessels, travelling thousands of miles to join the rush. There were large numbers of British and Irish, but citizens of many other countries made their way to the diggings so that in 1854 James Hoey observed a goldfields population comprising “all classes and all nations from England, America, all kingdoms of Europe, East and West Indies, China, New Zealand and all the South Sea islands, Tahiti, Rarotonga, etc, etc.”7 As those seeking gold poured into the colony, Victoria’s population swelled from little over 77,000 inhabitants prior to the first of the discoveries to a staggering 540,000 just ten years later, when 33 percent of the world’s total gold production was mined in the colony.8 Victoria transformed from a minor pastoral settlement to one of the most celebrated of all British colonies. Melbourne, a town of 23,000 residents at the start of the decade, became its crowning jewel: public works began in earnest and an astonishing 1,000 new buildings were constructed in central Melbourne in 1853 alone.9 In the early chaos, would-be diggers abruptly walked away from

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

Figure 1 E.T., Canvass [Canvas] Town, c. 1850s, print (etching), 10.2 × 20.5 cm. Collection: National Library of Australia, nla.obj-135871142.

their jobs, and despite its prodigious growth, those who poured into Port Phillip found it nearly impossible to find a bed in which to sleep. A canvas town sprang up to support Melbourne’s highly-sought housing, accommodating 7,000 by late 1852 (Figure 1).10 It soon came to shelter some of the city’s poorest residents and those who returned broken by goldfields fatigue and failure. Ships sat deserted in the harbor as Melbourne became the entry point and supply station for the seekers of Victoria’s gold—with an average of 259 new arrivals landing daily between 1852 and 1854 (Figure 2).11 Melbourne later became home for many of these diggers and their families who departed the diggings either buoyed or exhausted from the experience. In just three decades, the city had become known globally by the moniker “Marvelous Melbourne.” Gold was a powerful enticement and although reports increasingly suggested the goldfields might not hold endless riches, most new arrivals were sufficiently encouraged to try their luck: on the rich alluvial goldfield at Mount Alexander, the richer-still Ballarat and Bendigo diggings, or one of the number of smaller fields where camps of thousands could spring up almost overnight following rumors of a new discovery. Edward Gilks mapped these locations in The Digger’s Road Guide to the Gold Mines of Victoria and the Country Extending 210 Miles Round Melbourne in 1853 (Figure  3). Gilks also helpfully noted their distance

Introduction

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Figure 2 Samuel Calvert, The Gold Rush in Victoria: On the Road to the Diggings, Deserted Ships in Hobson’s Bay in 1852, 1888, print (wood engraving). Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, IAN01/08/88/Supp/7-8a.

from Victoria’s major towns for those who walked long distances carrying their possessions on their backs. There they found an astonishing scene: landscapes that had been altered sometimes beyond recognition, cleared of trees and vegetation, and pockmarked with holes which more than one commentator noted bore an uncanny likeness to a graveyard.12 At popular diggings, miners and tents spread as far as the eye could see, a scene illustrated by David Tulloch and Thomas Ham in Golden Point, Ballarat 1851 which bustles with the activity of goldfields life (Figure 4). Look closely at this engraving, though, and you’ll find but one woman—a gendered view of the diggings that is inaccurate.

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Figure 3 Edward Gilks, The Digger’s Road Guide to the Gold Mines of Victoria and the Country Extending 210 Miles Round Melbourne, 1853, print (lithograph), 17.5 × 23.5 cm. Collection: Maps Collection, State Library Victoria, 30328105437999.

Historian David Goodman articulates the ways in which gold seeking exaggerated masculine behavior, where digging was seen as a gendered activity and an independence from domestic influence in a largely masculine landscape emerged. Certainly, this is true. Yet Goodman also recognizes that while the imbalance was significant, women were present.13 Illustrations like Tulloch and Ham’s gloss over the reality that women lived, worked, and raised families in these communities; they made important contributions which scholarship increasingly sheds new light on.14 Official statistics provide clarity, revealing that men outnumbered women in Victoria in 1851, the year of the first gold discoveries, by what colonial statistician recorded as 67.4 women to every 100 men, and that numbers further destabilized as men swarmed into the colony.15 Yet, to paint a picture of an almost total absence of women is simply not true, even if a stark disparity was visible in some locations. Henry Mundy, who had arrived in the Port Phillip District as a boy the previous decade, recalled that the

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Figure 4 David Tulloch and Thomas Ham, Golden Point, Ballarat, 1851, print (engraving), 21.5 × 29.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H2411.

Fryer’s Creek goldfield in 1852 was made up of “mostly men very few women.”16 However James Muir, who jumped ship that same year to try his luck on the goldfields, noted shortly after his arrival a larger-than-usual presence of women on a part of the nearby Castlemaine diggings. Reflecting this make-up, he referred to the area by its distinctive name: “Petticoat Flat, so called for the number of the female sex in the neighbourhood.”17 Two years later, statisticians recorded just over 14,000 women and more than 52,000 men on the goldfields.18 Charlotte Perrottet was soon to be among them and as she wrote home to her mother in London while on the Ovens diggings with her husband in 1856: “you are very much mistaken in thinking there are no females here, there is an abundant supply of that . . . And very smart ones too.”19 At the same time, however, Emily Skinner encountered severe isolation on the Bucklands goldfield and she noted “one time I was a whole month without seeing a woman of any description pass by.”20 Although fewer in number, these sources underscore the fact that women were part of goldfields communities. James Muir observed by the end of the decade, that goldfields demographics had

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altered so that “Women, instead of being looked upon as curiosity were allowed to pass without more than ordinary notice.” To emphasize just how much had changed from those early days, James somewhat comically explained “I have known men to run a mile to see the flutter of a petticoat.”21 This shift reflected the changing nature of mining and business opportunities in the colony. Alluvial gold became harder to find on small claims and mining went underground to deep leads and quartz reefs.22 Waged labor and more permanent settlements attracted new kinds of migrants: families, rather than young single men, seeking opportunity.23 While many intending-diggers still flocked to the colony to try their luck, they were men of business and trade, those seeking land and property, and workers skilled as blacksmiths, carpenters, wheelwrights, bricklayers, masons, and tailors. The impact of gold ripped through Victoria’s economy, and many hoped that if the promise of gold turned sour then opportunity might await elsewhere. Beside these men were business women, nurses and domestic servants, women working in refreshment houses and inns, and those taking in needlework and laundry. So too were there genteel women, who quietly contributed to the household’s economy in untold ways as settlements transformed from the tents and rough huts of the early 1850s. How, then, can we begin to think about and better understand women’s experiences—and the genteel women that I am particularly interested in—both on the goldfields and in the colony more broadly? A starting point is through exploring the rich body of emigration literature and gold-rush guides published in the mid-nineteenth century, as most authors were outspoken about their vision of the ideal female emigrant. Ellen Clacy counselled her readers in A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53: To those of my own sex who desire to emigrate to Australia, I say do so by all means, if you can go under suitable protection, possess good health, are not fastidious or “fine-lady-like,” can milk cows, churn butter, cook a good damper, and mix a pudding . . . But to those ladies who cannot wait upon themselves, and whose fair fingers are unused to the exertion of doing anything useful, my advice is, for your own sakes remain at home.24

Ellen based her travelog on her experiences of Melbourne and the Victorian goldfields while travelling in the company of her brother.25 Enthusiastically reviewed on its publication, London’s Morning Post noted that her advice on who should emigrate was “sound, practical, and conclusive . . . of great use and profit to all those who are debating if they should leave their native country.”26 And

Introduction

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despite Ellen’s warnings, many “fine-lady-like” women did migrate to Australia in the first years of the gold rush and in the decades that followed. Among the women of genteel persuasion who left their homes for this new land, many were as intrepid as they were adaptable. Most of the women in these pages experienced the mobility that characterized the decades of the mid-nineteenth century that began with a voyage across the Empire. So distinctive was it to this time and place that historian Richard Broome recognizes: “By the end of the fifties seven out of every ten people in Victoria were overseas-born, all of whom shared the experience of migration and the tussle between the old and the new.”27 Some chose to make this step and others were coerced, but most arrived anticipating an improvement in their circumstances. They joined the Aboriginal people on whose land the rushes took place,28 a growing colonial-born population that had been borne from earlier free settlers to Port Phillip or elsewhere in Australia (as an internal migration was simultaneously underway), and those with a convict past, creating its own unique challenges in the bourgeoning society. Once in Australia some women travelled willingly to the diggings while others were more reluctant participants, but a lucky discovery that could rewrite their circumstances was worth seeking. Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the French consul-general, observed on the goldfields in 1854 that “the women work like men, and the children like-wise. There is not an idler to be seen: gold obsesses them, fascinates them.”29 In a single day on the Mount Alexander diggings, English migrant Sarah Davenport and a female companion found seven ounces of alluvial gold.30 But women were vulnerable on the diggings, leading Sarah Greaves to lament in 1851: if I were only a young man would not I go gold digging and even now I feel half inclined to dress in man’s clothes and go[.] I am certain if I could not dig I could rock the cradle only I should be afraid they would know I was not a man as I should not like to part with my curls[.]31

Some women remained in the relative comfort of more settled areas of the colony while their husbands tried their luck. The lithograph Off to the Diggings published by Cyrus Mason in 1855 depicts such a parting: a digger bids farewell to his wife and small child, a pack slung across his shoulder (Figure 5). The wellplaced provision store behind them likely served as a source of additional supplies for the diggers, who mill about a horse and cart awaiting their departure. The handles of two shovels are prominent beside the coachman—a symbol of their imminent endeavor. So commonplace were these departures that Ellen Clacy observed in 1852: “To wander through Melbourne and its environs, no one

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Figure 5 W.H.O., Off to the Diggings, 1855, print (chalk lithograph with tint stone), 21.3 × 30.1 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H99.167/1.

would imagine that females were as one to four of the male population; for bonnets and parasols everywhere outnumber the wide-awakes.”32 The experiences of these “grass widows” could be of comfort or struggle and when some men never returned, the permanent desertion of wives and families and their subsequent destitution became one of the most significant social issues of the gold-rush period.33 Yet the universal hope was that husbands, fathers, or brothers would return, if not with their fortunes then with improved prospects, an idealized homecoming illustrated in S.T. Gill’s Lucky Digger that Returned of 1852 (Figure 6). Gill depicted several versions of this scene: central to each is the air of prosperity, and the happily reunited family for whom the pain of a temporary separation was justified. Those who did go in the early years found the goldfields could be rough, uncomfortable, and dangerous. The chance of encountering women of lower social backgrounds and questionable virtue was ever present, nights could be punctured by the sounds of drunks and gunfire, and the roads in and out of the diggings were patrolled by thieves. Yet the potential far outweighed the risks. Martha Clendinning was determined to accompany her husband, Dr George Clendinning, to the Ballarat diggings despite being warned by her brother-in-

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Figure 6 S.T. Gill, Lucky Digger that Returned, 1852, print (lithograph), 20 x 15.5cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H7826.

law that “the diggings was no fit place for any respectable woman.” There were, he explained, only “Vandie’s [convicts’] wives.”34 Jane Petford, described by her husband James as “from a very respectable family,” considered the diggings community “rough and rude.”35 Some women wrote home of their dislike of the goldfields, and of the colony in general, and hoped their stay would be only as long as it took their husbands to make a fortune or to tire of trying. Charlotte Perrottet described for her mother in 1856 that although the Beechworth township was “a very different place to any of the others” and improving daily with its shops, hotels, theatre, and society, “I feel I shall never like it and I am looking forward to returning to dear old England.”36 And although Jane Prendergast bitterly disliked the colony, she acknowledged it offered something her husband Michael would never experience back home: I can understand gentlemen liking it, their life is so very free & independent, so much the reverse of the restraint that society imposes upon them in England, but no Ladies like it: the fortunes of their families & a wish to get some gold out of the land of gold, has brought them here, and necessity obliges them to remain, for none like to return without a little fortune.37

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Despite the privations, the uneven quality of society on the goldfields, and the uncertainty that “a little fortune” would ever be made, genteel families continued to be drawn by the prospect of wealth and adventure. Relatively comfortable homes could be created in makeshift surroundings, and genteel observer Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye was surprised by the high standards of tent life she witnessed in Castlemaine, recording one particularly fine example in Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience: the tent, one of the largest in the camp, was lined with green baize; one end of it was fitted up with sofas, arm-chairs, and a grand piano. Small round tables were tastefully dispersed, on which some very pretty ornaments, books, and portfolios of drawings were placed. At the other end there was a large table with cups and saucers of every size and pattern, a large mud and stone fireplace, with a blazing fire, on which two immense kettles were singing. Loaded pistols decorated the mantelpiece.38

While perhaps not luxury in the conventional sense, this was a level well above the basic conditions more commonly experienced. Other genteel women struggled with goldfields living, intensified by months of struggle and not a hint of gold. Journalist and author Mary Fortune documented the words of despair of one woman on the diggings: not more than twenty-three or four, with a dress on that had once been of very elegant make and material, but was now neglected and untidy . . . “To think that I have been brought to this! I was brought up like a lady, with servants to wait on me, and everything I could wish for at hand, and now I am eating my food and making my bed on the cold ground, no better than a pig. Oh, Heaven help me!”39

These contrasting experiences, of comfort pitted against wretchedness, have alerted scholars to the wide-ranging experiences for the middling sorts on the diggings and in the colony. Yet as historian Charles Fahey points out, little remains known of their actual lives beyond what is evident in the public sphere.40 Of this, I aim to get us a little closer.

Topsy Turvy: Class in the Colony Polishman Seweryn Korzelinski arrived in Melbourne in 1852. His party of eleven left for the diggings shortly after, and on their arrival, Korzelinski described goldfields society as:

Introduction

13

compris[ing] men from all parts of the world, all countries and religions, varying dispositions and education, all types of artisans, artists, literary men, priests, pastors and soldiers, sailors, wild tribesmen with tattoo marking and those deported for crimes—all mixed into one society, all dressed similarly, all forced to forget their previous habits, leanings, customs, manners and occupations. All forced to follow their new occupation and to live the monotonous lives of miners. As they dig shafts next to one another, their outward appearance does not signify their previous importance, worth or mental attainments.41

Forgiving Korzelinski the complete omission of women, his comment remains useful as a point of departure for exploring class, or what laborers and gentlemen recognized as a certain classlessness that emerged from the levelling experiences of living and working on the goldfields and which rippled through mid-nineteenth-century Victoria. “Every one here is met and meets another on an equality, lawyers, doctors, prigs and parsons, magistrates and housebreakers, all fraternize, addressing one another as ‘mate,’ ” wrote John Green from Bendigo.42 Skill and endurance—or what Philip Prendergast described to his father as “pluck” as being “the one thing needed”—were prioritized by commentators over social hierarchies,43 and this, as Scotsman Edwin Booth noted, “open[ed] one’s eyes a little to the feature of a working man’s life” for men from higher social classes.44 Considered a workers’ paradise, manuals stressed the benefits of emigration for the industrious classes. Laborers or mechanicals—a nineteenth-century term for skilled workers such as carpenters, blacksmiths, or plumbers—were considered the ideal diggers, most capable of the work needed in the early years of alluvial mining such as digging, lifting, carting, and washing.45 They were also well-placed to find work in these roles again should the goldfields disappoint them. Hard-working women, too, were thought suited to the endeavor. When Englishman John Sherer published The Gold-Finder of Australia in 1853, he described meeting an Irish woman going to the goldfields with her husband. Sherer considered her “fitted for such an expedition . . . [as she] had been reared to potato-digging in her own country.”46 Wealth was the ultimate prize, with its tantalizing prospect of independence and freedom from a master-servant relationship—an aspiration the Maslen brothers realized at Long Creek. Writing to their siblings left behind in England they explained: “we are quite independent of any master now for we are our own masters. We get up in the morning and go to work when we like and give up when we like and no master to order us about, and we can have all we earn . . . it is the best job ever we done in our lives.”47 Lucy and John Hart also shared this aim. Their industriousness and care with money

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

were deliberate actions, Lucy explained, “so that my husband should not always work under a Master.” It was Lucy who encouraged John to travel to the Mount Alexander diggings, and five weeks later she recorded “the joyful news that he had got his own share 200 pounds worth of gold.”48 With it, they purchased two horses and a dray to cart stores to the diggings, realizing their ambition for independence. In the colony it was possible to be self-made. Many stories of goldfields success circulated around the globe, yet it remains difficult to enumerate that success in actual terms. Historian Geoffrey Serle estimates that from mid-1852, “of all those who tried the diggings, eight out of ten made no more than the equivalent of reasonable wages, paid their way, or lost money. Another one in ten earned high wages over a long period of time and the remaining 10 percent at the end of their digging may have been able to clear £100 or more—sometimes much more.”49 In fact, commentators and diggers increasingly recognized that it was not in digging for gold itself that riches were to be found, but rather in associated occupations: gold-buying and store-keeping, as merchants or publicans, or in carting goods to the diggings like John Hart. And the working classes were certainly not the only seekers of gold; its magnetic draw attracted those who might have preferred a white collar but were willing to accept manual labor, even if only for a short period, for the prospect of instant wealth. Indeed, many of the migrants to Victoria during the rush were far from penniless. A large number had paid their own fares, and their educational qualifications and professional skills cast them, as Serle has defined, “magnificent economical material . . . superior to any other group of migrants to Australia, at least in the nineteenth century.”50 Yet this foundation was contested, challenged by a new group of wealthy individuals with access to prestige like never before. The gold-rush economy was uneven, disrupting social order.51 George Butler Earp, in his emigrants’ guide The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual, insisted that “Rank and title have no charms at the antipodes,”52 while John Sherer emphasized “All the aristocratic associations of the old country are at once annihilated . . . riches are now becoming the test of a man’s position.”53 Both authors suggested that the links between wealth, power, and gentlemanly culture were reassessed in Victoria, where self-made men and women could possess influence in spite of their pasts. In fact, as historian John Hirst has recognized “the social distinction most readily available to the aspiring colonist was that of becoming a gentleman.” In Australia, he explains, the traditional English criteria (e.g. a good family and land ownership) did not apply, as the title came to incorporate far wider-ranging backgrounds and occupations.54 Hirst charts a change in balance when “the core of true gentlemen was small and not

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15

self-sustaining; the claimants at the edges numerous,” proposing that where gentlemen made money in increasingly diverse ways it became “the status of anyone holding a certain position in the occupational hierarchy or possessing independent means. Membership of a traditional English rank thus became available to the successful migrant of whatever background.”55 While self-made men could therefore demand the title, many genteel observers continued to struggle with their unconventional pasts that muddied social distinction.56 Clara Aspinall, visiting her barrister brother in the 1850s, admitted that she found Melbourne society comprised a puzzling mix while conceding: “This may naturally be expected in a new gold colony, where so many, by industry and fortunate speculation, have made for themselves a name.”57 The potential for social mobility, for a swift and indiscriminate rise from poor to rich through luck alone and the parallel prospect of downward mobility, appeared hugely troubling for commentators. Gold seeking’s indiscriminate rewards became commonly defined through the metaphor of a lottery.58 Edwin Booth found that he quickly tired of life in the colony. It was disagreeable to “a fellow that has been accustomed to anything better.” His hope, as he wrote to his mother from Campbell’s Creek in 1853, was that “I shall be one of the lucky ones & draw a prize in the Golden lottery & then for ‘Scotland ho’ to have some comfort there again.”59 Or, as Anthony Smith wrote to his father from Brown’s diggings and Smythesdale: “Gold mining is become a great lottery & if I could get clear of it, I would gladly do so.”60 Victoria’s early diggers intended to exploit the shallow alluvial finds, to pluck gold from the ground as stories circulating around the globe suggested they might. Many more experienced only disappointment. Those worn down by long months of hard labor, like digger John Green who arrived in Victoria in 1852, advised the following year: “Never recommend anyone to come to Australia to dig for gold[,] it is a complete lottery.”61 John Leech depicted an anxious version of this lottery in Topsy Turvey, or our Antipodes of 1854, where finely mannered, well-educated men and women wait on coarse gold diggers and their doxies (Figure 7). Underlining the deep insecurities of role reversal at its most extreme, one young lady, barefoot and bareheaded with tattered flounces on her once-elegant gown, serves drinks to a table of rude card players. Another teaches a ruddy-faced woman to play the piano; the implication being that she is a most unsuited student. Historical archaeologist Sarah Hayes locates these shifts in society and the emergence of a refashioned middle class as “part of a global movement in the bending of social hierarchies and boundaries,” while noting of Melbourne that it “happened in distinctive ways in this newly formed city.”62 It is part of a debate

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Figure 7 John Leech, Topsy Turvey, or our Antipodes, 1854, etching (watercolor), 21 × 38.4 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H40165.

into the middle class that has long engaged scholarly discussion. Decades ago, historian G.H.D. Cole noted the “exceedingly elusive” concept of the middle class, a broad grouping that more recently Simon Gunn finds was “the result of accumulated ‘middles’ or spaces between—between aristocracy and working class, land and labour, highbrow and lowbrow, provincial marginality and metropolitan power.”63 One aspect on which scholars generally agree is that the traditional indicators of class including pedigree, profession, and income are troublesome middle-class markers, and that investigating alternative indicators of the middle-class experience offers valuable insight. Explorations of the middle-class home including rooms such as the parlor and the employment of domestic servants, using a frame of conspicuous consumption, and through a shared material culture have all added considerable depth to how we understand the nineteenth-century middle class.64 The analysis of the intangible elements of taste, behavior, and values offers still more, revealing a preference among some scholars for examining class through the frame of gentility.65 Gentility, Linda Young explains, names middle-class culture that found expression in the values, beliefs, and behaviors practiced by its holders.66 It was underpinned by the “self-control of the body, its desires, weaknesses and autonomic responses; self-control of the spirit and emotions; exquisitely

Introduction

17

structured control of the self in public; and control of the environment, extending from personal space to domestic shell to urban frame, carried into the country and across the sea to the colonies.”67 Dianne Lawrence, who investigates the transfer of gentility to colonial contexts and its reproduction or adaption there, contends that this is a more useful frame of reference than middle class, when the departure of settlers and sojourners from their original contexts to elsewhere around the British world eroded indicators of class, fractured family connections, and made material markers unreliable.68 Lawrence’s articulation of gentility defines two qualities: firstly, a genteel viewpoint of superiority, expressed by women through a restraint of the body and personal space as external indicators and behaviors that revealed a control of the self; and secondly, gentility as performative.69 The performative nature of gentility underlines the critical place of the visible signs of class. Penny Russell therefore observes, as “an effective weapon in the struggle for social dominance, superiority had to be visible.”70 Gentility required ongoing performance as women were under observation both from their peers and inferiors; they were judged on their ability to correctly perform genteel behaviors, and aimed not to be found wanting.71 While a body of research into gentility has focused on the urban experience, studying gentility in isolated colonial contexts promises to reveal new insight. Emma Floyd acknowledges that without this, an image emerges of gentility “as nothing more than a public performance, an externalized display that would collapse when moved to rural areas beyond the gaze of an audience.”72 It is here, at the edges of the Empire, that I explore the sometimes-extraordinary attempts women made to maintain or negotiate genteel identity against the fluidity of social standing and the gradations of gentility in the colony. Some of the women that I examine in this book were aspirational, moving towards gentility through any means at their disposal; others were struggling to assert social position following a fracture from their home and family, and once asserted to maintain gentility following what could be a spectacular payoff or financially ruinous. For those who remained part of a stable family group with steady financial resources, the colony offered exciting potential.

Class and Gender in Gold-Rush Society Against the social, economic, and geographical fluidity encountered by sojourners and settlers in gold-rush Victoria, I argue that needlework was significant in the expression of identity. Identity is a complex concept that in the

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

simplest sense refers to who we are, both as individuals and as part of a group.73 My focus in this study is on three critical aspects of identity: its changing nature, social construction, and performativity. Identity is dynamic: it is shifting and multi-dimensional, resulting in identity being neither fixed nor absolute, not static nor coherent but changing over time.74 Sociologist Steph Lawler interrogates “how we achieve identity, under what constraints and in what contexts,”75 and this forms a foundation for my work with resounding implications in gold-rush Victoria where working men and women could rise—sometimes stunningly—above their humble beginnings, and conversely where gentlemen embraced physical labor and genteel women stepped outside conventional modes of feminine behavior. The fluidity of identity in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria and the resulting contestations of standing and hierarchies created the unparalleled social anxieties touched on in this introduction. The unease that surrounded the seemingly indiscriminate rise of some working people and the disconnect between their behavior and demand for certain social positioning, indicates the way in which identities are socially formed. That is, identities are not shaped in isolation nor belong solely within an individual but are negotiated or contested until understood collectively. They are formed by and within the social world, produced between people, through interaction. Identities are therefore recognizable, following accepted social rules; they are co-constructed and understood by both subject and observer.76 This understanding of the social nature of identities builds on sociologist Erving Goffman’s work on how we perform ourselves. More than fifty years ago Goffman proposed the notion of the dramatic performance as an element of social encounters. “Performance,” he explained, referred to the activity an individual engages in while in the presence of a particular set of observers. According to Goffman, individuals perform communicative, non-verbal acts or behaviors to guide others in how they want to be perceived, and thus to validate and strengthen their social identity.77 Identity performance is achieved not only through actors; it also relies on a public stage and an audience to make visible its claims.78 Identity encompasses who we are, and conversely, who we are not. Hence, much of the literature on class identity draws on differentiation—in behavior, appearance, and taste—to establish social boundaries. As Lawler argues, middle-class identity “is forged through both an association with others who are also middle-class, and a repudiation of those others who are not.”79 She employs the notion of “disgust” to examine how the middle class distinguish themselves from those below, allowing them to position their own good taste.80 It is an idea that resonates in the writing of nineteenth-century gold-rush commentators who were aghast at the social

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19

aspirations and the vulgar taste of the newly wealthy who they saw as “rioting in extravagance and folly,”81 and who employed this concept of disgust to distance themselves.82 Ellen Clacy, for example, emphasized that money could not buy taste, explaining how some Melbourne stores were “very fair; but the goods all partake too largely of the flash order, for the purpose of suiting the tastes of successful diggers, their wives and families; it is ludicrous to see them in the shops.”83 Revealed in this criticism is what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu articulates as cultural capital: certain expressions of taste, knowledge, and behavior, and a mapping of the distinctions categorized by differences. Bourdieu’s work focuses on twentiethcentury France though interest from scholars globally demonstrates its application in alternative contexts. It is useful to this study as it explains how the middle class is legitimized and privileged by their knowledge. It is what sets them apart from the working class.84 Class identity is an important concept in my work, though it operates in and alongside gender identity. In fact, nineteenth-century gender and class identities were closely bound. Scholars including Beverley Skeggs and Ariel Beaujot have investigated how femininity and the feminine body were classed—how they could be used as a means through which to judge others.85 Gender, as distinct from biological sex, is expressed through acts and behaviors that are culturally constructed and socially learned. They are defined by, and conform to, discrete categories of masculinity or femininity.86 Candace West and Don Zimmerman refer to this as the “doing” of gender, a complex series of activities that express masculine or feminine natures, which are recognized as such in interaction with others. Gender, they assert, is the product of social doings.87 For gender theorist Judith Butler, gender is not something we are born with but is culturally formed, repeatedly enacted to normalize a product we know as identity.88 This repetition of acts that conform to recognized scripts of gendered norms suggests that gender is constantly reiterated rather than an internal, independent reality. It is, as she argues, “not passively scripted on the body, and neither is it determined by nature, language, the symbolic or the overwhelming history of patriarchy. Gender is what is put on, invariably, under constraint, daily and incessantly, with anxiety and pleasure.”89 This thinking reveals how identity can be regarded as performatively constituted within a wider social world that recognizes and approves such acts. This series of acts consolidate being a man and masculine, or a woman and feminine. I have touched on two distinct concepts here: performativity and performance. A performance involves enactment, while performativity is a constitutive process of recognizable acts and their effects. Butler situates her work firmly within the

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concept of performativity (despite being recognized as sliding between the two terms)90 arguing that “performativity must be understood not as a singular or deliberate ‘act,’ but, rather, as the reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names.”91 Yet comparisons can be drawn between the frameworks offered by Butler’s performativity and Goffman’s performance. Both, as Lawler detects, emphasize that “we become what we continually, repeatedly and compulsorily perform”; both consider “identity as done rather than owned”; both underscore “the notion of identity as a process”; and both problematize “the distinction between ‘being’ and ‘acting.’”92 These are ideas that I tease apart in the social turmoil of gold-rush Victoria. Yet Butler and Goffman’s thinking is also dissimilar. Butler avoids engaging with social structure or institutions, a primary focus of Goffman’s theorizing,93 leading my research to draw on Goffman’s concept of idealized performances in the expression of gentility.94

Peeling Back the Layers Sidestepping the practice of past historical inquiry that sought primarily to record the lives of distinguished men, I deploy a method that sociologist Dorothy E. Smith defines as the “standpoint of women” as a way to recover and make meaning of women’s lives.95 My aim is to relocate women into an historical narrative from which they have traditionally been ignored. I do this by peering within the home to the words they wrote and the objects they created, as genteel migrants from this period—both sojourners and settlers—left rich primary sources. Their written expression comes to us through letters, diaries, and memoirs. Some published emigrant guides and gold-rush literature. They are depicted in pictorial sources: in photographs, illustrations, and paintings. They are recorded in official census data, reports, shipping records, and passenger lists. Most created needlework—though very few examples survive. In mining these sources, I am painfully aware that there is still much work to be done to recover the fullness and depth of women’s experiences during this time in Australia’s history. My contribution, though, aims to establish a broader understanding of needlework products as cultural objects, and needlework practices as cultural behavior; as acts of identity formation in mid-nineteenth-century Victoria through which to chart the maintenance, acquisition, or perhaps loss of genteel femininity that emerged in the social turmoil of the gold rush. Starting with one of the most significant examples of needlework produced on the goldfields, the enormous potential of material culture coupled with its

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21

inherent challenges becomes apparent. As Jules Prown noted in the early years of modern material culture studies, objects can reveal “the beliefs—values, ideas, attitudes, and assumptions—of a particular community or society at a given time.”96 This is evident in the Flag of the Southern Cross, or the Eureka Flag, which was flown defiantly above the Eureka Stockade by Ballarat miners in 1854 (Figure 8). An enduring symbol of the rebellion, it has since been claimed by other groups as their sign of protest. Now displayed on the site of the stockade and although only partially surviving (for it was souvenired at the time and after) it is a powerful material link to the uprising. Yet one piece of the story is missing: who made this iconic flag when nowhere can a maker’s mark be found? It is a problem I grapple with throughout this book when few examples of needlework record the name of their creator; just as it is something that historians have keenly pursued for this example over many years. A number of claims have emerged, though the Art Gallery of Ballarat, in whose collection the flag is held, cautiously attribute it to “unknown maker.” It is a group of miners’ wives— Anastasia Hayes, Anastasia Withers, and Anne Duke—however, who are now most commonly credited as its creators.97 Despite these uncertainties, some important assertions can nevertheless be made. When Val D’Angri mounted the flag for display in 1973 she identified

Figure 8 Unknown maker, The Flag of the Southern Cross (Eureka Flag), 1854, (wool, cotton), actual size: 260.0 × 324.0 cm [irreg], original size 260.0 × 370.5 cm [calculated]. Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat. Gift of the King Family, 2001.

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traces of multiple needlewomen through changes in needlework style and thread type. She also observed that despite evidence of it being made quickly and in difficult conditions, its makers were skilled.98 Historian Clare Wright further points to the physical requirements: because of its large dimensions (originally measuring 260 × 370.5 cm) the flag required a relatively large, empty space to lay it out in, and as she observes, there were few places on the diggings in which such a large textile could be unrolled on the ground, with room for a team of seamstresses to work around it in secret. What can be established is that these were capable women, experienced with their needles, who possessed the skills to work rapidly in adverse conditions—in all likelihood, a cramped, dark, and guarded environment.99 This hints at the rich possibilities of material culture for my research, and though this example is in many ways exceptional it reveals the potential for textiles to contribute insights into women’s lives and experiences during this period. The items of needlework that I explore are largely unremarkable. A woman might have sewn hundreds of textile goods over the course of her life from her first sampler and clothing for her dolls, curtains and sheets to make comfortable her home, to pretty, embroidered slippers or smoking caps, all the while mending, darning or altering existing items. Though mundane, every day, a pleasure or a burden, they, too, are worthy of examination. In this book, then, I consider how material culture and identity are linked: how the creation of objects can solidify a performance of identity, while the creative act materializes it—it makes identity real.100 The object world is not only central to the expression of identities, but also to the creation of them, and as Christopher Tilley pronounces:“Through making, using, exchanging, consuming, interacting and living with things people make themselves in the process.”101 Enlisting objects to realize identity had resounding implications in colonial settings, and Laura Peers’ analysis of material culture and identity in Canadian colonial society establishes that: The deployment and categorization of material culture was a significant part of the negotiations of identities within colonial social systems while also making real the categories of race, class, and gender within colonial society. Objects and their consumption performed and articulated identity and status, proclaimed allegiance and aspiration, and acted as potent symbols with the complex crosscultural realities of colonial society.102

This is an idea that I tease apart over the following chapters, further inspired by what Dianne Lawrence has demonstrated as the strong ties between material culture and identity in colonial societies. Lawrence asserts that in her case study

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23

sites of Australia, India, South Africa, West Africa, and New Zealand, genteel women refashioned their identities in new environments primarily through their material culture and related practices. Where social standing could be confused, objects took on a mediating role between individuals (and their families) and society.103 Emma Floyd suggests that through the integration of written primary sources and material culture “a more comprehensive interpretation of the British gentlewoman’s understanding of gentility and the ways in which she sought to recreate it in her new environment” in Australia is possible.104 I take up this challenge to relocate the practices and products of the feminine genteel experience into gold-rush Victoria, and in so doing, explore the ways in which identity was expressed and tested against the privations of colonial living. My aim is to assess the ways in which a middle-class culture transferred to Victoria, and women’s responses to the formation or revision of gentility there.

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1

Women, Work, and the Needle

The popular nineteenth-century English manual Beeton’s Book of Needlework claimed needlework had “from time immemorial been the support, comfort, or employment of women of every rank and age.”1 Texts like Mrs Beeton’s uniformly promoted sewing as a defining female occupation, outlining the central place of sewing in the female experience. A pervasive activity, needlework embodied explicit meaning: it suggested moral character, expressed virtue or frivolity, reflected familial duties, displayed economy and thriftiness, and enabled creativity. The complex—and sometimes conflicting—nature of what needlework meant to women provides some of the most fertile material for examining constructions of womanhood, femininity, and genteel identity in the nineteenth century. From being once overlooked and undervalued, part of the silencing of women’s historical voices, international scholarship now recognizes the significance of needlework in women’s lives and experiences.2 It emphasizes that the very factors through which needlework was devalued—its categorization as a feminine craft and its link with the home—is what makes it meaningful to examinations of the material culture of everyday life.3 Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin propose that through the process of making and manipulating objects, women “were not only engaged in self-definition and identity performance, but were actively engaged in meaning-making practices that involved the construction, circulation, and maintenance of knowledge.”4 This is the position with which I start my investigation, searching for new understandings of and perspectives into genteel identity in gold-rush society, both on the diggings and in subsequent more settled lives. Locating my research in the colonial home and the recreation of domesticity there, I aim to draw out the dynamic connections between sewing, gender, and class, demonstrating the ways in which the developing society enabled some women, and coerced others, into redefining the possibilities of genteel domesticity. For needlework was understood as “women’s work” in two distinct though conflicting senses. On the one hand, needlework was the employment of 25

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia

large numbers of working women: it could be a source of independence or the shackle that bound them to a life of poverty. On the other hand, needlework was a sanctioned genteel pastime with decorative needlework a clear assertion of women’s leisure. The reality for many women was that it was something in between: both a burden and a pleasure; a labor of love that was proof of devotion but unrelenting in its demands; and perhaps even a skill that, when needed, could cross the work/leisure divide of the genteel woman’s world. In this and following chapters, I unpick the nineteenth-century ideology that connected women and their needles, exploring what constituted genteel women’s work: from fancywork that visibly communicated status, to plain sewing that, although presumed the domain of the working woman whether as seamstress, piece-worker or domestic servant, was in fact part of the labor of the lady as much as her maid. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall first noted more than thirty years ago of the English middle class: Although written evidence is scarce, one of the great silences about women’s lives was undoubtedly filled with needlework. From the long flat-fell seaming of sheets to the embroidered chair cushions, from making up boys’ suits to exquisitely worked velvet slippers for papa at Christmas, middle-class women were constantly sewing, and their daughters were taught to do so from the age when they could grasp a needle.5

To give voice to this silence, I explore how expectations for needlework were heightened or challenged in Australia by the often-trying environments in which it was conducted and consider how the products and practices of needlework were made meaningful. I first acknowledge, however, that this general truth of needlework as women’s work overlooks men’s involvement, and the fact that what had become by the nineteenth century conventionally related to women had not always been so. I begin this chapter by challenging the gendered representation of needlework through recognizing its links with men.

The Gendering of Needlework Embroidery, practiced in parlors across the Empire, was widely perceived as a defining activity of genteel women in the nineteenth century. Yet this had not always been the case. Both women and men embroidered in Medieval guild workshops and in the workshops attached to noble households. It was produced in monasteries and nunneries. In fact, until the eighteenth century more men

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than women were embroiderers to the king.6 The beginnings of a shift in embroidery as a feminine art can be found in the sixteenth century when it became a symbol of aristocratic refinement. Its move into the genteel female sphere continued during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when wealthy but sub-noble women practiced some embroidery, and by the nineteenth century embroidery had opened out from being a recreation solely of the upper classes. Decorative needlework moved into the parlors of the rising number of middling sorts, growing so strongly that by the mid-nineteenth century the genteel had appropriated embroidery as their own.7 It took on new life as a symbol of middleclass womanhood in the way that Pat Kirkham calls to attention how objects, especially objects of everyday life, “are made socially acceptable and ‘appropriate’ for either men or women.”8 Yet Florence Nightingale questioned the gendering of certain behaviors in her observation of 1852: “suppose we were to see a number of men in the morning sitting round the table in the drawing-room, looking at prints, doing worsted work, and reading little books, how we should laugh! . . . Now why is it more ridiculous for a man than for a woman to do worsted work and drive out every day in the carriage?”9 It is a question that can also be asked of mundane household sewing, with an unusual case that challenges the assumptions of appropriate behavior for women and men presented by Karen V. Hansen in her New England study of Brigham Nims. Complicating the separate spheres ideology—the gendered division of roles, and the separation of the world outside the home from that within it— Hansen demonstrates how Nims routinely worked on household tasks together with his farm chores during the 1840s and 1850s. He recorded a range of domestic tasks in his diary: he sewed, mended, washed, and ironed, despite the availability of female labor in his mother and two younger sisters.10 Nims’ needlework was both productive labor contributing to the home and a pastime. Hansen finds that in his rural environment “Nims was easily able to cross work boundaries and do ‘women’s’ work. He may not have been typical in the amount of household work he did, but he was not self-conscious about it, suggesting that negative personal and social sanctions were few.”11 The rarity of this case study may be a result of surviving sources, and is perhaps more confirmation of the rule than proof of ungendered regard for sewing, but it reasserts the case that in some circumstances men had to, or liked to, work the needle. More commonly, when men sewed it was in gender normative roles such as tailors, although from the earliest years of penal settlement in Australia, both trained and unskilled needle workers (of both sexes) made clothing. In addition, the Marines were accustomed to altering and mending their clothing—a valuable

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skill when in 1788, for example, they found the trousers issued to them too small.12 Scratch the surface a little further and it quickly becomes apparent that other men plied needles—even if inexpertly—to keep themselves clothed and shod. In fact, some bachelors demonstrated surprising competence in working with a needle and thread. In 1842 Jessie Campbell wrote to her sister Isabella from Wanganui, New Zealand, that her husband’s business partner John Cameron “makes himself very useful . . . I often tell him, what would his friends at Home say if they could see him with a scrubbing brush cleaning his canvas trousers, or in the evening mending them; he can patch as neatly as I can.” Acknowledging that he set a good example for her husband, Captain Moses Campbell, Jessie wrote: “One evening the Capt. asked, to our great amazement, for a needle and thread, and set to work putting strings in a night-shirt which I had long forgot to do. He finished the job tolerably but has never been induced to follow John’s example in that respect since.”13 Working with hardier materials like leather was more common. Not one to shirk hard work, Edward Gittins Bucknall prepared himself in England for migration to Australia’s Port Phillip in 1843 by “tak[ing] the trouble to learn shoe mending and I can sew and heel shoes and sew patches on and have got some leather and lasts and tools. As we shall be some miles from a town this will be a great saving of money and trouble, and my boys can help me.”14 Migrants invariably learnt that footwear wore quickly, and the skill to make or repair shoes was invaluable when it could mean the difference between wearing shoes or going barefoot. Men also sewed thick, sturdy materials such as canvas to produce a range of practical goods in the bush and on pastoral properties. When Rachel Henning wrote to her sister Henrietta back home in England about their brother’s new wool-press, she told her with some relief, “I am happy to say that we are not expected to sew the tough canvas” into wool bales. Instead, she wrote how the men “sit on the veranda and stitch away at them.”15 Such labor was necessary in working a sheep station, however, that there was a degree of gender fluidity in sewing, particularly where location demanded; it is evident in the men on Biddulph Henning’s station also contributing to work inside the home. One evening Biddulph, Mr Devlin, Mr Hedgeland, Mr Taylor, Mr Julian and Mr Beckford worked with Rachel and Annie Henning to sew together long lengths of osnaburg, a coarse cotton fabric, for the lining over which the wallpaper in the sitting room would be pasted. Rachel remarked how: “They really all managed very well, though of course they sometimes pinched their fingers and could not always manage to thread their needle. Mr Taylor did best; he worked as fast as Annie or I, only he persisted in pushing the needle

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outwards instead of towards him in the orthodox manner.”16 Two points of interest emerge from Rachel’s observation: that an uneasy association with feminine labor could be avoided through a lack of skill, and that adapting skills from outside the home to within it was sanctioned, if not admired, when it contributed to improving the comfort of the home. Some men were uneasy about having their needlework made visible, both when worked in front of others but also when documented in letters or diaries. Andrew Hassam’s work on nineteenth-century shipboard diaries notes how recording alternative gendered domestic roles—cooking and sewing, for example—could threaten a man’s public identity while on board a ship and to an audience that might read his diary back home. Hassam observes that as a defense mechanism their performances were described and executed with an irony that acknowledged the transgression. This was further buffered through an emphasis on their ineptitude.17 But not all men were anxious about having their sewing observed. When the Timewell family sailed from England for Melbourne in 1852, they travelled steerage. The cheapest of passages, it occupied the poorly lit and cramped lower levels of the ship. Louisa Timewell noted that this dim light made needlework difficult, but that her husband George and son William spent considerable time sewing. Louisa wrote how “Wm [William] & George are busy sewing every day” and that “George & Wm are busy at work getting the new work done.” She assisted William in sewing the seams of his trousers as they approached Melbourne, noting “Have not been able to write until now have been busy helping Wm to get his work done as we expect to go on shore about Thursday.”18 Louisa’s assistance was timed around shipboard chores that included cooking, looking after her baby, washing, and her own needlework. When Hassam detects that not all diarists accepted or acted according to conventional work-gender roles or were self-conscious about cooking or sewing, this would seem to be the case for George and William Timewell. They felt no misgivings about completing their sewing in the crowded, shared space of steerage, corresponding with Hassam’s proposal that “There is no sense that these men are doing anything strange; if men could sew and cook before they left home, there was no need to make fun of sewing and cooking on board.”19 Other men had their hands forced, and had little choice but to engage with activities that may have been perceived as feminine. It was a circumstance grudgingly acknowledged on the Victorian goldfields and as one digger recognized: “Mothers and sisters there are none to mend torn clothes, [or] sew on buttons.” As a result, this author explained “the digger must be his own laundress and needlewoman.”20 It was perhaps not unexpected for many of the

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diggers in the first years of the rush to be aware of minor work that might fall their way. Young male emigrants were advised by guidebooks to carry needles and worsted yarn “for both on board ship and in the colonies they would have to mend their own stockings.”21 For some, if not most, their sewing would extend beyond mending their stockings to other items of clothing and textiles. The diary of an unknown Ballarat miner records daily life for a six-month period from mid-1855 and reveals a range of seemingly skilled work. One morning he “Spent an hour sewing moleskin trousers, had breakfast and went out.” One evening nearly two months later, he “set to work to sew trousers and then, Duncan and his mate having ret’d, we all had tea.” A little over a week later, he “split some firewood and sewed leggings on trousers and, having rigged myself in waterproof, left for the hole.”22 Here was a man, with little fuss, doing his sewing as part of his life on the diggings. Even those with fewer skills or limited experience willingly took up needle and thread when basic sewing could protect a digger’s hard-earned income. Before embarking on the notoriously dangerous road between the Ballarat diggings and Melbourne, Henry Mundy divided his profits, remarking: “I had money in my pocket and £30 sewn in the lining of my cap.”23 Needlework also held the potential to shelter or protect men, especially when summer months could be searingly hot and winter miserably cold. The unknown Ballarat miner worked on his tent on a number of occasions in the winter and spring of 1855 to keep it snug and watertight. In August, he and his mate Joe “set to work to rip up rags and to sew them for lining the tent. Occupied with this all the afternoon.” This technique prevented drafts, keeping tents warmer for their occupants. Rough weather could take its toll, and in September, during a windy and showery spell, he “Set to work to sew up Tent as it is in danger of blowing away. Occupied all afternoon in putting it to rights.” The following day, after visiting a friend’s claim, he “went up to tent and on my way bought a palm and needles and sewed up tent where it was torn.”24 A palm, a leather strap that went around the hand, eased heavy hand stitching and sufficiently equipped him for such labor. The result may have looked something like the stitching made visible in Henry Hainsselin’s watercolor painting of a prospector’s canvas and timber hut of 1853–54 (Figure 1.1). One line of stitching mends a jagged tear in the canvas above the head of the man standing; a second, behind the seated man’s cap, attempts to join the canvas wall together. In depicting such detail, Hainsselin seems aware of the approaches used to prevent drafts and drizzle penetrating a tent’s interior. Scotsman James Armour and his team were less successful in protecting themselves from the elements. On arriving on the Bendigo goldfields in 1852 the

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Figure 1.1 Henry Hainsselin, [Prospector’s Hut] Balaarat [Ballarat]), c. 1853–54, painting (watercolor), 36 × 35 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H83.106.

group realized they were without a tent. Thinking creatively, and almost certainly exaggerating to tell a good tale, Armour described: One said that he had “some needles and . . . thread,” . . . but that seemed small help until another who had brought some fine bed linen with his blankets, pulled it from his swag, and remarking that it would be “nane the waur o’ the bleachin’ [sic],” offered it to make the roof; a third gave a tartan plaid, and a fourth a blanket; a fifth, in the enthusiasm of the moment tore a striped shirt open, and throwing it with two towels among the other offerings, said these would make a gable. While some were fixing forked sticks in the ground to bear the ridge pole and attending to the fire and supper the rest were busy, without thimbles, at the needlework.25

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Armour published his adventures for his “small circle of intimate acquaintances” in The Diggings, The Bush, and Melbourne: Reminiscences of Three Years’ Wanderings in Victoria upon his return to Scotland and in it his strategy is distinctive: the reader quickly gets a sense of their lack of skill with a needle. Sleeping six in a row, upon encountering their first storm Armour wrote: “The sewing gives way, and the water comes spouting through the openings; we try to stop the leaks with our caps and stockings, but we only make the breaches bigger.”26 Behind the humor of this comment lies the basic fact that their sewing was found wanting.

Women’s Work / Women’s Employment These cases illustrate how practical sewing formed part of men’s experiences in certain environments: it was an advantageous skill for men in the colonies as they established new properties or when they were isolated in goldfields locations, away from the comforts of home and separated from their wives, mothers, or sisters. The critical distinction between needlework as it related to men and women was the extent of its reach: sewing impacted some men’s lives but was central to almost all women’s existence—wealthy, middling, working, and destitute alike—regardless of age, place, or circumstance. As The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness put it: “From the most remote ages needlework has been, not only a source of pecuniary advantage for poor women, but also of pleasant pastime for the rich.”27 This split in needlework formed part of a deep, complex contradiction that Maureen Daly Goggin defines as: both a domestic and domesticating labor, both a tool of oppression and an instrument of liberation, both a professional endeavor and a leisure pastime, both an avenue for crossing class boundaries and a barrier confirming class status. It has been constructed and pursued as a religious duty and a secular pleasure, as a prison sentence and an escape, as an innocuous pastime and a powerful political weapon. Depending on a woman’s status, needlework was either a necessity to live or a luxury reserved only for those who could afford leisure time.28

Some skilled needlewomen made good wages, but for many others it was grueling employment and they barely earned enough to survive. The subsistencelevel struggle frames their work in direct contrast with the needlework performed in genteel homes: sewing that was associated with “work” but not with employment. It is this unremunerated, domestic work in its various forms

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across the British Empire that I now introduce and examine further throughout this book. It is as enforced or paid labor that the rest of this chapter then turns. From the metropole to the edges of the Empire, women plied their needles. In Scotland, Kate Brown described for her sister-in-law how she was “over head and ears in sewing of various kinds.”29 Jemima Martin wrote to her aunt from East Tamaki, New Zealand, in 1856 how needlework was “always pressing on my attention which ever way I turn. Papa wants stockings mended, one child a new frock, another out at the knees and so on through the list.”30 Fellow New Zealander Rose Hall wrote home to England in 1863 explaining how “at times I feel quite overwhelmed with the number of things left undone, needlework, both in mending and making, accumulating with frightful rapidity.”31 One day in 1860 in London, Ontario, newly married Sophia Harris noted in her diary that she and her sister-in-law were “very industrious all the afternoon mending & sewing.”32 A decade later, Jessie Nagle listed in her diary from British Columbia her morning’s chores: “Baked bread for breakfast from Yeast which I set last night . . . after the breakfast things were washed I cleaned the inside of the kitchen windows & black leaded the stove . . . and then thought of what sewing I should do & concluded to finish a white petticoat.”33 Such comments hint at the prevalence and scope of women’s needlework across the British Empire. And what of needlework in Australia? Australia’s first needlewomen were Indigenous women. They stitched skins into clothing in the cooler temperate zones of south-eastern and western Australia, piercing holes using a pointed stick or bone needle, then threading sinew from kangaroo tails or legs to sew the skins together.34 They were, one commentator in the 1860s explained, “unrivalled in their skill with the needle in joining the skins.”35 The earliest European settlers found its value amplified by the shortages endemic in early colonial Australia. English migrant Elizabeth Macarthur arrived in New South Wales in 1790 with the Second Fleet; her husband, John, served as lieutenant in the New South Wales Corps. The Macarthur family became one of the colony’s wealthiest landholders and one of its most successful wool producers, exporting to a strong London market where their son John was based to receive and inspect their wool and facilitate its sale. John was also responsible for selecting the family’s clothing and household goods. As Elizabeth explained in a letter to her son in 1824, it was important that he chose good quality garments even if they were simple as: We wear things out, and therefore wear them long. We have no opportunity of changing often . . . At this distance from the Mother Country mere articles of

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia show are ridiculous. Our household linen and clothes I contend should be of good quality, both because they are better taken care of—are in the end more useful, certainly more respectable, and in the object of package and freight cost no more than trash.36

Cloth, even if recycled, was especially valuable when it was worn over long periods and a modest everyday dress of printed cotton, most likely made by another early English settler to Australia, Elizabeth Marsden, and worn by her young son John in the early 1800s reveals this distinct approach (Figure 1.2). The Marsdens arrived in New South Wales in 1794, four years after the Macarthurs. Elizabeth’s husband, Reverend Samuel Marsden, took up the position of assistant to the chaplain of New South Wales before developing an interest in farming— he too became a successful sheep grazier and land owner. Yet the simple child’s dress—with a ruffle at the neckline, long straight sleeves, and a high drawstring

Figure 1.2 Elizabeth Marsden, Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden, 1803, (cotton), 56 × 30.5 cm. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, A7885. Photographer: Sotha Bourn.

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waist—is darned, and the fabric is faded and pieced together. Evidence that it was cut down from another garment that had already been worn for a long period, this dress reveals the value of fabric for all colonists.37 Other free settlers such as Ann Horden quickly recognized the demand for materials, clothing, and accessories. Shortly after her arrival in Sydney in 1825 with her husband and three sons, Ann wrote to her parents having observed: “Cotton ginghams, prints, muslins, and lace are very dear, checked shirts and satin slops and waistcoats fetch a great price . . . Bonnet shapes, ribbons and sewing silks as well.”38 Given the shortages in labor and materials for the majority of early settlers, it follows that sewing skills—and the women who possessed them—were prized, as needlework could greatly improve a family’s quality of life in a fledgling society. It is not surprising that immigration promoter Caroline Chisholm was entreated by one New South Wales pioneer in 1844 to “obtain for me a suitable companion for life.” He described his ideal wife as “a young woman, between the years of twenty-five and thirty-five, English, clean in person, neat in habit, mild in manners, and an accomplished needlewoman.”39 And as the population of New South Wales expanded, women’s sewing remained essential. The opening line of twenty-three-year-old Mary Mowle’s diary, dated 30 December 1850, set the tone for many of her entries—and for the pattern of daily life—simply reading: “Busy at needlework nearly all day.”40 English-born Mary had migrated with her family from Durham to Australia nearly fifteen years earlier. After her marriage to Stewart Mowle in 1845 and on a property on the Limestone Plains near the present-day Australian capital of Canberra, Mary found herself constantly sewing for her home and family, then comprising her husband, three children, and her brother. In April 1851 she wrote of “Plying my needle diligently all day,” and in June 1854 recorded: “At needlework all day, from the time I got up till near eleven p.m.”41 Few women described or enumerated their output, so Katie Hume’s extensive list written in northern Queensland in 1869 establishes an important point of reference: I am overwhelmed by needlework as usual! I wish it were possible ever to come to an end of it, just for the sake of the novel sensation, but as soon as one thing is polished off, something else rises up at the end of a long vista of “must-bedone-immediatelys”! I have lately made my husband 2 strong duck coats, for the Camp, 2 white alpaca ones, & 2 prs of drill trousers, so now he is set up with summer things, & must not expect any attention from the machine for ages. I have just made Ethel two white sun-bonnets, now I must set about her print frocks & some white ones, & chemises, for she is outgrowing everything. Then

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Needlework and Women’s Identity in Colonial Australia there are lots of my own dresses to gore and modernize but those always get pushed into the background!42

Katie’s location was no doubt a factor, but even in more settled parts of the country women worked hard. Blanche Mitchell itemized the work she did in one evening in 1860 in her Sydney home when she “hemmed five glass clothes, and four dusters, all neatly, did three rows of antimacassars, and read three or four pages of Milton.” Pleased with her efforts, Blanche remarked: “I consider [this] a very good night’s work.”43 Many more women found their sewing so routine or such a drudgery that it was afforded only a passing comment when articulated at all. Radically reducing its pervasiveness, plain sewing in particular became invisible work. Hidden in plain sight, in the domestic setting unvalidated by monetary exchange, women’s labor was rendered unseen. Semantics further invisibilized sewing in that “needlework” or simply “work” could cover all forms from plain sewing, home dressmaking and tailoring, to fancywork. When London-born Agnes Henty repeatedly wrote “Sat working all day” in her diary from the family’s property in Victoria’s western district, she was certainly sewing although of what she was working on we cannot be sure.44 Desperately lonely, Agnes wrote one day that “this life of solitary confinement in this dismal dark bush is enough to drive any one mad,” but her preoccupation with her sewing filled those long empty days: “Sat working all day and wondered when Richie will come back.”45 Her needlework was perhaps an unrelenting burden, but conceivably also a source of distraction if only to keep her active in her isolation.

Convict Sewing: Punishment and Control In early colonial Australia, the vast amount of sewing undertaken in the home was supplemented by convict labor and the work of paid needlewomen. Convict sewing was vital when clothing Australia’s European population proved challenging from the outset. Although the eleven ships that formed the First Fleet carried supplies, three years later in 1791 a letter from an unnamed convict woman revealed severe clothing shortages: we are now much in want of almost everything; we have hardly any cloaths; but since the [Second Fleet ships] Scarborough, Neptune, and Surprize arrived we have had a blanket and a rug given us, and we hope to have some cloaths, as the Justinian, a ship that came from London with provisions, [is] bringing some cloth and linen, and we are to make the cloaths.46

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Sewing was completed at female factories, which operated as receiving depots for recently arrived convicts, labor bureaus for women waiting assignment, hospitals, and prisons. As workhouses, they imposed labor on their inmates in tasks ranging from wool picking, spinning and weaving, laundry work and ironing, to needlework and mending. They were, above all, places of punishment and institutional reform.47 Of the sewing carried out in the Parramatta Female Factory, Australianborn Elizabeth Barrett Davis, daughter of a free settler, recalled that in the 1830s “most of our clothes were made in the Factory, and of course the Government were paid for the work, which was beautifully done, and cheaply.” While this labor was undoubtedly hard work, Elizabeth remembered that punishment could be worse: “when they misbehaved, they had to break stones.”48 Convict women in the female factories were allocated plain needlework from fabrics that had already been cut out, making jackets, trousers, waistcoats, shirts, shifts, night gowns, pinafores, babies’ gowns, and slop clothing.49 Those convict women assigned as domestic servants in the homes of settlers provided further labor in needlework. Sewing was also used to regulate convicts’ behavior both before and during transportation. The British Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners, formed by Quaker prison reformer Elizabeth Fry in 1816, promoted the benefits of convicts undertaking useful tasks while incarcerated. This extended to women scheduled for transportation to Australia during the period 1817 to 1843, with many taught patchwork skills and supplied the fabric and notions to make quilts.50 Society members distributed haberdashery to women on convict ships prior to sailing, and provided the ships’ superintendents with additional supplies. Two weeks into the voyage of the convict ship Lord Sidmouth in 1822, after most had overcome their seasickness, Superintendent Robert Espie “served out the patchwork left in my charge by the Quaker ladies” to ensure the convicts were gainfully employed.51 Convict shipboard sewing was considered constructive, rehabilitative, and useful for all women. It formed part of a strategy for maintaining industriousness but was also intended to occupy or distract women given the authorities’ belief that female convicts possessed low moral character. Convict ships were considered sites of potential chaos and maintaining order at sea was critical when the voyage from England to Australia could take three, four, or five months on calm seas, or considerably longer for convict ships that stopped at numerous ports en route for provisions and repairs. Order could be difficult to police on these ships given their public and private spaces, with a closely supervised daily routine introduced after 1817: following cleaning until 9:00 a.m., women were employed in sewing or washing. At 2:00 p.m. they were fed, then again put to work.52

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Figure 1.3 Unknown female convicts on board the Rajah, under the direction of Kezia Hayter, The Rajah Quilt, 1841, (pieced medallion style unlined coverlet: cotton sheeting and chintz applique, silk thread embroidery), 325 × 337.2 cm. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, NGA 89.2285. Gift of Les Hollings and the Australian Textiles Fund. Photograph: National Gallery of Australia.

While many convict quilts were sewn on these voyages, only one is known to have survived: the Rajah Quilt, named after the ship on which it was made (Figure 1.3). The Rajah transported 180 women to Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) in 1841. Over a three-month period, convict women used supplies including balls of thread, pins, scissors, 100 needles, and two pounds of patchwork pieces to produce a coverlet in the pieced-medallion style. It was a project of considerable scale: the quilt contains 2,815 pieces and includes a central panel worked with appliquéd chintz bird and flower motifs, surrounded by multiple borders of appliquéd flowers or pieced printed fabrics. The quilt’s embroidered dedication was addressed: TO THE LADIES / of the / Convict Ship Committee / This quilt worked by the convicts / of the Ship Rajah during their voyage / to Van Diemans Land is presented as a / testimony of the gratitude with which / they remember their

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exertions for their / welfare while in England and during / their passage and also as a proof that / they have not neglected the Ladies / kind admonitions of being industrious / June 1841

It was the result of careful planning and supervision, completed under the direction of free passenger Kezia Hayter. The convict women who worked on the quilt, however, remain anonymous. Their sewing skills vary, and some, such as those capable of finely working the thirteen lines of the inscription in silk yarn or applying in herringbone stitch the birds on the centerpiece possessed considerable skill. Other sections demonstrate less ability but reflect the distinct purpose of the lesson: in joining small triangles and squares of printed cotton to form the borders, and in using various stitches—backstitch, running stitch, and over-sewing—women practiced sewing neat straight seams, matching corners and patterns. The quilt was never washed, and the small bloodstains marking its surface are testament to those women who improved their skills as part of this shipboard exercise.53 Authorities encouraged sewing for female assisted passengers decades later as an appropriate practice to fill the empty, monotonous months at sea: it could be done while seated, and engaged the mind and hands to prevent idleness that was thought to lead to disorder.54 Encouraging gainful employment was reasoned to result in good behavior, although linking their sewing with the provision of funds on arrival was a clear incentive. The women aboard Female Emigration Fund ships had access to materials—in the case of the Culloden, the first of the ships to sail under this scheme, to make men’s shirts for wear in the bush—and were enticed to take part in the work with the promise of a share in the proceeds from their sale on arrival in Port Phillip.55 On other ships, goods were redistributed to the women for their own use as described by assisted passenger Mary Maclean, who wrote in 1864: the matron has given out knitting and sewing to the girls thay [sic] are to make stockings & shumeses (chemises) [sic] after thay are made thay are to wash them and [put] their name on them and return them to the matron after we have arrived thay are to be given to the girls who have behaved themselves to the matrons satisfaction I hope to merit some small token of good conduct.56

Trading their good behavior for stockings and chemises must have been an attractive prospect for Mary and her fellow assisted passengers as they sailed towards a new life in the Antipodes.

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Dressmakers, Needlewomen, and Outworkers: The Needlework Industry From the eighteenth century, significant developments in technology and methods of production transformed textile and clothing manufacture, replacing artisans and cottage industries with factories, machinery, and cheap unskilled labor. The result was an increasing concentration of women’s labor in the needlework industry. The general term “needlewoman” described a woman earning her living through sewing, though she could be employed in a number of areas with some requiring more skill and being better remunerated than others. Dressmakers were the most proficient and depending on the size of their business they might hire seamstresses to stitch the plain, long seams, which allowed them to focus on the more technical areas of design and cutting. Tailoresses worked in the only area of male-dominated needlework, the men’s garment trade, where they stitched together garments that had been cut by tailors, working under their supervision.57 Outworkers, homeworkers, or pieceworkers, were the poorest-paid needlewomen. They took unstitched garments from a clothing wholesaler or merchant to make up in their own homes.58 The work of the needle was essential but often overlooked and undervalued, leading to a splintering of experiences for those working in the trade. Those women who were highly skilled with their needles, and with the related design, cutting, and fitting required of dressmaking could profit in small businesses, some achieving economic independence. Outworkers and factory workers, however, were exploited for their labor. They were expected to work long hours in often dreadful conditions, yet were paid only very low wages. Large numbers came to be defined in Britain during the 1840s as “distressed needlewomen,” to whom Thomas Hood gave vivid expression in The Song of the Shirt. His first stanza establishes a desperate picture: With fingers weary and worn, With eyelids heavy and red, A woman sat, in unwomanly rags, Plying her needle and thread— Stitch! stitch! stitch!59

In London, an estimated 33,500 women experienced a version of the hardships articulated by Hood. Most were engaged in apparel-making including shirts, military slops, and convict clothing, and were attempting to live on critically low

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wages.60 Work on convict and slop clothing was considered the lowest of all needlework. These garments were made quickly and cheaply, and the women working on them received the lowest pay of all. The work was intermittent and without a regular income, their existence was made all the more precarious. Needlework could also significantly impact their health, with many women suffering from serious eye strain. These conditions could lead to destitution, and especially alarming to well-off contemporaries, prostitution. Prostitution was one of the only other money-making occupations available to unskilled and uneducated women, a dreadful alternative when an income from sewing was not enough to support oneself or one’s family.61 As one woman who made slop shirts explained: By working from five o’clock in the morning till midnight each night, I might be able to do seven in the week . . . it was impossible for me to live. I was forced to go out of a night to make out my living . . . Sometimes there was no work for me, and then I was forced to depend entirely upon the streets for my food. On my soul I went to the streets solely to get a living for myself and my child.62

Contemporaries defined London’s needlewomen as “probably the most helpless of any in existence.”63 Growing public concern led to the formation of the Distressed Needlewomen’s Society and the Society for the Protection of Distressed Needlewomen in London.64 In 1850, Sidney Herbert established the Female Emigration Fund to assist English needlewomen migrate to Australia though the plan met both encouragement and resistance (Figure 1.4). Supporters of the scheme reasoned that emigration was a means of bettering the living and working conditions of the poorest class of women. They claimed that many would be suitable for the journey and the demands of their new life, being demonstrably capable of hard work. An added advantage was that they would go some way to addressing the continuing imbalance between men and women in the colonies, providing a feminine, moral influence.65 A key driver of female emigration schemes—not just Sidney Herbert’s—was to improve the colonies where vices such as alcohol, gambling, violence, and illicit sex were rife. The supposed moral qualities of women were essential to this aim, with the reasoning that women could bring about a shift from frontier environments to more civilized communities.66 Critics of the Female Emigration Fund, however, cautioned against sending out women of “dubious” character. They feared that those women who were unable to support themselves in the new country, without friends to call on for assistance, would have few options other than turning to prostitution for survival—precisely the situation that promoters of emigration were attempting to alleviate at home.67

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Figure 1.4 The Illustrated London News, Distressed Needlewomen Emigrating to Australia for a Better Life, 1850, (print). Collection: Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty Images.

Distressed needlewomen and other female workers who arrived in Australia over subsequent years found a demand for labor concentrated in domestic service and the needlework industry, much as it was at home. Regular advertisements seeking “good” needlewomen and dressmakers ran in colonial newspapers.68 Needlewomen placed their own advertisements, emphasizing their respectability or their desire to work for a respectable family combined with their knowledge of dressmaking, needlework, or plain sewing.69 Some found good positions with kind families. However general needlework wages remained low and there was not always enough work to support all needlewomen. Conditions for some needlewomen, then, were no better in Australia than in Britain. They continued to work long hours, some up to fourteen hours a day, and it was suggested that there were hundreds working in Melbourne in deplorable surroundings,70 provoking one writer to note: “I fear the song of the Australian needlewoman is scarcely less mournful that that of her English sister heard by [poet Thomas] Hood.”71 Despite this, it remained an industry one turned to when all else had failed. Melbourne’s Argus newspaper illustrated this, reporting on the circumstances of a widower, once prosperous in England, who lay for months in his sick bed. Forcing

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the labor of his eldest child—a girl of fifteen—its author conceded: “it was a poor pittance that rewarded the twelve hours of daily toil which her aching fingers and throbbing head attempted to perform.”72 Needlework could not be relied on as a sole source of income in the colony, a fact recognized by ladies’ benevolent societies who provided financial assistance to supplement needlewomen’s earnings.73 Yet those same organizations continued to encourage women to reenter the needlework trade, tying them to the cycle of poverty.74 Even the city’s most desperate women could not escape needlework, and for inmates of institutions such as Melbourne’s Benevolent Asylum, sewing was a condition of their shelter.75 A growing number of critics argued that better female education and the opportunity to learn a trade or profession would open up employment options,76 noting that, without alternatives, “their only resource is, to stitch, stitch, stitch for a miserable pittance, which will just save them from starvation.”77

Genteel Paid Labor: Challenges and Contradictions I have outlined the enforced labor of convict women and the paid labor of free settlers and recognize that though many of their contemporaries found it unsettling, genteel women also worked for money. For widows or those who faced an abrupt change of circumstances, sewing was the only morally and socially acceptable skill they could sell if they lacked the education needed to work as a governess. It was a situation that troubled some commentators given these women were once their social peers. Although criticized for her “brightest rose-colour” descriptions of Melbourne and her privileged glimpse into society, Clara Aspinall was openly sympathetic to their plight.78 Revealing the struggles of the genteel poor in the city in Three Years in Melbourne, her retelling of an incident experienced by her Irish servant makes clear how disturbing these circumstances could be: Two shabbily-dressed ladies had accosted her, who she did not at first recognise, so worn, and haggard, and changed were they since she had known them at home. It appeared they were the daughters of an officer, who had died and left them almost destitute. They had come out to Australia, hoping to be able to earn a subsistence, and were now desirous of taking in plain sewing . . . These ladies had asked her if she could procure any plain work for them; and such was the delicacy and kind-heartedness of the Irish woman, that she at once had made up her mind to take them some work to do for herself and fellow-servants, but not to tell them from what source it came.79

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This episode emphasizes a most alarming role reversal, where servants provided employment for women who had once been their betters. Clara’s acquaintance with “the reduced lady” who earned her living through her toy and fancywork shop and in teaching fancywork, indicated the situation was perhaps more prevalent than acknowledged. She noted: “This lady once told me that, in the course of about a week, twelve other ladies (who had been brought up in affluence at home) had applied to her, begging her to obtain plain work for them,” adding additional female labor to an already unsustainable industry.80 Yet, there were many degrees between wealth and poverty, and women’s paid labor did not always indicate an association with the working-class or genteel poor. Brian Roberts explores middle-class culture during the Californian gold rush, casting a critical eye over what he defines as “women in the East as active participants in the gold rush.”81 He shifts attention to the wives who were entrusted with businesses as their husbands joined the rush, noting “if we measure the rush by material standards, according to who made the most money and who conducted the most paying business, many of these wives were more successful than their husbands.”82 However, a fine line existed requiring a constant negotiation between the public sphere of work and the notion of leisured gentility. As Catherine Bishop recognizes of the women who operated their own small businesses in Sydney in the mid-nineteenth century: “Respectability was easier to maintain than gentility.” Working in the public sphere could result in a drop in social status, if not an outright compromise to gentility.83 The genteel labor of paid needlework was more acceptable, particularly when, as Catherine Kelly asserts, “the most genteel lady could augment her family’s income as long as she labored at tasks that seemed to replicate the unpaid labor that middle-class women performed in within their homes.”84 Selling decorative needlework or plain sewing could be tolerated as a genteel money-making enterprise.85 When Reverend Robert Brown passed away in Scotland in 1847, his daughter Jessie, a talented needle-worker, sold pieces she had made. Her sister Jane confided in a letter to their aunt that there appeared to be some demand for Jessie’s work in local shops: “Mr. Hair’s are crying to Jessie to make things for the throats; she is doing a crochet muff—she does it very quickly.”86 Catherine Hester Ralfe followed a similar course of action after she emigrated to New Zealand in 1866. As a single woman joining her brother Henry and his family she realized a need to supplement their income. She began by selling her tatting created during evenings at home, before a shift occurred:

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After this I started tatting collarettes and so forth, from early morning to bed time, the poor Mater [her sister-in-law] disposing of them, the worst part of the business; but soon I was advised to ask for work of a kind as a draper’s shop kept by Mrs Black in Colombo Street; I went there and showing me a silk mantle she asked me if I could make one like it. I said I would try. “That won’t do, it must be yes or no,” she said, whereupon I said “yes”; my attempt met with approbation and from that time she kept me supplied with as much work as I could do.87

While Catherine initially described her work in the context of a genteel evening at home with the suggestion of leisure, it increasingly became the focus of her daily efforts. Yet the benefits were clear: through the money made from her needlework she actively and regularly contributed to the family’s finances.

Conclusion Needlework was fundamental to nineteenth-century female existence across the British Empire. While sewing was necessary and valuable for some men, it impacted most women: as labor forced on them, willingly accepted, or something in between. For women whom authorities sought to control or rehabilitate, needlework had a moral underpinning. For vast numbers of working women, it formed their primary or secondary employment—especially as by the nineteenth century employment in the needlework industry had shifted, responding to advances in technology and expanding industry, introducing new ways of living and consuming. It was the symbolic, unremunerated work of genteel women, though it might also be harnessed by them when seeking to contribute to the family income. Needlework could therefore be a skill which women exploited for their own gain or for which they could be exploited. This chapter has established the tension between needlework as “work”: for payment or as domestic labor, while acknowledging that these could perhaps intersect. In the following chapter I examine why needlework touched so many women’s lives and how it became a distinctly feminine skill through the focus on sewing in the education of girls of all classes. I will explore how nineteenthcentury education systems contributed to the widespread perception of work with the needle as being women’s work, and how this aspect of their learning was motivated by particular moral and behavioral objectives. Chapter Two further shifts the focus from needlework as paid employment to genteel work, considering the advantageous nature for middling girls to develop needlework skills as a genteel accomplishment and to manage their home, all the while part of the corporeal project of constructing the genteel feminine body.

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Maggie Brown left Scotland for Victoria in 1854. Her sister Jane departed five years later. Jane’s arrival in the colony—unmarried, aged thirty-two—had been prompted by her sister’s health. Maggie was critically ill and died from tuberculosis in November 1859. Although Jane had intended to stay only temporarily, she accepted the care of Maggie’s children, Robert and Maggie (junior), and married Melbourne merchant Andrew Hamilton in 1860. Andrew had established himself since his arrival in Victoria in 1852 with Maggie’s fiancé James, and it was to his “most exquisite place . . . a pretty villa surrounded by several acres of garden and pleasure ground in most beautiful order” that the sisters travelled for Maggie’s final days, moving her from the goldfields to his comfortable home in Brighton, a seaside village eight miles south-east of Melbourne.1 But gold weighed heavily on Andrew’s mind and two years after marrying Jane, the family relocated to Bendigo. Writing from that location in 1866, Jane updated her mother in Scotland on family news noting that “Robert and Maggie are well and regularly at school, they have both passed their examination creditably.” She proudly added, “Maggie promises to be a very nice seamstress.”2 That Jane made no comment on nine-year-old Maggie’s proficiency in other areas of her education at Ironbark School highlights the critical place of needlework in a girl’s education and forms the point of departure for this chapter. Jane’s remark acknowledges that despite what was widely considered a natural relationship between women and sewing—that is, needlework as an innately feminine talent—skills in needlework had to be learned. It underscores how an education in needlework remained vital across the British Empire: as essential a step on the path to womanhood in a goldfields town in Victoria as it was in Britain. The importance of young Maggie Hoey showing signs of being “a very nice seamstress” becomes all the clearer as I set out to examine the making of women and the construction of femininity through training in needlework. Referencing British and American prescriptive literature in the form of etiquette 47

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and conduct manuals, instructional guides for female education, and needlework handbooks, I begin by exploring the object lessons taught through formal schooling and in the domestic setting and reveal how these transferred to the Australian colonies. Alongside this I investigate the dual function of needlework lessons: firstly, the skills in working with a needle and thread that would be as vital for the future employment of working girls as it was in preparing genteel girls for their domestic roles as wives and mothers; and second, in instilling feminine values ranging from patience, discipline, and self-control to virtue. For it was undeniable that an education in needlework inculcated feminine behaviors—of enormous consequence in a shifting society like Victoria where women’s conduct was critical in expressing a family’s status amid challenges to, and negotiations for, identity.

A Correct Education The concept of education in the nineteenth century was not confined to learning in the schoolroom but broadly encompassed the instruction received during childhood that increased understanding, taught discipline, and formed manners and habits—elements that together went into the creation of a person’s character.3 Education could be gained both through instruction in a formal institutional setting ranging from charity and day schools to exclusive private colleges or in the home via a governess’s instruction or at a mother’s side. It was intended to develop the intellect, but it was critical that a child’s education also incorporated moral and religious training. A “correct” education was especially important for children of middling families or for those aspiring to a higher social class. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital—values, knowledge, and manners, and understanding how they operate in and influence social relations, positioning the holders of like cultural capital in distinction to others on the social scale—in children’s early learning offers a framework for examining how the behaviors of gentility were most successfully “inherited” from an early age.4 Bourdieu asserts that cultural capital in the embodied state, that is, in the form of dispositions of body and mind, “cannot be transmitted instantaneously (unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility) by gift or bequest, purchase or exchange . . . [but] quite unconsciously.”5 The most effective method of transmission occurs in the children of families possessing certain cultural capital. Taking time to accumulate, economic capital influences the time allocated to the acquisition process.6 This simple summary touches on a considerably

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more complex theory but aims to establish the critical place of a correct education for children: the importance of model behavior passed from parent or teacher to student. Children lacking a correct education were judged, revealed in Penelope Selby’s criticisms from the coastal town of Port Fairy (then Belfast) after five years in Port Phillip with her family. Penelope arrived in Australia in 1840 with her husband George and two sons as free settlers, determined to improve upon their strained gentility. Five years later she carefully distinguished between “us” and “them,” and writing to her sister in 1845, she highlighted the differences she saw between “the particular ones from the old country” and those who were “colonial and quite different to at home.” Penelope implied that colonial women, lacking the benefit of an English upbringing and education and with many coming from a vastly different background, had inadequate resources to correctly raise their children. As a result, she observed the “children here are sadly brought up.”7 She scornfully wrote to her sister of a lack of discipline presumably not seen in her own children: As a specimen, Mrs Cox’s son, his father quite a gentleman and rich, has a pony of his own to ride where he pleases, associates with all the bullock drivers and worst characters of the place, will go to the public house and call for anything he likes, and use such language as would shock you to hear from a man, and he is just six years old, his younger brother aged four [is] quite as bad.8

For Penelope Selby, as for many genteel women in the nineteenth century, education was a mark of higher class. It could quickly express correct training in gentility, or conversely expose a family’s true status as otherwise.9

Needlework: The Fundamental Female Activity Nineteenth-century prescriptive literature emphasized the historical link between women and the needle, promoting sewing as a normal, rightful occupation.10 Skills in the use of the needle, outlined by Lucretia P. Hale in her Plain Needlework, Knitting and Mending for All, at Home and in Schools, were “important, even essential, to every girl, every woman, whatever her position in society.”11 Sewing was defined by Emily Shirreff in her writing on women’s education, Intellectual Education, and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women, as “the only indispensable feminine art.”12 Texts widely promoted attaining sewing skills as a vital part of the education of girls, and as The Ladies’ Work Table Book therefore

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recommended: “To become an expert needle woman should be an object of ambition of every British fair.”13 This ambition was reflected in Australia, too, where one writer urged in 1861, “without a knowledge of the busy needle, a female’s education is far from complete.”14 Needlework was gendered and gendering: it was considered a distinctively female activity and part of the process of feminizing girls, reflecting Simone de Beauvoir’s much-quoted assertion that “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”15 Early lessons in needlework were driven by that aim, reflecting the framework set out by Judith Butler who argues that gender is not given but acquired. Butler explains “to be a woman is to have become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of ‘woman,’ to induce the body to become a cultural sign, to materialize oneself in obedience to an historically delimited possibility, and to do this as a sustained and repeated corporeal project.”16 According to Butler, femininity is produced via an ongoing and persistent series of acts, movements, and gestures that are construed as feminine. The concentration on needlework in the education of girls can therefore be seen as important in teaching the cultural signs of femininity, for as one manual expressed it “a feminine character cannot be quite perfect without a knowledge of all sorts of needle-work, and a downright hearty love of it, too.”17 In order to achieve this, female preoccupations were modeled to girls in childhood and inculcated through constant repetition. Needlework was therefore a core subject for girls at whatever level they studied. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy, it was the only subject that was taught to all girls in colonial Australia, in addition to being the only subject taught exclusively to girls.18 Depending on the nature of the education and the social status of the student, lessons could focus on the skills for practical sewing, decorative needlework, or both, but all were based on the fundamental link between sewing and womanhood. So essential was this link that when Wilson Hardy humorously outlined his ideal woman in a letter to his sister in England in 1854, there was some truth to it: I am not particular about the weight size or beauty so that she must be a good sound bouncing lass with teeth & character & refinement a character of common sense & willing to off her artificials & go through thick & thin should it be required of course she would be gratified to knit, sew, wash, serve & cook in ordinary degree.19

His desire for a wife capable of undertaking practical household duties reflected Wilson’s position in the colony: young, ambitious, and still to make a name for

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himself in business in Victoria. He emphasized that he was not looking for a “lady,” writing it “does not matter if she never heard of a crochet needle or saw a carpet . . . in short I might have said a good stout country lass would do me . . . a genteal [sic] finical Lady won’t do now you understand.”20 When, six years later, Wilson announced his engagement to Mary Ann Tankard he described her as “a lady by education . . . & tho not brought up to the duties of domestic life she is naturally not incapable of fulfilling them.”21 With increasing wealth made through distributing fruit to the goldfields, Wilson had revised his expectations. As “a lady by education” we can be sure that Mary Ann’s girlhood lessons had included instruction in needlework—both plain and, befitting a girl of her standing, ornamental—preparing her for the duties of domestic life. This chapter looks at these in turn, beginning with the plain sewing skills taught to girls, the motivation for such lessons, and the methods of instruction.

Practical Lessons in the School Room and at Home Formal schooling for poorer girls was limited across the British Empire. Few could afford anything other than charity schooling, if that, as many families required a labor contribution from their children. The charity school illustrated in the frontispiece of the British needlework manual The Workwoman’s Guide is filled with rows of improbably obedient young girls industriously stitching: an idealization of both their method of instruction under the benevolent watch of a genteel lady, and the attitude in which they engaged with their work. Their learning of practical skills would for many become a primary source of income or would prove to be one of the essential skills needed for their employment in domestic service. Early Australian charity schools such as the Sydney-based Female Orphan Institution, established in 1800, and the Female School of Industry formed in 1826, focused their training around the skills required by girls for employment as servants, with the overarching aim of imparting “the habits of industry and neatness . . . [and a] religious, moral and useful education.”22 Needlework and literacy were central components; they formed distinctive parts of the project that inculcated girls into religion and encouraged moral behavior. Students worked on plain sewing and manufactured clothing for sale, defraying part of the costs associated with their schooling, training them to work under supervision, and teaching them the needlework skills they could turn to for legitimate employment as adults.23 These same educational outcomes were encouraged in ragged schools decades later with their free instruction in the

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Holy Scripture, reading, writing, and arithmetic for boys and girls from destitute families. Girls were also taught plain knitting, plain needlework, mending, and darning.24 Methods for teaching plain sewing were structured around exercises of increasing difficulty and independence. Hilda Leviny, youngest daughter of colonial-made gentleman Ernest Leviny, recalled attending state school in the goldfields town of Castlemaine for a short period where, under the instruction of a sewing mistress, girls began practicing their stitching at the age of five or six. Hilda remembered of the concentration on needlework: We had a bit of cotton this side, and a needle this side, and you were not to thread the needle till she [the teacher] said so . . . And we had a little bit of sewing like that, and we did backstitch on it, and we did hemming on it, there was so much sewing—you had to sew a lot.25

Hilda’s comment reveals that the earliest lessons taught girls how to correctly hold their fabric, then thread a needle, building on these through introducing simple stitches. Letters, numbers, and motifs were practiced by intermediate stitchers. Plain sewing samplers that demonstrated cuffs, button holes, and mending were completed by the most advanced, in addition to cutting out fabric and sewing full-sized garments such as shifts and shirts.26 Plain sewing samplers could comprise specimens of various techniques worked in small sections on the one piece of plain cotton fabric, or worked individually and tacked into a sampler book, and aimed to develop proficiency in a range of household sewing. Plain sewing samplers incorporated indispensable lessons explaining why some, including Anne Trotter’s sampler book completed in Ireland in 1840, travelled with her across the Empire (Figure 2.1). Anne attended the Female Free School in Collon as part of the system of public education tailored to the children of working and poorer families. Literacy and numeracy were a focus, and for girls, plain sewing. Anne worked several examples of needlework ranging from mending, buttonholes, seams, and patchwork to miniature garments that she pinned or pasted into her book. They show a clear progression through the curriculum laid out in Simple Directions in Needle-work and Cutting Out; Intended for the Use in the National Female Schools of Ireland, a textbook of prescribed lessons first published in 1835.27 Students worked through four divisions of increasing complexity and what they produced became, in effect, a portfolio of their skills. In bringing the book with her when she migrated to Australia four years later in 1844 it is possible that Anne used it as evidence of

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Figure 2.1 Anne Trotter, Needlework Specimen Book, Collon, County Louth, Ireland, 1840, (paper, cotton, wool), 5 × 15.5 × 3.8 cm. Collection: Museums Victoria, HT 36147. Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY, https://collections.museumvictoria. com.au/items/2027802.

her skills in a range of plain sewing applications, especially important when the Dale Park’s manifest, the ship on which Anne migrated, listed her as a domestic servant.28 Important complementary training in needlework took place within the home, the future site for a girl’s skills. “No woman is fitted . . . for home, unless she is perfect mistress of needlework,” The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness declared, emphasizing the link between needlework and women’s domestic duty.29 Sarah Stickney Ellis was explicit in her advice in The Daughters of England: “To know how to do every thing which can properly come within a woman’s sphere of duty, ought to be the ambition of every female mind.”30 Lacking an understanding of the steps necessary to manage a house was considered a failing, or as the manual How to be a Lady stressed: “a lady who does not know how to take care of herself and of her own house, or who feels above it, cannot be very useful.”31 To be useful in the home was essential, and it was a mother’s responsibility to train her daughter in the domestic arts as part of her broader

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function as teacher, role model, and moral guide.32 Such home-based training depended heavily on a mother’s own education. Prescriptive literature emphasized that plain sewing was one of the most important household occupations, stressing that girls be proficient in making shirts or their own clothes before “degenerating into the frivolity of constant fancy-work in which so many precious hours are wasted.”33 The push for plain sewing as a foundation skill was widely encouraged. While decorative needlework was acknowledged as a more enjoyable focus for their energies, a knowledge of plain sewing was essential to successfully manage a home. Harvey Newcomb therefore suggested: there are multitudes who would prefer spending their time at fancy needle-work . . . This I do not condemn; but the useful should be set foremost. All ornamental branches of education are to be encouraged; but they will not make amends for the want of skill to cook a meal of victuals, make a plain garment, or darn a stocking.34

Hence a mother’s first duty in teaching needlework was to ensure that the basic stitches of plain sewing were mastered, with lessons beginning at a young age. Thoughts on Domestic Education instructed that by the age of five, girls should be capable of beginning to work with a needle, and that aged six, they should be able to neatly complete plain work. It recommended girls spend one hour daily on their plain sewing. By the age of eight, plain sewing could be supplemented with marking and fancywork.35 Another manual suggested that girls aged nine might be put in charge of mending their own clothing. By twelve they should be proficient in plain sewing and be able to work quickly and neatly.36 Daily lessons of increasing complexity ensured that girls had ample opportunity to build on and refine their skills while still young. Yet how were very young girls encouraged to begin needlework when, given the limits of motor skill development, they could barely hold a needle let alone thread it? Young girls handled needles, thread, and fabric from an early age, and for working-class families, a child’s labor or assistance could be valuable. The history of child labor confirms that while today this seems inconceivably young, it was not uncommon for children in the nineteenth century to be employed, and exploited, in the needlework industry.37 For girls who were not obliged to quickly master sewing skills out of economic necessity, mothers encouraged their daughters to sew from a young age by allowing them to undertake similar projects to what they were working on, but on a smaller scale. This method of instruction is visible in the patchwork quilt of Mrs E. Prince, with two smaller patchwork

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samplers thought to have been made by one of her daughters (Figures 2.2 and 2.3). Mrs Prince’s quilt is formed by the same English Paper Piecing method as the unfinished samplers, however the quality of the stitching and the accuracy of the piecing is vastly different. Quilt making required working straight seams, a common task and therefore an early lesson, but matching the corner of each piece demanded greater technical ability. Mrs Prince’s stitches are small and uniform, with each hexagonal piece joined with precision. Hers is the work of an accomplished needlewoman (in fact, Mrs Prince’s quilt was awarded a bronze medal in the Metropolitan Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney in 1877).38 The stitching on the samplers is coarser but nevertheless an attempt to emulate a mother’s example. Learning beside one’s mother was a lesson encouraged for girls of all classes and the English publication The Family Economist: A Penny Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Moral, Physical, and Domestic Improvement of the Industrious Classes held up this method as the model for training girls. The magazine’s idealized cover image from an 1848 issue depicts a young girl sewing at her mother’s knee, mirroring her posture, her gently inclined head, and her

Figure 2.2 Unknown maker [daughter of Mrs E. Prince], Patchwork Sampler, 1850–77, (cotton), 64 × 64 cm. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 94/215/3-2. Photographer: Sotha Bourn.

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Figure 2.3 Unknown maker [daughter of Mrs E. Prince], Patchwork Sampler, 1850–77, (cotton), 64 × 64 cm. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 94/215/3-1. Photographer: Sotha Bourn.

manner of holding needle and thread, suggesting a parallel method of learning for Mrs Prince and her daughter. Young girls were further encouraged through gifts of their own work box and sewing tools, instilling a sense of ownership. In June 1853, Mary Mowle recorded her daughter Florence’s seventh birthday, noting that she “gave her a work box & dressed her very prettily in the evening—she is a very dear child & gives forth abundant promises of realizing all my fondest hopes concerning her.”39 Florence’s first work box, perhaps full of needles, thread, pins, pincushion, scissors, and other useful tools (though Mary did not list its contents) was no doubt a source of great pride. Some of Florence’s tools may have been made to fit her smaller hands. At Viewbank Homestead, home of the genteel Martin family in Melbourne, the archaeological record reveals girlhood sewing by the daughters of Dr Robert Martin and his wife Lucy, with a child-sized thimble amongst the assemblage excavated at the site.40 Advice manuals suggested an alternative method for inducing young girls into their first needlework lessons: teaching them to make clothing for

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their dolls. Emily Shirreff outlined how through encouraging them to clothe their dolls “there is in general no difficulty in making little girls fond of it [needlework].”41 These first lessons in needlework were also intended to lay the early foundation for maternal care, or what Anne Bowman expressed as “feel[ing] the importance of a mother’s duty.”42 That this achieved its desired effect is revealed in Eliza à Beckett’s memoirs. Raised in the fashionable municipality of St Kilda, she recalled that around the age of eight “we were all very fond of our dolls and spent much time making their clothes, and in various ways giving them every advantage possible, as good mothers should.”43 The fabric for their early attempts was likely cut out by an older sister or the girls’ mother as this required a steady hand or a ready supply of fabric; it was then worked under their guidance. In caring for and clothing their dolls, then, girls were training to be mothers. Girls also worked garments in miniature, with the aim of mastering the techniques of producing clothing while using less fabric and in a shorter timeframe. According to Mrs Child’s The Girl’s Own Book, girls aged three and four were capable of attempting miniature shirts, first practicing turning a hem using paper, and then progressing to cloth, using brightly colored thread to make their stitching visible.44 With such practice, Mrs Child believed that every girl “before she is twelve years old, should know how to cut and make a [full-sized] shirt with perfect accuracy and neatness.”45 Modern knowledge of child development suggests that initially these must have been primitive attempts, but there is a large difference between the capacity of a four and a twelve-year-old, and persistence over a number of years could evidently bring an older girl to a degree of skill.

Marking Samplers: The Measure of Girlhood Education The practical lessons taught by working on plain sewing samplers and miniature garments would create the foundation for the range of sewing responsibilities for girls, as women. However, it was the marking sampler with its rows of letters and numbers that became emblematic of nineteenth-century female education. Marking samplers typically comprised cross-stitched upper and lower-case alphabets, numbers, and floral or animal motifs within a border. In this they were considerably different in purpose to the band samplers of earlier centuries: a practical record of stitches, patterns, and motifs, kept in a workbox to be used as a reference tool by needlewomen (Figure  2.4). Simpler nineteenth-century

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samplers drew on basic lessons in needlework, in addition to design and color skills. They also claimed to help girls learn the fundamentals of spelling, and how to form letters and numbers, though the efficacy of learning literacy and numeracy through working samplers is doubtful. Some scholars contend that samplers were merely effective in teaching girls to embroider.46 Samplers were considered a tool for practicing the neat, plain letters and numbers required for marking quantities of household linen, useful when managing large quantities and for keeping track of multiple sets when they were sent out for laundering.47 Marking was conventionally undertaken by servants, who stitched the initials of the master or mistress of the house and the set to which they belonged: The Workwoman’s Guide suggested bed linen be marked B for best, F for family, S for servant, or for other household linen, P for pantry, K for kitchen, H for house, the number and date.48 Girls from genteel families also learnt skills in marking as, depending on their level of household assistance, they may have marked their own sheets, tablecloths, and other linen once married.49 The emphasis on proficiency in marking, however, does not fully explain the prominence of samplers in the education of girls. The emergence of indelible inks into the market in the 1830s negated any truly necessary practical application for this skill;50 The Workwoman’s Guide, first published in 1838, recognized that while every piece of linen should be marked, ink was better for this purpose than thread.51

Figure 2.4 Margret Barber, Sampler [detail], 1661–63, (linen worked with silk and linen thread), 95.3 × 16.2 cm. Collection: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 57.122.368.

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Yet samplers remained an important part of female education providing evidence of correct instruction for girls. Across the British Empire, girls attending everything from private ladies’ colleges to charity schools were expected to work on samplers.52 Variations exist not so much in who worked the sampler, as how decorative they were and the quality of the materials used. Rozsika Parker illustrates how the samplers of working-class girls in institutions, orphanages, and village schools in Britain were purely practical lessons in letters and numbers, using less color and fewer decorative motifs. She refers to the latter as “symbols of privilege,” far more prevalent in samplers produced by girls of the middle and upper classes.53 So too, Margaret Fraser finds ample evidence in colonial Australia of samplers made by the daughters of struggling farmers and servants, those attending national or state schools, institutionalized girls such as orphans, Aboriginal girls, as well as the genteel.54 That some samplers were proudly displayed as a record of a girl’s education is evidenced by the holes punched along their edges to stretch them for framing. The text worked on samplers could be as simple as the alphabet running from A to Z but could also comprise poems, hymns, or passages from the Bible. Underpinning this text was the dual purpose of education: to develop the intellect while providing moral and religious training. This was thought to encourage girls to become pious while young, with religious motivation informing their behavior, conduct, and habit of mind.55 It was intended that this would extend into their adult lives in meaningful ways, inspiring benevolence through acts of kindness and humility. Popular sampler text from hymns or passages from the Bible therefore modelled the standards girls should strive for, leading Maureen Daly Goggin to propose that samplers aimed to improve not only the worker’s needle skills but her moral character.56 It explains why samplers continued to remain important in nineteenth-century education, when stitching good and righteous sentiments cemented the link between the work of young girls’ needles and their religious education. It was a link made visible across the British world, and from the wide range of surviving examples the samplers stitched by Alice Winter in Melbourne are typical of their time. Melbourne-born Alice was the daughter of English migrants Richard Winter, a cabinetmaker, and his wife Eliza. At the age of nine in 1866 she stitched in brightly colored wools a passage from Ecclesiastes 12: “Remember now / thy creator in the / days of thy youth. / Eccles. XII.I” (Figure 2.5). On a second sampler made the following year, favoring green and purple wools, Alice cross-stitched the Commandment: “Honour thy fath / er and mother / and forget not / all their kindness” (Figure 2.6). On this second sampler, Alice also recorded

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Figure 2.5 Alice Winter, Sampler, “Remember Thy Creator in the Days of Thy Youth,” Melbourne, c. 1866, (canvas, wool), Collection: Museums Victoria, HT 3889. Photographer: Rodney Start.

an address: 172 La Trobe St, Melbourne, the Winter family’s home.57 Alice’s samplers reveal the explicit connection between a girl’s needlework and her moral education, and she was not the only girl in Melbourne to express an engagement with good behavior through her stitching. Two decades earlier, Swiss-born Rose Augustine Pellet stitched on her sampler: “Jesus permit thy

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Figure 2.6 Alice Winter, Sampler, “Honour Thy Father and Mother and Forget Not All Their Kindness,” Melbourne, c. 1867, (canvas, wool). Collection: Museums Victoria, HT 38901. Photographer: Rodney Start.

gracious name to stand / As the first effort of an infant hand / And as her fingers oe’r [sic] the canvas move / Engage her tender heart to seek thy love” (Figure 2.7). As a ten-year-old, Rose was hardly an infant, and her stitching of this verse alongside other elements including upper and lower-case alphabets, numbers, plants, flowers, and animals within a floral border reveals that this was certainly

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Figure 2.7 Rose Augustine Pellet, Embroidery Sampler, 1847, (linen, wool), 71.5 × 58.5 × 2.5 cm. Collection: National Museum of Australia, MA23390928, 2007.0098.0001. Photographer: Jason McCarthy.

not her first effort. Yet, as she carefully embroidered these words into her canvas, we can see how the creation of samplers centered on the home and domesticity, piety and morality, self-control and discipline, introducing girls to behaviors that in the nineteenth century were articulated as feminine, and which through constant repetition established them as natural female behaviors. Beyond this verse, Rose Pellet’s sampler comprises several motifs that perhaps make known more intimate details of her life. Rose emigrated to Australia with her mother, Charlotte, in 1841. Charlotte Pellet worked as housekeeper for Charles La Trobe: Superintendent of the Port Phillip District and from 1851 Lieutenant-Governor of Victoria, ensuring a position of power in the colony at the time of Victoria’s gold discoveries. Rose was educated alongside La Trobe’s

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children, and it has been suggested that the two cottages depicted in her sampler represent La Trobe’s pre-fabricated cottage where she grew up in Melbourne and a second cottage built on his estate; while the two birds stitched at the bottom of the sampler bear a resemblance to Australia’s brightly colored native parrots.58 These elements demonstrate how samplers could be made personal, revealing aspects of a girl’s childhood. Certain elements, though, could also be remote from girlhood experience. What, we could ask, compelled a ten-year-old Scottish girl to stitch the name of the site selected for Australia’s first penal settlement, Botany Bay, on her sampler? This is precisely what Margret Begbie worked into her undated sampler, among its more conventional letters and motifs that included a house at both the center top and bottom, trees and flowers, and animals including birds, lions, dogs, and insects (Figure 2.8). At the center of the sampler Margret stitched an unexpected scene: a two-masted tall ship flying the British ensign of a civilian vessel; a smaller vessel; and a row boat holding two figures. Above this depiction she stitched the words “Botany Bay.” These vessels may represent part of a convict fleet, leading us to question what a young Scottish girl knew of such crime and punishment. Perhaps a lesson in the geography of the British Empire, it seems likely to have been underpinned by a powerful moral lesson— the consequences of bad conduct which could result in transportation, perhaps for life. Given the prominence of samplers at all levels of schooling, and as the only form among needlework genres to be commonly signed and dated, these examples and many others reveal how samplers are rich sources of social and cultural histories.59 Samplers are increasingly drawn on to communicate the concerns of girls (and women) where they are difficult to locate in the historical record. Recent research examines samplers as a means to place women within a community, and to trace their lives, dreams, and aspirations, interrogating the ways in which they reflect important ideas and ideals of class and femininity.60 Samplers record certain facts often not acknowledged in other forms of needlework (apart, perhaps, from quilts): the names of their makers, the date, and sometimes the location. Some hint at life events, provide clues to situate identity, and all offer a means to explore the female experience. The direct link between maker and object invests them with a sense of personal presence, even though many follow conventional designs. They shift in meaning over time as they pass through generations of women, part of a gendered practice of handing down intimate objects with little apparent economic value. Taking on new meaning through their connection to the maternal line, textiles keep the memories of

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Figure 2.8 Margret Begbie, Needlework Sampler on Woollen Even Weave Fabric Featuring Boats and the Text “Botany Bay,” c. 1790–1840, (wool), 34 × 39.5 cm. Collection: National Museum of Australia, MA74487450, 2005.0086.0001.

female ancestors alive.61 In this way they can be, as Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway explain of textiles and needlework more broadly, “important vehicles for emotionally charged memories, and were often personalized and carefully preserved before being passed along by family members.”62 Schoolgirls were not their only makers. Samplers could also act as powerful biographical documents for women. Aimee E. Newell’s study of samplers made by American women aged forty and over between 1820 and 1860 identifies several forms worked by adults, including biographical samplers—those

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conveying a life story such as that found in family record samplers—and the related epistolary form, which tell a story through stitched words. Such genres provided women with a way to validate achievements (both personal and familial), by documenting events, and presenting testimony. They constituted the story of their maker, established their place within a family group, and increased in value by being passed between generations, coming to serve as a memorial to their maker.63 The form of the commemorative sampler is distinctive for the text it carries that marks a meaningful event. Some record loss—whether through death or migration—such as Maria Tilley’s sampler The Emigrant’s Farewell and The Emigrant’s Prayer made in England for her son John when he migrated to Australia in 1854 (Figure 2.9). On the sampler, Maria stitched eleven passages from the Bible relating to departure and the pain of absence.64 This specially female recording and communication of life events via needle and thread led Ann S. Stephens in The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework to suggest that needlework was the primary means of expression for women.65 A. Mary Murphy extends this idea to propose that needlework was “a form of self-writing,” a biographical tool to reconstruct a lived life.66 Newell further explains that shifting from an act of obedience or schoolgirl learning, when made by a woman’s own volition samplers served as a source of identity through which she could define herself.67 Their words on canvas can therefore be interpreted as a formal female language for memory, reflection, and assertion. Examples such as The Emigrant’s Farewell and The Emigrant’s Prayer hint at the personal stories and experiences that could be articulated through needle and thread. As personal documents and cultural artefacts, samplers inform our understanding of the expectations placed upon girls in the nineteenth century, and how these extended to womanhood.

Genteel Accomplishments: Ornamental Skills For genteel girls, an education in accomplishments that included decorative needlework was critical. Early elite colonial education was available through governesses or small private institutions.68 Aged fourteen, Caroline Bucknall travelled from her family’s property, Rodborough Vale, in what would become central Victoria to attend Mrs Henderson’s private boarding school in Melbourne. She prospered under Mrs Henderson’s guidance and in September 1849 her father proudly wrote: “Mrs Henderson’s last letter gave us great pleasure as

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Figure 2.9 Maria Tilley, Sampler, “The Emigrants Farewell and The Emigrants Prayer,” 1854, (linen, wool). Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, A11604. Photographer: Jean-Francois Lanzarone.

she spoke so favourably of your conduct and attention to learning.”69 The gold rush and increasing wealth in the population generated a demand for correct British female education so that by the time Clara Aspinall spent her three years in Melbourne she noted that schooling for girls in the colony was good,

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and that there were “young ladies’ seminaries in abundance . . . some bearing a very much higher reputation than others.”70 In fact, close to 700 women advertised their “select” female schools in Melbourne’s Argus newspaper between 1850 and 1875.71 Clara also observed that, despite this proliferation, some wealthy colonists still preferred to send their children to Europe for their education.72 This was the case with three of Caroline Bucknall’s brothers who returned to England when a suitable tutor could not be found in the colony as men scrambled to join the gold rush.73 Providing a correct education was worth the effort: it was a sign recognized by those of genteel persuasion, or a means of bettering their status for newly wealthy colonial families who aimed to educate their daughters as ladies and sons as gentlemen. Training girls in ornamental skills was motivated by class aspiration, just as failing to build cultural capital by learning accomplishments could imply that a girl and her family were not truly genteel.74 At East Leigh Ladies’ College in the fashionable district Prahran, three miles from the center of Melbourne, pastoralist John Hastie’s niece Jane studied the “usual routine of an English Education,” including English grammar, history, and spelling,75 as well as French, music, and drawing.76 Jane also practiced fancywork as expenses outside tuition and board included the purchase of these supplies.77 A decade later, Mildred Snowden, the daughter of a partner in the law firm Gillott and Snowden, attended Mr and Mrs E.A. Samson’s School for Young Gentlewomen, where part of her education comprised decorative needlework. Perhaps neither skilled nor enthusiastic, she recalled “Mrs Samson was a great worker at church work & point lace, my sister learnt both from her. I just learnt to embroider handkerchiefs, night dresses, etc.”78 Jane Hastie and Mildred Snowden’s education in ornamental needlework suggests one of the important steps in forming genteel identity: the time needed to embroider handkerchiefs or nightclothes was a clear expression of social standing. As non-essential sewing, embroidery was unambiguous evidence of available leisure. The acquisition of decorative skills was critical to social position across the British Empire, where, as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich has recognized: “Bending over their embroidery frames little girls added value to themselves as well as to the silk their parents purchased.”79 This training in accomplishments taught the skills necessary to produce pretty work but it also helped instill corporeal refinement and elegance. That is, it produced the genteel body. Returning to Butler’s proposition that the body conform to conventionally feminine behavior to express gender—to become a woman—needlework established the foundations for the feminine body and mind.80

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Shaping the Body and Mind For all girls, genteel or not, there was explicit intent behind training in needlework that Lucretia P. Hale explained as: The great object of all instruction is to strengthen the mind, and form the character. Even needlework, humble as the employment may appear, may be made conductive to this end. When it is intelligently taught, the mind is employed as well as the fingers; powers of calculation are drawn out, habits of neatness acquired, and the taste and judgment cultivated.81

Needlework lessons assisted in forming decent, respectable character for poorer girls, and enhanced the character of girls of social standing whose training had implications for polite behavior and refinement. Lessons stressed industriousness, discipline, and duty, aligning with etiquette manuals such as How to be a Lady: Book for Girls, Containing Useful Hints on the Formation of Character which instructed girls to accept work and respect other women who labored.82 Industry was emphasized in this feminine ideal, positioned as superior to idleness. Idle fingers and minds had the potential to threaten the domestic ideology into which the training of girls fed, where by the mid-nineteenth century an active interest in managing the household and caring for the family was promoted. Given new meaning in colonial circumstances, female industry or idleness were of consequence to migrants and settlers, an idea that I will return to throughout this book. Beyond inspiring the habits of industry for all girls, lessons in needlework encouraged restrained conduct—one of the truest marks of gentility when class could not be asserted through wealth alone. Linda Young notes that “Selfpossession in public was a primary aim, and ideally in private life as well, especially in the socialization of children but also in intimate personal practice.”83 Self-possession, when expressed correctly and naturally, was made visible through bodily control in which cleanliness, an upright posture, restraint of the hands and feet, and the regulation of emotions, were all important elements.84 Such behavior was most effectively taught from an early age, influenced by home and school-based learning, and was fundamental to the place of needlework in girls’ lessons. The aim was to suggest ease and elegance when sewing, from the correct posture and incline of the head, to the position of the hands. These were corporeal gestures that produced the appearance of naturalism and grace but which, in fact, required a good deal of control. Carefully constructed, they were the result of monotonous lessons and correction during girlhood. Sewing in an

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elegant manner deliberately focused attention on the delicate hands of the needle-worker.85 As Ariel Beaujot demonstrates, small white hands which showed an absence of labor were central to constructions of the genteel body.86 Needlework also required a certain demeanor that suggested modesty, but the posture, Parker argues, went beyond elegant gestures to a bodily bearing indicative of submission and docility. Sewing, she contends, was an activity intended to familiarize girls with sitting still with a downcast gaze.87 It was an idealization of women as quiet, gentle, and compliant to her husband or father. Needlework lessons both produced the appearance of femininity while emphasizing its ideals. It was in successfully adopting the correct gestures and bearing, as one needlework manual expressed, that feminine performance was most effective: women “appear most natural and charming when employed in some graceful task of needle-work or knitting.”88 In fact, The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework went so far as to suggest that “On no occasion does a lady seem more lovely than when half occupied with some feminine art which keeps her fingers employed, and gives an excuse for downcast eyes and gentle pre-occupation.”89 The danger of appearing untrained or clumsy was revealed by G. Curling Hope in his observation: “nothing is less becoming to a woman than to appear awkward at such occupations.”90 The act of needlework was thus essential in female gendering and feminine performance.91 It was a distinctly female practice, whereby girls acquired gender through their engagement with recognized social and cultural signals, hinting at the reality that gender is not natural but that the body is a surface on which gender is inscribed.92 It is, as Butler expresses, instituted through “the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements, and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self.”93 Through their sewing, girls became women.

Conclusion An education in needlework was essential for every girl in the nineteenth century. Skills in sewing were taught from a young age so that, with continued practice over a number of years, girls became proficient needlewomen. The practical sewing skills taught through working a plain sewing sampler and the production of miniature garments were especially important to girls who employed these skills in their adult lives in the needlework trades. However, these plain sewing skills also impacted the experiences of genteel women, who

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in managing their households were not exempt from the chores of mending, darning or making underclothes or linen for their families. For them, training in practical sewing would come to make a significant contribution to the timeconsuming bulk of household sewing. It was a vital skill for women in gold-rush Victoria, as the last three chapters will explore. Marking samplers, though, offered limited practical needlework applications. They were questionable teaching tools beyond the basic skills but continued to remain important in nineteenth-century education for their perceived role in the ideals of correct female education. Having girls work on samplers reveals a twin concern for establishing moral character and performing femininity. Given sewing was perceived as the fundamental work of women and a critical component of the gendering process, working a sampler was a vital step through which girls became women—as the substantial number worked and surviving demonstrates. The performance of femininity, and especially genteel femininity, was in some ways best expressed through decorative needlework, and ladies’ colleges encouraged girls to master the non-essential skills needed to embellish the home and person. Engaging with these skills provided a clear indication of leisure, and proficiency in them revealed the female body at its most elegant. The next chapter further explores this link between fancywork and what I consider peak performances of femininity through needlework.

3

Constructing the Genteel Woman: Fancywork and Femininity Before her marriage in 1863, Eliza à Beckett “read a good deal, took plenty of exercise, helped make things for [her sisters] Minnie’s and Emma’s babies, did much fancy work, loved arranging flowers for the house, making bouquets for myself and others for any ball or wedding, and became rather good at archery.”1 That Eliza “did much fancy work” is hardly surprising—it was a wildly popular pastime in the nineteenth century. It was also an activity that required time: what we might call leisure, a central tenet of the genteel experience. Eliza’s behavior reflected the à Beckett family’s status in Melbourne where her father, Thomas Turner à Beckett, was a solicitor with a thriving private practice and as Eliza acknowledged: “I think we ought to have had more duties at home, but, with plenty of servants, including a resident needlewoman, and plenty of money, I had no cares.”2 Despite stressing her privilege Eliza was also careful to explain “I was not an idler in those days.”3 In filling her time with refined pursuits, Eliza’s behavior was aligned with the accomplishments of women of social standing across the British world shielding them from charges of idleness. For although fancywork was often positioned in opposition to the practical, necessary, and mundane task of plain sewing, it was widely framed as genteel labor and this is one of the many contradictions that I explore in this chapter. Eliza à Beckett’s circumstances threw up few challenges to distract from her genteel pastimes. Her “roomy and comfortable house” in St Kilda, home to some of Melbourne’s elite residents, was in stark contrast to the living arrangements that some women found themselves in during Victoria’s early gold-rush period.4 Other women were forced to make their homes in tents, makeshift huts or cottages, in isolated settings far removed from the civilities of genteel living. Some went without the assistance of domestic servants to ease their transition. In this chapter I examine fancywork practices and products in the context of rapid social and economic change in the colony, where women may not have had the stability of home and family that privileged Eliza à Beckett. I build on 71

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growing scholarly attention over the last three decades that examines the links between fancywork, femininity, and the culture of gentility.5 In situating these in gold-rush Victoria—in town, country, and on the diggings—I explore how these links were translated to often-trying locations, where women grappling with isolation and transience turned to material practices to create objects that could assert a degree of control over their environment. I begin by establishing a base for women’s gendered behavior through examining how femininity could be performed via the needle, with fancywork a means through which women sought to demonstrate the highest degree of feminine performance. It was critical in the performance of genteel femininity, although this was not always so clear or well defined. In colonial Victoria, fancywork was practiced by both the secure and the aspirational with different inflections. It is within these layers of experience that I investigate the material strategies women engaged in to indicate or assert status. Identity performance was especially vital for those occupying liminal spaces: women negotiating the boundaries between the upper strata of working-class respectability and the genteel, and in this context, fancywork could provide visible proof of genteel aspiration or association. Building on the previous chapter I again draw on Judith Butler’s scholarship and her concept of gender performativity, which is concerned with how “gender is constructed through specific corporeal acts.”6 Connecting this notion to the gestures and bodily bearings of fancywork, it was further underlined through location. Fancywork was performed in the parlor or drawing room—the most public of spaces in the genteel home. I also turn to scholarship that examines the intersections between femininity, identity performance, material culture, and what Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin define as “gendered material practices.” They argue for the significance of women’s manipulation of the material world, suggesting that “the ways in which objects were conceptualized, produced, circulated, used, and exchanged” can tell us much about the interaction and connections between a subject and an object.7 I explore how the link with specific feminine characteristics provided a frame for constructing fancywork as charitable and moral work, deflecting troubling charges of wasted time. Doing so reveals how fancywork and femininity were intimately connected.

Defining Fancywork and Femininity Fancywork was so popular during the nineteenth century that it needed no definition for the genteel women who practiced it. In the twenty-first century,

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however, it is useful to recognize that while embroidery is most strongly associated with the term, it also incorporated knitting, crochet, tatting, netting, beading, and lace making. In addition, other forms of fancywork utilized a range of materials from shells, fish scales, bird feathers, moss, pine cones, seaweed, and wax flowers to human hair.8 The proliferation of fancywork guides published during the nineteenth century emphasized that women could provide decoration, charm, and comfort to the home and person through an endless variety of handworked projects.9 Such projects, as Mrs Warren and Mrs Pullan explained in Treasures in Needlework, “delights the eye, [and] amuses the mind.”10 Fancywork techniques were most commonly used to decorate practical items, or to construct and decorate ornamental items.11 As Beverley Gordon recognizes, they fell into three main categories: personal accessories or embellishments (items for women or children comprising bags, purses, and handkerchiefs, men’s accessories such as embroidered smoking caps and slippers, and trimmings for garments or small clothing items); household accessories or embellishments (flat textiles ranging from table covers to doilies, receptacles to hold items including brushes and watches, three-dimensional free-standing objects such as fire screens, and ornaments that were framed or mounted under glass domes); and sewing or writing accessories (sewing and writing cases, workbags, pincushions, and letter racks).12 A black velvet smoking cap, an example of one of the most popular personal accessories made for a woman’s husband, reminds us that fancywork was as widespread in the colony as it was in Britain (Figure 3.1). This cap, with handstitched blue braid and a blue tassel, is just one example of the embroidered objects that form part of the Springfield Collection, made up of about 1,550 artefacts from Springfield Station, a New South Wales merino stud owned by the Faithfull family from 1838.13 Not superfluous to life on Australia’s early pastoral properties, handmade smoking caps demonstrated leisure: both of the wife who worked the surface with oriental patterns or floral motifs, and her husband’s time to relax in the home while wearing it. This kind of decorative needlework could be distinguished not simply as female work—part of the understanding that sewing was regarded as a fundamental, exclusive skill for women—but as feminine work. Considered another way: not all sewing performances were equal. Plain sewing was practiced by most women, and dressmaking and tailoring were often skilled, moneyearning work. Fancywork, however, was a means through which women sought to communicate the highest degree of feminine performance. It expressed a set of values and qualities such as gentleness, modesty, purity, and grace,14 that

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Figure 3.1 Unknown maker, Gentleman’s Black Smoking Cap, with Blue Trim and Blue Tassel, nineteenth century, 12 × 20 cm. Collection: National Museum of Australia MA74487450, 2005.0005.0397. Photographer: Amanda Crnkovic.

linked with nineteenth-century British and American formulations of femininity. English poet Coventry Patmore, for example, articulated the feminine ideal in his poem The Angel in the House. Feminine women, he described, possessed the qualities of a devoted and submissive wife, and displayed the attributes of passivity, meekness, charm, gentleness, sympathy, self-sacrifice, and purity.15 Another mid-nineteenth-century ideal, the American concept of True Womanhood, has been described using four essential traits: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness.16 Barbara Easton finds that the acceptance of female submission to the husband, common to both these feminine ideals, relied on the changing nature of the home and domesticity, and a loss in women’s economic function due to industrialization. For the new conception of femininity to be successful, particular elements were emphasized especially those that related to motherhood, the creation of the home, and the protection that this offered from the corrupting forces of the outside world.17 Feminine women were further separated from

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those above, and particularly those below, by creating difference. Carol Srole argues that this was constructed through gender balance or gender extremes, and as she explains: “upper-class women looked too dependent and frivolous— that is unduly feminine—while working-class women seemed overly forward, sexual, and independent, sometimes too masculine and other times too feminine. The middle-class ideal sought to balance gender and class together, finding the perfect middle ground.”18 Likewise, Ariel Beaujot suggests that the styling of middle-class feminine bodies, especially the hands, was used to set them apart through defining seemingly undesirable qualities of aristocratic and laboring women—in this case fingers too thin, or hands too worn.19 It was a manifestation of femininity determined by class, and Beverly Skeggs argues by the end of the nineteenth century “Femininity was seen to be the property of middle-class women.”20 The feminine ideal relied on specific conditions in which to thrive: a stable home environment, reliable income from work that was not women’s own, and at least one domestic servant (but preferably more) to undertake the timeconsuming and physically challenging tasks of keeping a house in the nineteenth century. In short, genteel femininity relied on access to a particular, privileged, way of living.

Leisure and the Genteel Woman Fancywork was a ubiquitous feature of nineteenth-century life, integral to middling women’s experiences and culture. It was so commonplace that most genteel women practiced it in some form and most parlors incorporated the display of fancy-worked objects.21 As men pursued professional interests in the public sphere, fancywork became a signifier of the leisure of genteel women, setting them apart from their working counterparts.22 It thus represented the separation of genteel women from the outside world of productive work, undertaken by men, servants, and female workers of lower social orders.23 This was an important distinction: industry and the marketplace were masculine, and women who operated in the public sphere transgressed one of the fundamental components of femininity—domesticity. However, an uneasy link between leisure and genteel women formed. The very notion of “leisure” was troubling, and despite being a clear indicator of middle-classness, it could also be framed as idleness, a behavior that was condemned. Fancywork negotiated some of these tensions. It allowed women to remain in the home with all the appearance of leisure while providing a genteel occupation to deflect criticisms of

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unproductive time. Too much time held the potential to disturb order, so it was linked with suggestions of upper-class ease and wastefulness.24 A sense of genteel framing, of leisure but not idleness, is evident in Eliza à Beckett’s comment which opened this chapter: “I was not an idler.”25 Yet following her marriage in 1863, Eliza linked her fancywork to leisure acknowledging that in her new home in the goldfields town of Creswick she had a good servant and no housework of her own to do. Eliza’s husband, Henry Chomley, made £400 per year as an agent for the Bank of Australasia and on this comfortable income she later remembered her “passion for wool work of the early Victorian style, patterns either stiff or floral, working in cross-stitch on canvas grounded in some other color. I would sit happily for hours over this work.”26 Eliza called it “work,” though not by the same definition that we now understand it. As Thorstein Veblen outlined, the leisure of the middle-class wife was not simply an expression of idleness. Rather, her leisure was practiced in the name of work, household duty, or social function regardless of the essential fact that this “work” was often not of a truly practical nature.27 Work and leisure are fundamental components to the analysis of class, a concept that has been richly explored by scholars over several decades. Influential work by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall sought to reposition women in eighteenth and nineteenth-century English middle-class families. Defining the ideal of the middle-class household, they drew on the ideology of separate spheres: the divide between public and private made visible by a husband who entered the workforce and a leisured wife who remained at home.28 This and other scholarship outlined how the nineteenth-century middle class was defined by a need to work for an income—and it was to men that this obligation fell. Work was invested with a noble morality whereby not working was condemned as decadent behavior, a criticism that could be applied to the idle rich. To set their work apart from those of the working classes, middle-class men worked in white collar roles with their minds, not their hands. Mental labor was contrasted with manual labor as a powerful source of class division from those below.29 The public work of men was balanced by women remaining in the home so that, unlike the leisured class where both men and women were free from employment, it was middle-class women for whom notions of conspicuous leisure were transferred.30 While the separate spheres ideology has been vigorously challenged with assertions that women did more public work than it recognizes and conversely that men had more to do within the home than has been assumed,31 it remains a useful framework for exploring women’s experiences. The concept is a valuable tool for interpreting class and gender cultures as it relates to the

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division of labor, and the shifting of male and female roles within the domestic economy.32 A woman’s need, or lack thereof, to enter the paid workforce demonstrated the realities of class. This is unmistakably established in Henry Mundy’s reminiscences. Henry migrated to Australia in 1844. His father “had been put to work almost in his babyhood,” and as with many migrants, their move from England was motivated by the search for a better life.33 As a young man, Henry tried his luck on the diggings and in carting goods between Geelong and the Ballarat goldfields, while his sweetheart Ann earned what he referred to as “pocket money” making flannel shirts.34 We see Henry’s aspiration in his use of this term. The couple married in 1854, and in 1856 on Chinaman’s Flat where Mundy’s work on the same claim for five months saw little reward, Ann proposed that she return to needlework in order to contribute to the family’s income explaining: “If we are hard pushed, why should not mother, and I get work off the draper’s shops. There is plenty of that work to be got I know, as a woman told me the other day who was doing that kind of work, that she could get twice as much as she could do.”35 Despite their precarious financial situation, Henry’s response to Ann’s offer to work indicates a desire for an improved standard of living for his family: his aspiration for a middling lifestyle with a leisured wife. His response was definitive: “Ann my dear . . . when I married you, I knew it was my duty to keep you what nonsense are you talking of taking in sewing to keep the house. By God I’ll get a living for us.”36 The labor of leisure, or appearance of leisure, was contingent on the employment of servants, themselves a middle-class marker.37 Women’s leisure was challenged in Australia where it was notoriously difficult to find or keep a well-trained servant. Social commentators deplored the colonial attitudes of servants who showed a distinct lack of respect for their mistresses and made unacceptable demands.38 Ellen Clacy advised that her contemporaries considering emigration to Australia be prepared to do some of their own housework in lieu of a bad servant: Those who can afford to give £40 a-year to a female servant will scarcely know whether to be pleased or not at the acquisition, so idle and impertinent are they; scold them, and they will tell you that “next week Tom, or Bill, or Harry will be back from the diggings, and then they’ll be married, and wear silk dresses, and be as fine a lady as yourself.”39

Revealing the complexities of servant-keeping, this comment highlights how servants were not always biddable, nor did they show deference or respect to the

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family they were serving. Many were aware only of primitive standards of housekeeping and lacked training in the maintenance of a genteel household— and even this standard of servant was difficult to find.40 The situation was further complicated by establishing homes and setting out new markers for a woman and her peers. Jane Hamilton noted from the seaside village of Brighton, “when one has only one servant in a house like this, many a little thing turns out for me to ‘do myself ’—especially when we have visitors.”41 Jane Cannan, who travelled to gold-rush Victoria with her husband, the Melbourne agent for a London firm selling galvanized iron houses, was one of many women who acknowledged forming a new relationship with household labor. Writing in 1853, Jane emphatically described how “all ladies here must put their hand to, to ‘grease’ the domestic wheel if not absolutely to turn it!”42 From the Victorian town of Inglewood, Henrietta Hearn likewise referred to “learning the art of ‘doing without’ a good many things that I used to consider necessities” while her husband built up his medical practice. Henrietta explained: “The housekeeping puzzled me a good deal at first, and I still feel sadly ignorant in the kitchen; but fortunately the servant we have is a good deal more skillful than most country girls, and I find I can learn myself of what I want to know, quietly, from her.”43 These women, it seems, willingly took up work to keep up appearances and this understanding provides an important frame for the following chapters. For many genteel women then, even those with access to servants, true leisure was a front. What instead emerges is a fracture between the ideal and actual leisure of genteel women. Erving Goffman suggests that in the attempt to express ideal standards, people may conceal actions that are considered inconsistent with those standards.44 This has implications for how we understand the deployment of fancywork in the genteel home, whereby it can perhaps best be seen not as concrete or actual proof of genteel leisure, but as a signifier of it (that is, fancywork transmitted the appearance of leisure).45 It was this appearance that was a measurable index of gentility, where public displays of genteel behavior acted as a counterbalance to a discordant reality. Offsetting increased domestic labor, fancywork could be an effective show of leisure that may or may not have been real.

Performance in the Parlor Fancywork had a close relationship with the parlor or drawing room in the genteel home. This was the space in which families could present a public face as

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the setting for social visits, events, ceremonies, and entertainments.46 The parlor played a key role in articulating social status, and the presentation of this room was critical. It was where the family’s best things were on show, with items demonstrating women’s taste, design sensibilities, creativity, and skill. These were embodied in objects carefully selected from the growing array of consumer goods, or in objects that were the products of women’s own work, or that of family and friends.47 Therefore while some post-Victorian characterizations of the nineteenth-century parlor see only the clutter of this room, contemporaries understood it as a wealth of tasteful objects that formed part of the trappings of gentility. This emphasizes one of the fundamental principles of material culture studies: how objects can be deliberately employed to project public identities, communicating as much about an individual as verbal communication.48 As historian Deborah Cohen puts it: “Things proceeded identity; what you owned told others (and yourself) who you were.”49 Aspirational families embraced the parlor as a space of show. In 1860, Joseph Elliott described in detail his family’s rented Adelaide home in a letter to his mother. Joseph had served an apprenticeship in the press in England, and by the time of his letter he was in charge of the general printing department of the Adelaide Register newspaper. Hints from his letter indicate only moderate resources: the family did not keep a servant, they dressed plainly and were “often ‘hardup’ for a new pair of boots, or a coat, or dress & more particularly children’s shoes.”50 Although he had “saved money” he noted he had “also spent it & the last 2 or 3 years expenses have been so much for living, & we have no luxuries— nothing.”51 Nevertheless, the family home included a parlor, revealing what Katherine Grier defines as “parlor consciousness” in new members of the middle class or in those aspiring to respectable living.52 As their best room, the Elliotts negotiated the use of space with the rest of the home; other rooms served dual functions in order that it might be kept representative of the ideals they attempted to live up to. Joseph noted several examples of decorative needlework in their parlor: including an antimacassar on each of the four chairs, and one with a Berlin wool-worked seat; a knitted or crochet table cover; and two antimacassars and cushions on the sofa.53 Their efforts to attain genteel standards in their home hides the Elliott’s actual situation: that the family shared one bedroom, while their eldest daughter slept in the back sitting room. The parlor was, at the same time as a space of show, a stage for performing identity. Maria Brownrigg’s painting An Evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens of 1857 makes visible the cultural signs of gentility (Figure 3.2). Genteel activity is at the heart of Maria’s watercolor portrait of her six children: one son plays the

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Figure 3.2 Maria Brownrigg (1812–1880), An Evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens, 1857, (watercolor and collage on paper). Collection: National Portrait Gallery, Canberra. Purchased 2017.

piano, two daughters are occupied in letter-writing, while their sisters are busy at needlework. One young woman, her head gently bowed, works on a square of frothy white fabric; the second looks directly at the viewer as she pauses in her work, her scissors prominent on the table before her. Maria’s work reveals genteel performance at its best, and considering Butler’s proposition that gender identity is expressed through an ongoing series of culturally constructed and understood acts is useful here. Butler asserts that “gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender creates the idea of gender,” and I use this concept to suggest that needlework could be understood as part of the daily performance of femininity.54 Fancywork, in particular, was crucial to the performance of genteel femininity. Through engaging with gestures construed as feminine, gender identity was produced, styling women’s bodies according to socially recognized ideals. It created women as feminine objects to be looked at by men, as much as by other women, via their interaction with work that was considered pretty and delicate. Thus, nineteenth-century manuals governed needlework as a performance for the parlor, concentrating on the gendered stylization of the body: sitting still, with busy hands, and downcast eyes. An engagement with light needlework

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during a visit suggested good breeding, particularly as Mrs Beeton advised “if the visit be protracted, or the visitors be gentlemen.”55 Conversation was thought to come more easily with a decorative needlework project in hand, and these projects could be turned to when there were pauses, or awkwardness, in polite conversation.56 And as surely as needlework was critical to constructions of gender, its absence had repercussions. For Ann S. Stephens, whose manual The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework was published in 1854, independence was a growing threat in the rapidly changing social and cultural environment. Stephens therefore proposed that the act of crochet be employed “not merely as an elegant way of wileing [sic] away time, but as one of those gentle means by which women are kept feminine and lady-like in this fast age.” “Masculine women,” she implied, avoided such employments.57 Indeed, those seeking to distinguish themselves or to garner respect in male-dominated fields often deliberately rejected embroidery to position themselves apart from the feminine ideal.58 For women who simply did not enjoy decorative needlework, there were additional complications. The suggestion that they were hardly women at all implies the punishment that came from challenging or subverting accepted gender behaviors, from performing out of turn. In violating gender expectations, they were seen to be revolting against womanhood.

The Contradictions of Fancywork Fancywork could be strategically employed to assert facts about identity, however, ever present and simmering beneath the surface were a range of contradictions. Fancywork was characterized as useful and useless, valuable and worthless, moral and frivolous. It was celebrated, loathed, and derided. It was said to both resist and support women’s roles in childcare, charity, and commerce. It could be a source of pleasure and solace, praise-worthy for the patience it required; yet critics then and later claimed it inculcated subservience, created intellectual starvation, controlled or distracted women from larger concerns, and suggested indulgence, laziness, and apathy.59 Berlin woolwork, named after its German origins, was especially devalued. The satirical poem The Husband’s Complaint published in the London Saturday Journal lamented: I hate the name of Berlin work, in all its colours bright, Of chairs and stools of fancy work I hate the very sight; The shawls and slippers that I’ve seen, the ottomans and bags, Sooner than wear a stitch on me I’d walk the street in rags.60

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Fancywork rose above such criticism when mobilized for the charity bazaar, one of the most successful fundraising activities developed by women for church, public, or charity institutions.61 When created for the bazaar, fancywork became noble, selfless, and pious work. Deflecting notions of idleness, fancywork in this context was demonstrable proof of a woman’s morality and benevolence.62 Thus, Annette Shiell’s work on charity bazaars in nineteenth-century Australia argues for their co-dependence.63 Producing fancywork for charity bazaars was the work of genteel women who could meet the economic pressures to purchase materials and the time pressures for creation. Endless ideas could be found in needlework manuals, such as Mrs Warren and Mrs Pullan’s Treasures in Needlework, intended to “aid in the production of ornamental and useful articles that add elegance to the boudoir, and yield a profit to the fancy fair.”64 For a month in 1855, Emily Childers devoted her time to “begging contributions” from genteel friends and acquaintances for a bazaar in aid of the Melbourne Hospital and making her own contribution: a Berlin woolwork cushion.65 Opened by Lady Hotham, the Governor’s wife, to “great crowds of people” Emily estimated that £60 was made in the first day alone.66 And while these crowds understood that pin cushions sold for an inflated price, as the Argus expressed, “every shilling . . . goes to the relief of the lame . . . [and] to the lessening of human suffering.”67 In this context, fancywork transcended its parallel status as worthless. Even its most vehement critics conceded that fancywork shifted into a new frame when motivated by charitable impulses. Writing to his cousin in 1859, Richard Skilbeck explained that the health of women in Australia was better than that of English women due to the climate, the “exhilarating exercise” they participated in on a farm, and the limited time they devoted to fancywork. As he saw it, “Young Ladies at home carry this supposed specie of refinement to a fanatical excess by sitting and mooping over it for hours to the greatly impairing if not destruction of that invaluable boon, health,” while young ladies in Australia gave it only limited attention.68 Yet, Richard did not completely dismiss fancywork. In 1861 he attended a bazaar in Belfast (now Port Fairy) held to raise funds for the local chapel, complimenting the standard: “it was well got up and tastefully arranged, the goodly array of fancy and useful articles did the ladies great credit and manifested a degree of assiduity, benevolence and self-denying effort highly praiseworthy.” Richard’s polite (or strategic) admiration of the work done by women for the bazaar included their prolific output and he added, “I spent about £4 to relieve them of some of their super-abundant stock.”69 For men, purchases at charity bazaars amounted to donations to a worthy cause.

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But this could be an obvious show, when the high price placed on goods allowed for conspicuous displays of wealth. Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye noted at a charity bazaar held at Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens that “Diggers, in the pride of new-found treasure, seemed bent on astonishing the fair ladies who presided at the stalls with the recklessness of their purchases, always choosing the most expensive and useless articles they could see.”70 For these diggers and their evident lack of subtlety, theirs was perhaps more a simple show of wealth rather than fulfilling any charitable responsibilities—and yet buying did them undeniable honor.

Creating a Comfortable Home Women also devoted long hours to their fancywork with the aim of improving comfort in their home. The genteel understanding of comfort heightened when homes were remade in the colony. Their structures could be smaller and more transient, while inside they might contain few familiar objects. This was a fact frequently commented on in the early years of the rush, but while it was difficult to have a genteel tent or hut it was not impossible. Objects could help mediate the shock felt in transitioning from a stable home to a temporary one, much as they could assert standing to those invited to look within. Elizabeth RamsayLaye’s description of one tent in which she was a guest listed a surprising range of furnishings for its Castlemaine location: not only sofas, armchairs, and small tables on which ornaments, books, and drawings were displayed, but even a grand piano.71 Here material goods could be as powerful expressions of social distinction as they were in established homes far away. Adding familiar touches like these, Emma Floyd understands, was the strategy of “Gentlewomen [who] attempted to ease their sense of social upheaval by creating a familiar and ornamental world to counter the physical hardships and practical nature of colonial life.” It was, as she expresses “a key strategy for maintaining some level of gentility against the odds.”72 Revised notions of respectable homes developed and as archaeologist Susan Lawrence illustrates, on the goldfields barer homes were commonplace.73 Yet the presence of certain items including fancy tableware, pictures on the wall, and small decorative touches such as needlework, enabled a degree of domestic improvement. Here we see how material culture was mobilized to make distinctions even in unpromising circumstances, and in this environment Lawrence observes “the discreet addition of a few carefully selected goods

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enabled the bare minimum to be subtly reworked into something more respectable.”74 Reworking this bare minimum had been the aim of earlier migrants to the colony as Charles Norton’s sketch of his room at Tooralle, near Clunes, in 1846 suggests (Figure  3.3). Norton arrived in Australia as a young man in 1842 and was around 20 years old when he painted this watercolor of his simple room: saddlery and guns hang from the otherwise bare timber walls, while his spurs, stockman’s whip, and boots lie discarded on the floor. Yet several attempts have been made to improve the room. Four framed works hang on the wall and a patterned blue coverlet gives the interior color while keeping him warm at night. Women might articulate their work as being produced for the comfort of others, though the idea of “comfort” in itself was, as Grier outlines, “a distinctively middle-class state of mind.”75 A range of values including, but also extending beyond, the physical state of comfort might drive the placement of women’s fancywork in their new homes. Creating comfort suggested a home’s inhabitants could be at ease in their surroundings: that it was familiar and stable even if what was beyond its walls was something unfamiliar. The addition of objects that signaled comfort heightened the sense of the home as a haven, an escape, a place

Figure 3.3 Charles Norton, Interior of CN’s [Charles Norton’s] Room at Tooralle in 1846, 1846, painting (watercolor), 7.7 × 11.2 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H88.21/121.

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of calm, so that when produced in the new home, or created years ago and packed into a migrant’s luggage to be carried across the sea, these objects were strategic expressions of comfortable domesticity. Irish woman Martha Bergin made a quilt in Athlone in 1843 when she was around 21 (Figure  3.4). She appliqued a floral and bird pattern incorporating a range of print fabrics, likely to be from her father’s drapery business, on an off-white ground.76 She also embroidered her name, date, and home town onto the quilt. In 1846, Martha married Andrew Tipping and the couple migrated to Australia five years later, travelling as one of twelve married couples with more than 150 single young women to Tasmania as part of the Tasmanian Female Emigration Scheme.77 Martha and other immigrants risked much in relocating to an uncertain home in a strange land. Given the quilt’s size, the decision firstly to bring it to Australia and then to move it from one place to the next was not lightly made. Yet such

Figure 3.4 Martha Bergin, Applique Quilt, 1843, (cotton), 264 × 243 cm. Collection: Museums Victoria, HT 12340. Photographer: Jennifer McNair. Copyright Museums Victoria / CC BY, https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/items/1216698.

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objects could signal a degree of comfort, all the while mediating between the loss of a migrant’s former home and their new location. They expressed a continuing attachment to the past as migrants negotiated their present.78 Households were reduced to the bare essentials for use during the voyage and on arrival in a new country. Practical items like clothes, linen, utensils, and portable furniture featured prominently. But items of sentimental value too were packed: family bibles or letters, for example, which became meaningful vehicles for maintaining identity and facilitating memories of home. For Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear, the objects migrants carried with them helped negotiate transnational experiences. That is, these objects: exerted agency in diverse ways: as repositories of memories, mechanisms for the transfer of skills and sites for negotiating cultural frameworks, as areas of imaginative escape, modes for connecting with lost family, as metonyms for other places, and so on . . . Objects collapsed geographical, temporal and perceptual distances. As people engaged with them, they enabled people to simultaneously experience and mediate multiple times, places and modes of being.79

With this in mind, we can begin to understand why Martha Tipping packed her quilt, a deliberate decision when luggage allowances were limited. It carried ties to her home that persisted even though fractured by migration. Naming Martha’s home town was a reminder of where she had come from, and a temporal point from which to understand where she might go. It had the potential to reflect a sense of self while keeping up a certain standard of living, reflecting how the objects migrants carried with them to form part of their new homes held old values. After landing in Hobart, the Tippings moved to Melbourne, then the Victorian goldfields in 1856. There they achieved some success and purchased land in central Victoria. Prudent diggers were encouraged to funnel their earnings from gold into property, illustrated in S.T. Gill’s Provident Diggers in Melbourne, where three men carefully consider the plans of land for sale (Figure 3.5). Theirs was not the rash, ill-conceived purchase decried by genteel commentators, but a thoughtful decision made with long-term growth in mind. Land was the most desirable means of independence for those with some capital and as one nineteenth-century manual recommended, next to seeking gold, agricultural pursuits such as farm ownership should be the aim of “small capitalists,” advising it “may not, at first sight, appear to promise a fortune, but it will, in reality, lay the foundation of one.”80 Owning property and a home that contained objects of

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Figure 3.5 S.T. Gill, Provident Diggers in Melbourne, 1869, painting (watercolor), 26.8 × 19.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H86.7/35.

comfortable domesticity was a tangible marker of prosperity and evidence of respectable living, hinting at the Tippings’ aspirations. An improvement in circumstance was the motivation behind many migrants’ eager arrival in the colony. Some were able to negotiate and redefine their social standing and as goldfield towns developed rapidly during the 1850s and 1860s, settlers established their place within them. Within a month of the discovery of rich deposits of alluvial gold in Castlemaine in 1851, 8,000 diggers had flocked to the site. By the end of that year, close to 25,000 were working the diggings. Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye described the all-consuming attitude during her residence there in 1852 and 1853 writing “Money absorbs every thought, every heart, in this strange camp.”81 Hungarian-born Ernest Leviny, a silversmith and jeweler, was one of the tens of thousands who travelled to the area in the years following the discovery. He quickly realized that reliable money was not to be made in the uncertain business of digging for gold: instead he opened a jewelry

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and watch-making business, purchased gold and property, and acquired interests in local mines.82 By 1863, Ernest was unarguably a gentleman, having sold his business to live off the income generated by his investments. He lived in a settlement that had transformed from “a few small wooden houses,” as James Muir described it, having “swollen into a town that would pass as second rate in England—containing some 4 churches, 22 hotels, and all other things needful in a place which, at some future time, will be a great depot for merchandise—the store house for the interior.”83 In 1864, Ernest Leviny married Bertha Hudson. Bertha had arrived in Australia in 1850 aged six. Her family spent two years in Melbourne before moving to Tasmania where they had relatives, and it was there that Bertha was educated in French, drawing, and the piano—key genteel accomplishments (Figure 3.6).84 It is likely that an embroidered fire screen displayed in the drawing room of the Leviny family home, Buda, was made by her (Figure 3.7). Using the

Figure 3.6 Unknown photographer, Bertha Hudson, 1860, photograph (carte-de-visite), 10.7 × 6.3 cm. Collection: Buda Historic Home and Garden, Castlemaine, RN 2.1.

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Figure 3.7 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Berlin Woolwork Firescreen, c. 1860s, (canvas, wool, glass), 45 × 44 cm. Collection: Buda Historic Home and Garden, Castlemaine, 2109. Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

popular technique of Berlin woolwork, the fire screen is stitched with colored wools in a floral arrangement, incorporating glass bead highlights. Bertha’s fancywork signaled the family’s financial position where, removed from the paid workforce, she engaged with prevailing notions of femininity and domesticity. From their comfortable home, Bertha’s management of the household and servants and the care of her ten children established her as capable domestic manager; her symbolic work reinforced their genteel status. Bertha’s actions as wife, mother, domestic manager, and needle worker helped deliver Ernest’s claim to gentility. It was through her contribution that Ernest established himself socially—while he was already acceptably wealthy, Bertha assured his status as a gentleman integrating the family into what Marjorie Theobald defines as Castlemaine’s “home grown elite.”85 Buda thus expressed many of the expectations of the home as the center of genteel living, and of separate spheres. In this, the Levinys were among a minority of families for whom maintaining the genteel

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Figure 3.8 Dublin & Melbourne Portrait Rooms, Ernest Leviny and his wife Bertha (nee Hudson), 1870, photograph (carte-de-visite), 11 × 7 cm. Collection: Buda Historic House and Garden, Castlemaine, RNP 55.

ideal of the public and private divide was possible in Castlemaine,86 and as such they today provide a substantial case study in genteel living during the gold rush thanks to the fact that their home and its contents remain intact (Figure 3.8).

Maintaining Gentility on the Edges The performance of genteel femininity was especially important for those women who negotiated the privations of colonial living, the uncertainty of life in a new homeland, or dramatic shifts in income. In those circumstances, expressing their class and gender identity through needlework was a strategy intended to maintain standards and standing. This is what Scottish-born Jane Hamilton perhaps hoped to achieve after her move from Melbourne to the goldfields

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where her husband struggled to keep his mining venture afloat. Jane spent ten years in Bendigo and the neighboring towns of Eaglehawk and California Gulley as Andrew tried his luck in the search for gold. It would appear, though, that his luck had run out. He was plagued by ill health and his unsuccessful mining operation led to the sale of their home and the move to a smaller cottage where Jane made do without a servant. Jane acknowledged the precarious state of their finances in a letter to her family in Scotland, writing that Andrew and his brother-in-law James Hoey “have got nothing, not a sight of the precious metal.” But even in these circumstances Jane found time to, as she phrased it, “indulg[e] in a little fancy-work.” Her work on a pair of slippers for her husband came at the expense of “always plenty [of] stitching to do.”87 Jane contrasted the usuallyunspoken plain sewing for a family, caring for her niece and nephew together with her own children, with the prettier colored wools in the production of a small luxury. Jane called it indulgence, and it may be understood as beneficial to her own self as well as to her peers: despite a reduction in her circumstances and her husband’s continued struggle on the goldfields, she retained the culture necessary to identify with gentility. It was an idealized performance of self through which Jane produced an attractive non-essential item while concealing the long hours she spent laboring over more necessary sewing. Jane was not creating a genteel identity but attempting to maintain one. Her strategic management of identity through her fancywork throws into relief the challenges she faced on the diggings. Two years later, the Hamilton’s financial situation forced Jane to defy the genteel ideal of remaining out of the workforce, and she restarted her teaching career. Her sister-in-law, Kate Brown, wrote from Scotland of her “sorrow, that you and your husband should experience hard times, & necessitate exertion beyond your household duties.” Kate reflected though that “on consideration both James & I thought such occupation was far more congenial to you & even less toilsome than those said household duties as you described them a while ago.”88 Indulging in fancywork, then, can be seen as a means of disrupting the possibility of a shifting identity, of one moving down. Struggles for identity were not confined to the unpredictable life on the goldfields but were experienced by women around the colony. Annie Baxter arrived in Australia in 1834 with her husband, Lieutenant Andrew Baxter. She returned to England in 1851 after the breakdown of the marriage, but six years later sailed back to Melbourne to wind up his affairs after he committed suicide. On the voyage she met Robert Dawbin and they married shortly after their arrival in Melbourne, with Annie contributing a considerable sum to Robert’s

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choice of property in Victoria’s rich grazing district in the west of the colony.89 From her stone cottage in 1858, Annie wrote in her diary of the range of essential everyday sewing and the difficulty of obtaining a servant. She worked on heavy needlework for household linen, and on underclothes for herself and her husband. She was also busy with an embroidered sofa cushion.90 Annie continued to work on decorative projects even after her husband was declared insolvent in 1861, forcing them off their property.91 After moving to Melbourne, Annie spent time embroidering at her frame and it was in this genteel pose that she sometimes met her visitors.92 It was perhaps deliberate: she understood that, even in reduced circumstances, the performance of middle-class femininity was necessary. It was an assertion in defiance of the fortune she had lost, bolstered by the genteel behavior that she retained. The home was, as Deborah Cohen has defined, a “sensitive barometer of status.” Middle-class British women drew on their domestic frames to reinforce public and self-perception of their social position even, or especially, for those in reduced circumstances where they were acutely aware of providing evidence of gentility, even if only a glimpse.93 This understanding resonates with Annie’s situation. The practice and products of her fancywork reflect her performances of, and identification with, the ideals of gentility. An audience was vital to Annie’s fancywork and her effective display of identity. Within the private sphere of her home (yet in its most public space) and the constraints of her gender, she employed the material strategies that expressed genteel femininity. This was further strengthened by the objects Annie Baxter Dawbin created to be given as gifts. Her needle-worked presents formed part of the web of reciprocal obligations and social attachments: as public tokens, they cemented connections, kinships, friendships, and social relations.94 When she presented a pair of slippers to her friend Mr Waldick, she reported that “he says he shall keep them for state functions only.”95 These were not the only pair that Annie worked, and her journal indicates that she produced at least another four pairs within a five-year period.96 As her income dipped, the slippers Annie worked as gifts can be considered strategic attempts to maintain, if not strengthen, relationships. Such gifts, representing a substantial amount of her time, were a commodity not exchanged for money but for something of far greater social value. Goffman asserts that the performance of self becomes idealized in contexts of stratified societies. Here, social mobility and the possibilities for upward movement “involves the presentation of proper performances and . . . efforts to move upward and efforts to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front.” He argues that once the correct

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performances are acquired and actors become fluent with them, they can be used to enhance daily performances with accepted and recognized social style.97 Annie Baxter Dawbin’s behavior does precisely this, while her situation brings into focus the shifting nature of gentility in colonial Australia. The fluctuations in Annie’s wealth did little to dampen her identification with a culture of gentility. Her influential friends in the colony remained supportive of her in reduced circumstances, while she resisted the challenges of upward mobility from those with new money. For her, fancywork was integral genteel behavior and a clear expression of status. This, in turn, meant that it was vital behavior for women on the edge: for those in liminal spaces negotiating the boundaries of genteel living.

Conclusion Women’s fancywork was deeply important to constructions of femininity and genteel culture and was an especially visible performance of identity in goldrush Victoria. Genteel femininity could be projected or articulated through decorative needlework: the corporeal poses and gestures of needlework, its geography of home which emphasized domesticity, and its performance of devotion to husband and family were imperative in justifying fancywork as valuable in the face of growing criticism. In Victoria, such performances of genteel femininity were often negotiated against colonial challenges, and the deliberate placement and display of fancy-worked objects in the public areas of the home, whether they be on a parlor mantelpiece or armchair, or worn by a woman’s husband, strengthened constructions of the genteel home and family. The knowledge and resources necessary to perform these acts implied a value beyond simple decoration. The transient nature of living on the diggings, requiring portable goods and fewer belongings, characterized much of the early days of the gold rush. In making a home in remote or challenging locations in Victoria, examples of fancywork could act as key indicators of genteel capacity or aspiration. At the same time, when uncertain incomes resulted in financial strain the practice of decorative needlework provided a visual strategy to assert status. Fancywork was therefore a material practice mobilized by women negotiating upwards social mobility or reduced circumstances as they tested the edges of the genteel experience. This chapter examined the impact of various shifts: location, access to income, and social fluidity. But it also acknowledges that despite severe dislocations, fancywork retained the essence of feminine ideals and values. Most

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of the women who practiced fancywork in their new homes did so alongside plain sewing, and I next examine this alongside a shift in women’s work. The challenges of life in the colony made many women rethink their domestic roles, taking on wider-ranging tasks as new homes demanded. The following chapter turns to the vast amount of practical sewing required to satisfactorily furnish the house and family, and the very different meaning for plain sewing on identity.

4

Industrious Women: Duty, Virtue, and Plain Sewing “[B]rought up in the lap of luxury and idleness”: this was an unflattering portrayal given idleness was widely condemned in the nineteenth century, yet it was the phrase that Jane Hamilton used to describe her “great friend,” Mrs Thomson, before her migration to Australia.1 Idleness and genteel leisure were concepts with vastly different inflections; the first found no place in Britain’s colonial societies, while the second was undergoing transformation—not only in Australia but elsewhere across the globe. While Jane’s words established a point of reference for Mrs Thomson’s past, Jane clearly admired how her neighbor had developed a capacity for domestic labor, observing: “She has only one servant and four children, one a baby—but she bakes, cooks, washes and irons and [is] always ready for her many visitors.” With apparent surprise Jane wrote: “Only think it was first in this land she learned to do anything useful at all—could not even do plain sewing when she came.”2 My focus in this chapter is the labor of plain sewing, where I question if Mrs Thomson and other genteel women really could be trained in simple everyday sewing for the home and family. I interrogate the genteel strategy of underplaying a knowledge of household labor, opening up for scrutiny two complex areas of negotiation: women’s actual work against attempts to minimize or silence their labor contributions—for many women, not only Mrs Thomson, were complicit in hiding plain sewing from their peers. Emigrants’ guides and contemporary observers warned that women who were too fine—that is, those incapable of undertaking some household labor— were not fit for life in the colony.3 They instead promoted a revised notion of what constituted genteel behavior: the industry, diligence, and duty accepted by Mrs Thomson and women like her as they attempted to remake their homes and lives in what could be vastly different circumstances: isolated from family and perhaps polite society, where finances were uncertain, and servants were scarce. Stressing the moral imperative of active labor to look after the family, a range of 95

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authors promoted genteel behavior in Australia as incorporating cooking, cleaning, and other work beyond what was conventionally accepted as genteel in situations where there were few other options. Australia, as other colonial societies, was therefore positioned at the frontline of the push to encourage active, useful, genteel lives. To explore this reworking of an active gentility, I address how women’s daily sewing enabled them to assert, stabilize, or reinvent identity. I examine the value judgements linking plain sewing and genteel women, and the moralizing frame whereby plain sewing was characterized as a virtuous activity, understood in terms of providing for the family and the poor—becoming in this sense an indicator of women’s industry and benevolence. Yet a distinct contradiction remained: through more conventional understandings of work as arduous, manual, and repetitive, plain sewing was morally sanctioned but concealed in practice. The previous chapter explored how the visibility of decorative sewing heightened constructions and expressions of genteel and feminine identities. This chapter reveals a paradox: that, despite its often-hidden practice and concealed products, plain sewing simultaneously possessed value in the colony. It, too, contributed to identity. In framing this chapter around Erving Goffman’s contention that idealized performances of self can conceal a reality inconsistent with the appearance generated, with certain behaviors underplayed and others emphasized,4 I examine how genteel plain sewing practices continued to be shielded from a woman’s peers despite their industry promoted as an important part of success in the migration project.5

Plain Sewing: Work for All Women Plain sewing spanned the making of simple clothing, nightwear, underwear, and various items of household linen and furnishings. It also comprised mending and darning, and the ever-present need to alter existing textiles.6 Simple stitches such as running and back stitch were used, in addition to various hemming stitches, and techniques ranging from gathering to buttonholes that were taught to girls through their plain sewing samplers. Stressing its critical place in all homes, the Method for Teaching Plain Needlework in Schools asserted: “It is impossible to do without it. It is essential, as well in the household of the great as in that of the lowly.”7 Yet plain sewing was onerous, and a manual labor suggesting nothing of the leisure (or the pleasure) of fancywork. Where domestic servants were available they helped ease the load, and additional assistance came from

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employing plain needlewomen in-house for short periods or giving them work to take into their own homes to complete.8 Longer-term employment was also an option: women might find their board subsidized in exchange for their contribution to a household’s plain sewing, while families with financial resources formalized this arrangement by employing a resident needlewoman who focused her time and energy on this labor alone.9 Plain sewing could, therefore, be a skill exploited for financial return when some households struggled to keep up with demand. Yet in the servant-scarce colony, where skill-shortages materialized, needlewomen were not always available to relieve their betters of plain sewing. Nor was this always preferable when plain sewing was linked to constructions of moral behavior: most pronounced when undertaken as an act of genteel benevolence, but also visible in women’s labor to make comfortable her home, and to provide her family with the textile goods that expressed standing. In examining the breadth and depth of genteel plain sewing in the colony it becomes apparent that most women, including genteel women, labored at this mundane task. Emily Childers arrived in the colony in 1850 and was soon associating with Melbourne’s finest society. In 1852 she made a brief notation in her diary that reads “after plain needlewoman”; perhaps to lessen the load, just a few days later she recorded that she had spent the entire day busy at needlework.10 Other genteel women such as Maggie Hoey, who lived on a more modest scale, outlined how the employment of a capable servant could be a god-send in reducing general household work. Ten weeks after employing “a very quiet sensible woman” Maggie recognized that “as all the work of our house is an easy job for her, I never need do anything.” She acknowledged a distinction between the work of her servant and what she felt compelled to do herself, explaining “I have, however, plenty of sewing just now to fill my hand.”11 These examples reveal how, for those fortunate enough to find reliable domestic help or to possess the means to employ needlewomen, plain sewing remained central to their role in the home. There were strong moral inferences that favored productive female work over idleness that Maggie Hoey, Emily Childers, and other genteel women understood. Across the British world prescriptive literature increasingly positioned middling women as useful, warning against ill-spent leisure by promoting industrious and busy lives. The American publication The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness instructed its readers that instead of suggesting a loss of social standing, undertaking some work actually reinforced it, emphasizing: “There cannot be any disgrace in learning how to make the

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bread we eat, to cook our dinners, to mend our clothes, or even to clean the house.”12 Other authors cautioned genteel women against avoiding responsibility for work in the home, encouraging the feminine humility to acknowledge that plain sewing was an essential domestic labor: “good” women accepted it, even if few liked it.13 Plain sewing was enjoined as suitable work for all, especially when it was positioned alongside the loaded term “useful” and its nineteenth-century opposite “idle.” An exception to this rule was in providing employment for struggling working women. Some conceded that it was better to send out plain sewing than work on it in the home as it gave poor women a means to create an income,14 or put another way, that it was “better to pay a half-starved needlewoman for work done, than to give her the money in the form of alms.”15 The migration experience gave further weight to an active gentility.

A New Colonial Femininity Women contemplating migration to Britain’s colonies including Australia in the mid-nineteenth century were urged to accept an increased need for their labor. William G. Kingston stressed in his guide How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for all Classes: “let them [young women] remember that a life of industry, and not of so-called amusement, is to be their lot.”16 The preference for capable women in Australia was explicit and “stout lasses able and desirous of scouring floors, and doing general work” were emphasized as ideal colonists.17 John Capper instructed women that a life of industry was an essential part of the act of migration, cautioning unmarried women that “the drawing-room accomplishments of singing, dancing, painting and crochet, would stand no shadow of a chance against the highly-prized virtues of churning, baking, preserving, cheese-making and similar matters.”18 It was advice that promoted the benefits of migration for “industrious, unpretending girls, whether as wives or servants” noting that for them “there is scarcely any limit,” while simultaneously warning “Useless fine ladies are completely out of place in Australia.”19 “Useless fine ladies” were counselled to forego thoughts of migration as the consequences could be tragic. John Sherer recorded this potential in the words of an Irish working woman, who explained to him: “this is the country for people to come to, that have got sinews in their badies [sic]! Your fine lady doesn’t do here. She’s of no use. The men won’t have her, nor the women either, and so she must work or starve, or do something worse.”20 Others described for their families back home the widespread preference for manual workers in the colony.

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John Green, the son of an English clergyman, explained in a letter to his sister from the Bendigo diggings: “Above all no young gentleman or young lady should come here.” To better make his point he emphasized that those unaccustomed to labor “had better drown themselves.”21 But where ladies could adapt, the rewards were enticing.22 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye’s description of the steps a friend “well born and accustomed to every luxury which a high position in an English county ever commands” embarked on to prepare herself for her new life in Victoria revealed how she “was not idle—the housekeeper’s room, the dairy, and the laundry were visited daily, and she soon made herself mistress of their mysteries; nor was dressmaking forgotten.” Elizabeth’s delight on encountering her friend again in country Victoria, where she had indeed proved herself to be the “mistress of their mysteries,” held her up as an example “of what can be done by young people of active energetic habits.”23 The acute shortage of servants lay at the heart of such observations, where finding a good servant was the first challenge and keeping her was another.24 Against this backdrop, A. James Hammerton explains that “Cultured idleness, it seemed, ceased to be a virtue when separated from the domestic assistance more readily available in Britain.” Adapting to the colonies demanded women rethink their participation in menial work, and while this might have impacted their status in Britain, a buffer formed for genteel women in emigrant communities.25 So critical was this shift that Robert Grant demonstrates how migrants were determined fit for life in the colonies through their readiness to accept manual labor. In adjusting to colonial circumstances, Grant reveals how the British construction of domestic femininity was “augmented by recognition of the particular demands of colonial life and women’s active adaption to them.”26 This seems crystalized in Maria Richmond’s writing. After arriving in New Zealand and taking on the role of housekeeper for her family, she wrote from New Plymouth in 1853 of a shift in her understanding of self: I consider myself a much more respectable character than I was when I was a fine lady, did nothing for anybody but made a great many people do things for me . . . But imagine a delicate woman coming, unable to get a servant to stay with her, half killed with work and unable to tear about through the bush as I do, what an utterly different feeling she would have.27

Maria Richmond was not alone to adopt a more flexible approach to household work in the settler society in which she found herself. Women travelling across the Great Plains to the western territories of North America quickly realized how demanding frontier housekeeping could be. As Lillian

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Schlissel explains, once settled, they “found themselves in conflict between their sense of women’s proper sphere and the demands of each new day . . . adaption was anxious and often uneasy.”28 Some women identified the limit to their domestic skills and longed for more. On the Californian diggings, Clementine Brainard explained that although she had made curtains and a carpet to improve her parlor “it would be very convenient now if I had a knowledge of cooking.”29 In fact, the admission of enlarged genteel activity in the colonies could be set alongside a revelation that some women labored in broader-ranging tasks than had previously been acknowledged even at home, providing space to articulate the full extent of their work in Britain. Though Mary Hobhouse, wife of the Bishop of Nelson in New Zealand, was herself unprepared to go without a servant, in 1861 she noted of her growing comprehension: I begin to suspect that a good deal that I supposed to be (and that people of one’s own class supposed to be), Colonial, is really just what goes on in the genteel middle classes in England. For instance when I asked Mrs Halcombe, a recently arrived clergyman’s wife, if she had at all realized what doing her own housework would be, she said, Oh yes, she had stayed some time with a friend who could get no servant and they did all the work between them and her mother had evidently had no more than one maid-of-all-work.30

The need for women’s labor in Australia was both invaluable and expected,31 and so pervasive that expanding notions of genteel work transformed ideals of femininity.32 In his second expanded edition of The Emigrant’s Guide, John Capper described the experiences of Harriet, a young woman brought up in prosperity but who, with her brother, was left but a few hundred pounds following their parents’ death. Having travelled to the goldfields together, Harriet willingly traded her domestic skills, remarking that she had “become a sort of ‘necessity,’ as I am always ready to do a good turn—the great secret, after all, of social success.” And as Harriet happily revealed of her reward: “The consequences are pleasant enough. Many a ‘nugget’ is thrust on me, whether I will or not, in return for cooking a pudding, or darning a shirt; and if all cooks and sempstresses in the world were as splendidly paid as I am, the ‘Song of the Shirt’ would never have been written.”33 While Harriet’s story is certainly part of an exaggerated goldfields narrative, this vignette relocates the advantages of work with the prospect of reward for women across the colony. Though perhaps not as dramatic in many other cases nor resulting in such a prize (for Harriet explained, “My own hoarding now amounts to about 10lb of gold and, if I go on accumulating, even the richest heiress in my family, in former days, will be left immeasurably

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behind”34), female industry became essential to maintain markers of class. When separated from established homes, supportive family, and a network of associations, and when their relocation to colonial spaces could be uncomfortable and transient, with great distance between settlements and few well-trained servants, women contributed more—some with alarm, some with resignation, and others with surprising deftness.

The Home as Haven: Comfort in the Home The act of migration invariably increased the need for plain sewing, particularly when access to familiar household linen and furnishings could ease a genteel woman’s transition to the colony. It helped create a sense of comfort in what might be an otherwise strange new world.35 In Australia’s north, shortly after her arrival in 1866, Katie Hume acknowledged in a letter to her sister: “I cannot describe the 1,000 things I find to do.” Her days followed a pattern and in the heat of the afternoon she sat “at the [sewing] machine, or mend[ed] Walter’s things, in the dressing room (the coolest room at that hour).”36 Katie’s access to a sewing machine must have been a blessing as she established her home. Arriving in Australia four years later, Ada Cambridge articulated her work for her new home in the Victorian town of Wangaratta. She sewed textile goods to cover the floor, curtains for the windows, and covers for the furniture, all without mention of a sewing machine. In explaining the extent of her work, she revealed she had “made everything, in fact, that was sewable, for, fortunately, I come of a long line of good needle-women.”37 Céleste de Chabrillan, wife of the French Consul, also had the necessary skills to enhance her new home in Melbourne. In 1854, with the arrival of her furniture delayed, Céleste’s response was pragmatic: “I did some upholstery myself with boards, hay and chintz.”38 Domestic needlework practices like these were strategic when a comfortable, tasteful interior signaled genteel status, as Blanche Mitchell no doubt realized as her family finances became strained. Understanding that her input was increasingly important in their Sydney home, especially when she could save the money that would otherwise go to a needlewoman, she proudly (if briefly) recorded of her sewing of a pair of curtains for the dining room window: “Greatly admired.”39 These sources suggest that genteel women were keenly aware that the home presented status to the outside world and to those invited to enter into it.40 They also indicate a widespread engagement with plain sewing to improve their home’s interior for its inhabitants. This was plain sewing, as Mrs Warren and Mrs

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Pullan explained, that was intended to bring “daily blessings to every home, unnoticed, perhaps, because of its hourly silent application; for in a household each stitch is one for comfort to some person or other; and without its everwatchful care home would be a scene of discomfort indeed.”41 This nineteenthcentury understanding of comfort or discomfort was distinctive. Though observable as a physical condition, a sense of comfort was also an internal, emotionally charged state that could be amplified in new homes, and in new contexts. Across the colony, then, women aimed to replicate what they had left behind. This may have been easier to achieve in more settled areas, though it was also the intention on the diggings, in developing goldfields towns, and in the bush. Yet creating comfort might be complicated when homes not only looked different but were also set in alien landscapes. When Richard Daintree photographed Castlemaine around 1858, he captured a range of homes in the increasingly prosperous town: canvas tents are visible in the foreground, but more numerous are the timber and stone cottages that line the streets (Figure 4.1). Accommodation in the first years of the rush, by contrast,

Figure 4.1 Richard Daintree, View of Castlemaine Town, c. 1858, photograph (albumen silver), 12.1 × 25.3 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H84.167/19.

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was especially primitive: tents were designed to be quickly pitched or collapsed again as the rush moved from one big find to the next. Tents were simple and bare, enhancing mobility, as illustrated in Charles Lyall’s pencil-and-ink sketch of a digger asleep (Figure 4.2). His tent is largely empty, and although covered by a blanket, this digger is essentially sleeping on the ground. It is a circumstance that an author named only as the Miner noted could be improvised into something better “unless, indeed, he be hardy enough to be content with laying his bare bones upon a sheet of bark, or on the naked bosom of mother-earth.”42 This digger’s simple interior reveals that he has in his possession far less than the quantities of basic household linen recommended by emigrants’ guides. In enumerating the most essential items for a new colonial home one guide advised migrants carry at a minimum eight towels and two pairs of sheets; another suggested sixteen towels, two sheets, a counterpane, and a blanket; a third recommended one pair of blankets, one coverlet, six pairs of cotton sheets, and two or three tablecloths.43 Many—this digger among them—clearly made do with much less when they had no place to store such items and no desire to carry them on their back as they moved from one rush to the next.

Figure 4.2 Charles Lyall, Digger Asleep, c. 1854, drawing (pencil, pen and ink), 19.5 × 23.3 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H87.63/1/32.

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Despite a willingness to temporarily live this way as they searched for the glitter of gold, diggers were well aware of more attractive alternatives. Bachelor James Petford wrote from Smythdale, near Ballarat, with some despair, that “i ham very tired of liveing a singele life i have no comfort what ever [sic].”44 James Armour longingly observed how one man’s tent maintained by his wife near the Avoca diggings “wore an air of comfort I had long been stranger to.”45 The largest barrier to their comfort, according to Victoria’s diggers, wasn’t the limit to textile goods themselves but rather the lack of a woman’s influence. Women, they emphasized, introduced comfort. The suggestion here, that feminine presence and practices could create a sense of comfort in even the most difficult of circumstances, was made visible by markers that Ellen Clacy recognized as including “sheets as well as blankets on the beds, and perhaps a clean counterpane, with the addition of a dry sack or piece of carpet on the ground.”46 By making these markers, a woman could seek to transition her accommodation from a tent to a home. Maggie Hoey worked hard to enhance her family’s tent on the Bendigo goldfields, and succeeding in doing so. Writing to her mother in 1857 of her family’s home she explained: “though only a large tent, it is by far the most convenient, comfortable house ever we had in the Colony.” Expanding on her description, Maggie described how the tent was two-roomed with a central lobby: one room with a shared purpose was used as “the parlour, sitting room or kitchen or whatever it may be called” while the other was their bedroom. It had a roof lined with green baize and canvas walls, which Maggie had improved by sewing curtains for the window and white covers for her furniture. Though Maggie understood that Bendigo standards were vastly different to those in Scotland, writing “I daresay all my little arrangements would seem rude enough to the Glasgow folks,” other goldfields residents greatly admired what she achieved. In sewing pretty, matching textile furnishings—or in making the effort to produce such furnishings as this was not always easy—Maggie was striving to achieve one of the genteel ideals of domesticity, of the home as haven. Her friend Catherine Buckie announced with appreciation, if not a little envy: “My word, Maggie this is comfort!” However it might have seemed at home, then, Maggie’s sewing made all the difference to her new surroundings, and as she recognized, while there may have been “hundreds of finely furnished Glasgow dwellings . . . the same amount of happiness does not exist as in this retired tent-cottage on the Australian Diggings.”47 The effects of Maggie’s sewing created an atmosphere of physical and emotional wellbeing in her family’s tent.

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Three years later, Maggie’s sister Jane Brown worked with James and Thomas Hoey to alter James’ home in Bendigo prior to her wedding. Knowing her mother in Scotland would be interested in the process, Jane wrote: “I daresay you would like to hear a little of what we did to accomplish this and get a peep into a digger’s house.” The men removed a partition between rooms and built a new room at one end of the “half tent, half house,” thus described as being made of wood with a calico roof. While they worked on the structure, Jane focused on the interior. She stitched together glazed chintz hangings resembling wallpaper for the walls and “a small spotted print for the ceiling which, strange as it may sound to Home ears, made the little room look nice.” She softened the floor with carpets, and made covers for the chairs, boxes, and tables. It was a challenging task when “All this sewing having to pass through my hands,” she acknowledged, “you can well guess that I had not much time previously for either play or thought.”48 Jane’s sewing, as Maggie’s before her, reveals how plain sewing could transform a tent, lifting it from a form of simple shelter to what could arguably be considered as comfortable domesticity for its residents.49 Established goldfields homes held the potential for more and the lithograph Christmas on the Diggings or the Unwelcome Visitor who Came Uninvited (c. 1860s) reveals a well-decorated interior with framed pictures hung on the walls and a table set for Christmas dinner (Figure 4.3). A home like this may have started to resemble in its holdings of linens and furnishings something approaching that of the established home in mid-nineteenth-century Britain that extended to use in the bedroom, the kitchen, and the pantry.50 With this family’s meal thrown into disarray at the intrusion of a snake, a pair of yellow curtains hanging prominently in the background are likely to be just the beginning of the textile goods found in this home. When this was beyond the scope for migrants in Australia, newspaper reports revealed how those with less might steal them: servants from their employers, residents from their lodgings, linen was taken from clothes lines, and lifted from outhouses where it was stored before laundering.51 And as it was scarce for some then, nineteenth-century household linen has now all but disappeared from the material record. Despite the quantities of household linen used in the colony throughout the nineteenth century, the search for material culture throws up few traces in museum collections. As with much everyday domestic material culture, survival is the exception and disappearance the norm. Two factors explain this absence: a reluctance to collect mundane objects, and rare survival due to heavy patterns of use. Sheets, towels, and other items of household linen were subject to daily use, then scrubbed and boiled as part of the laundering process. They remained in

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Figure 4.3 Paul Jerrard & Son, Newbold & Co, Christmas on the Diggings or the Unwelcome Visitor who Came Uninvited, c. 1860s, Sketches of Australian Life and Scenery Complete in 12 Plates, lithograph (hand colored), 27.9 × 38.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, NK753/8.

use until worn out, and even then were not disposed of but adapted, cut down, and recycled, transitions that reveal the shifting values of textiles from best, to daily, to servant use, to being cut up for other utilitarian purposes, and ending as rags. Buda, the home of the Leviny family in Castlemaine, is notable in preserving a small sheet sized for a cot or pram in its collection (Figure 4.4). The simple white cotton twill sheet with hand-stitched seams is the sole identifiable survivor of the large amount of linen that must have been used at Buda by Ernest and Bertha Leviny, their ten children, and their live-in maids. Its very survival suggests it was never or rarely used. Such limited museum specimens make the material record unreliable, yet it is undeniable that women with genteel consciousness recognized that the presence of household linen and furnishings improved standards of living. Given its value, it is also certain that mending—perhaps the most despised of plain sewing tasks and described with loathing by young Annabella Innes as “oh! hateful task”52—possessed clear worth. Needlework manuals acknowledged that mending was “an ungrateful task,” but stressed how it remained “a very necessary

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Figure 4.4 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Sheet for a Cot or Pram, 1875, (cotton), 65 × 66 cm. Collection: Buda Historic Home and Garden, 408. Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

one, to which every female hand ought to be carefully trained. How best to disguise and repair the wear and tear of use or accident is quite as valuable an art, as that of making new things.”53 In emphasizing the transformative effects, manuals connected women’s labor with making and maintaining a comfortable home.54 Annie Baxter Dawbin gives voice to days filled with mending, and writing in her journal in 1859 from western Victoria she noted with irony: I never go beyond the paddock fence so I have little to narrate in the way of incident: my life never was so monotonous, nor more dreary! I cannot amuse myself as I would wish, as I have to stay in doors to see to the wants of others! I patch and darn, and darn and patch, in delightful alternative!55

Annie had employed a servant, Mary Beeson, five months earlier yet chose to mend herself, attuned to a knowledge of genteel economy and the consequences for appearance—her concern both for personal presentation and a commitment to maintaining standards of neatness and comfort in the home. The drudgery of mending, though repetitive and dull, was underscored by the reality that few in the colony could afford not to do so when it greatly extended the life of all textiles.

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Hidden Practices, Hidden Products Though plain sewing was a critical part of preparing and maintaining the genteel home it was frequently concealed. The evidence of plain sewing thus emerges from a close reading of letters to family or through personal diaries: such detail is unlikely to have been revealed to a woman’s social peers. While the moral rewards for being a capable woman who took care of the home and family were clearly articulated in gold-rush Victoria, they were not enough to overwhelm the counter-need to be seen as leisured. Anne McClintock exposes this tension, describing how the lives of middling women “took shape around the contradictory imperative of laboring while rendering her labor invisible.”56 Plain sewing practices were not fit for public display: utilitarian sewing was worked in private (although domestic servants could witness the intimate work of their betters) or in the company of close female family members in the morning,57 in the afternoon with no callers,58 or during an evening at home.59 At Viewbank, the Melbourne home of the Martin family from 1843, archaeological evidence suggests that the bulk of sewing undertaken by Mrs Martin and her five daughters was worked in the sitting room—a smaller, more private area than the public space of show that was the Martin’s drawing room. A concentration of seventeen pins were recovered from in front of the sitting room’s fireplace locating their sewing “back stage.”60 Using Erving Goffman’s terminology, this is a space in which the performer was removed from the sight of her peers. Actions or behavior undertaken back stage, Goffman emphasizes, often contradicted the public performances of self.61 Goffman’s work on the discrepancy between appearance and reality offers a useful framework for exploring this further. He argues that “a performer tends to conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of himself and his products.”62 This can be achieved via a range of strategies. One approach is to show others only the end product, while concealing the long and mundane hours of necessary labor. Another is to conceal the evidence of “dirty work,” suppressing the fact of unclean toil from the audience. A third mechanism involves sustaining certain standards in public while privately sacrificing others.63 It is likely other women recognized a household’s lack of servants, isolation, or financial strain left little option but to undertake plain work. It would therefore seem there was female complicity in suppressing the reality of plain sewing to keep up appearances. Alongside Goffman’s contention that defensive techniques of impression management were employed, there was a “tactful tendency of the audience and outsiders to act in a protective way in order to help the performers save their own show.”64

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A sense of modesty further intensified this pattern of concealment. The increasing use of underclothes throughout the nineteenth century emerged from the mass production of cotton cloth and rising standards of personal cleanliness and modesty, especially for women. Worn closest to the skin, underclothing provided a barrier between outer clothing and bodily secretions, protecting more structured and expensive outer clothes. Once soiled, their cotton fabric was easier to wash than dresses that could be made from many yards of fabric. For this reason, most wardrobes commonly contained a far greater number of undergarments than outer clothing. Women’s multiple layers of underclothing included a chemise or shift worn closest to the body under a corset, and by mid-century, multiple stiffened petticoats replaced a few years later by a cage crinoline.65 Chemises and corsets had a long connection to the female wardrobe, but the introduction of drawers in the nineteenth century reflected shifts in concealment. Elite women took up wearing drawers early that century. They were adopted by most middling women by the 1840s, while poorer women may not have started wearing drawers until the last quarter of the century.66 Previously worn only by men, drawers were distinctly gendered as masculine through their bifurcation. Changes in fabric to lightweight muslins and lawns, construction of the open crotch, and ornamentation in the form of pin tucks, frills, or lace eased their adoption into women’s wardrobes.67 The assertion that adding another layer of clothing to women’s bodies improved modesty was increasingly accepted as drawers came to represent chasteness and sexual propriety. They also addressed the concern of exposure with the expansion in the size of the crinoline-cage in the mid-nineteenth century, which was liable to sway.68 Hinting at the growing concern with the sensuality of the female form, covering the legs indicated new standards of morality. The bodily and sexual implications of drawers was thus thought best managed privately, resulting in women sewing their own drawers but concealing this work from others. The collection of Buda and the Leviny family offers a rare, provenanced example worn on the Victorian goldfields: they belonged to Mary Isaacs, Ernest Leviny’s first wife (Figure 4.5). Likely to have formed part of Mary’s trousseau, her drawers are finely hand-stitched with two separate legs joined at the waistband, decorated with tucks and broderie anglaise at the leg hem, and baring the laundry mark “Mary / 11 57” in indelible ink on the waistband. Made the year before Mary’s migration from her father’s Kent household to Castlemaine, where her brothers were wine merchants and she would set up her own home, Mary’s drawers are evidence of her commitment to retaining genteel standards of cleanliness and

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Figure 4.5 Mary Isaacs, Drawers, 1857, (cotton), 85 × 83 cm. Collection: Buda Historic Home and Garden, 222. Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

modesty far away from England in her new life on the goldfields.69 As physical cleanliness became a symbol of class distinction, the ready availability of undergarments in a wardrobe could demonstrate status. Although invisible to the outside world, underclothes thus positioned a woman and her family ideologically with a private commitment to improved levels of personal hygiene and delicacy.70 Such factors resulted in a difficulty in giving public advice. Mid-century immigrants’ guides are silent on any requirement for drawers, although they acknowledged women with free passage to Australia required other undergarments such as shifts, chemises, and petticoats.71 Discretion may have rendered them unmentionable in print material; alternatively, drawers were still not common for the women for whom these lists were intended. There was a further indelicacy in publicly shopping for them. Melbourne businesswoman Miss Sawtell realized the “inconvenience” in purchasing underclothing in crowded shops that sold other kinds of garments, and that attracted male and female customers. This encouraged her to develop a special department for ladies-only shopping, “where ladies can without annoyance make their selections and give their orders.”72 Consequently, preference among the most refined remained to make underclothes at home where the sewing could be discreetly hidden. But not all plain sewing was shielded from a genteel audience.

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Charitable Needlework: Sewing for the Poor Two young children, a brother and sister, were discovered in Melbourne’s Little Bourke Street in 1852 “nearly naked, and in a state of destitution.” They were “supposed to have been deserted by parents who have gone to the Diggings.”73 When a woman passed away in 1862 “miserably destitute, as there was nothing to eat in the tent” near Ballarat, she left behind three “almost naked” children. Her death was found to be the result of “cardiac dropsy, accelerated by intemperance.”74 Both cases reveal neglect, and illustrate how a lack of clothing cast a child’s mother as an inadequate provider of care. This may have been due to poverty, perhaps compounded by addiction or fatal disease, but these evils were considered incidental to her womanly failure. Addressing such signs of female degeneracy, concerns for adequate clothing for the poor and destitute became a genteel prerogative. This led to the most public acknowledgement of women being proficient in plain sewing, made visible through their sewing for the poor. This act of charity elevated their labor into the frame of admired female benevolence and shifted the focus from hidden to public sewing where it could be more effectively communicated. Charitable needlework was the only occasion in which plain sewing could be publicly acknowledged because it wasn’t for one’s self but for Christian relief. In helping those judged in need, genteel women displayed both their compassion and their family status: they were free from the time constraints of outside work and not overwhelmed by their own family’s sewing. The temptations of wealth could thus be balanced by using social position to aid those less fortunate. Prescriptive literature encouraged good women to regulate the time and money they devoted to “conveniences and adornments of taste,” ensuring that these were not more than the time and money which was spent on moral and intellectual improvement, and on benevolent activities.75 A critical focus of their charitable work was in providing clothing, vital when its lack marked destitution, risking indecency. The value of clothing and its scarcity among the poor resulted in the frequent theft of garments. A myriad of colonial newspaper reports indicates a ready market or an immediate personal need: thieves were sometimes employees, sometimes opportunists.76 Indeed, clothing was almost a form of currency, for it could be pawned or sold by those in need.77 Genteel women therefore sought to ensure the needy had enough garments to meet respectable dress standards. Anne Bowman, in her English manual The Common Things of Every-Day Life, outlined how every woman should visit the poor and needy, bringing articles that could be spared from her

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larder or wardrobe.78 Churches, orphanages, and asylums pursued donations of garments from the public to meet the constant need. As the Immigrants Home in Melbourne noted “there is scarcely a respectable house in Melbourne that could not easily afford a small supply of cast-off clothes.” In offering shelter for deserted wives, single mothers, children, and the sick, the Home therefore requested “All sorts of rugs, blankets, and quilts, cloth, clothes, boots, flannels of every description, and all kinds of female wearing apparel” given such contributions were “of real comfort to the poor.”79 This work was extended through women’s charitable organizations such as the Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society, formed in 1845 as the Presbyterian Female Visiting Society, to assist the destitute, unemployed, infirm, elderly, and increasingly from late 1851, the deserted wives of men on the goldfields. Established by those from the highest levels of society with the time, financial resources, and moral obligation to be generous to those in need, it and other ladies’ charitable societies aimed to “relieve the wants of the poor, particularly females, by supplying them with clothes, food and necessaries.”80 The Ballarat Ladies’ Benevolent Clothing Society, for example, distributed both new and second-hand clothing that it had obtained through a variety of means, from fund-raising activities, council grants, subscriptions, and donations,81 while other societies requested contributions of “left-off ” clothing.82 Given decent clothing was a fundamental tenet of working-class respectability, the provision of clothing became a primary concern of these organizations. It did not have to be new, but it was important that clothing appear clean, be in good repair, and be appropriate for time and place. Worn, faded, and patched (but entire) garments were acceptable. Ragged, dirty clothing was not.83 Clothing the poor also formed the basis of a civilizing mission of imposing, or at the very least encouraging, minimum standards of dress on them. Therefore, while genteel women may have paid for some of the labor to complete their own households’ plain sewing, they willingly undertook plain sewing to contribute to this mission. It was admirable work, socially acceptable, with clear moral inferences. Linen, especially sheets, was also much needed. Benevolent societies, asylums, and hospitals made frequent public calls for old and cast-off sheets and blankets, however, genteel women also made them.84 Members of the Ladies’ Committee organizing a charity bazaar for the Geelong Hospital and Benevolent Asylum in 1855 worked on a large quantity of plain sewing to furnish two new wings of the hospital. The Committee requested contributions of lengths of cotton or linen to make sheets, pillow cases, and clothing, with the ladies’ efforts recorded in deferential tones. The Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer reported of their work:

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“as their fair fingers ply the steel bar in fabrication of the wherewithal to pillow the burning brow, or enwrap the wasted form, they will have all the pleasing reflection inseparable from acts of pure, unselfish benevolence.”85 These women and their very public acts of compassion were demonstrable proof of genteel virtue. The motivation for their work shifted plain sewing from labor to charity of the worthiest kind, deserving of public recognition.

Conclusion My examination of plain sewing and the genteel woman is challenged by a threefold absence: plain sewing was concealed within the home, the very practice was rarely written about, and its material traces have all but disappeared. While many of the products and much of the work of plain sewing were hidden from the public gaze, they had consequences for a genteel way of living. Women who ensured their family had sheets on the beds, napkins at the table, curtains shading the windows, and who wore a full complement of undergarments both subtly and purposefully expressed genteel values. Such goods distinguished their home and its inhabitants from those of the lower ranks. In order to possess these textiles plain sewing was required, whether by the hand of a needlewoman, a domestic servant, or a genteel wife and mother, leading to an uneasy contradiction that challenged plain sewing as proof of labor or leisure. Gold-rush commentators were ardent supporters of genteel women accepting an increase in work in the home. Where it was difficult to find assistance in new homes in the colony, or where financial resources were limited, plain sewing was a necessary labor and therefore daily work. Emerging notions of colonial femininity aligned the work to a sense of duty by promoting moral rewards for caring for the family. Utilitarian sewing was critical for middling women to frame their moral worth, their virtue, and their responsibility for home and family. Although a mundane (if not despised) task, it provided proof of their domestic obligations: as active contributors in the home. Even when some women did have access to help, they deliberately chose to undertake plain sewing tasks for charity in order to be seen to be leisured enough to be charitable. It was evidence of a family’s status through the very fact that they had time to sew for others. Sewing clothing for impoverished children, or linen for hospitals and asylums, was validation of Christian conduct and moral character. It was a tangible, public confirmation of women’s concern for the poor—of genteel benevolence that was widely encouraged during the nineteenth century. Some

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of the products examined in this chapter were concealed, shielded from all but the most intimate of family members. The next chapter turns to an area of domestic sewing where the products were highly visible to an audience and a key indicator of social standing—dress—to explore the expectations, attitudes, and values assigned to sewing women’s clothing in the home.

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Dressing the Part: Dressmaking in the Home

In August 1857, Annie Baxter’s soon-to-be second husband Robert Dawbin purchased Bongmire Station in Victoria’s western district: £5,000 of the total £7,500 agreed on by Robert for the property was provided by Annie, a comfortable fortune and the entire proceeds from her deceased first husband’s estate.1 Annie’s capital dwindled over the next few years in Robert’s hands. Proving inept at farming, he was declared insolvent in 1861.2 The first cracks appeared early: in April 1858, less than a year after it had been first purchased, Bongmire was sold and the Dawbins moved to a new property, Sinclair West. Determined to keep up appearances, in her slab cottage Annie stitched herself a jacket. She noted in her December journal that she thought it “very pretty,” and was astonished when her neighbor, Mrs Dodd, remarked: “ ‘Oh! how can you wear one of those horrid jackets! They are to be had in Portland for 6 [shillings]/6 [pence] a piece; and my servant girl wears one!’ ”3 Mrs Dodd’s scathing observation reflects the class implications of clothing during the nineteenth century and allows us to speculate on Annie’s transgression: genteel women did not wear the clothing favored by their servants. But this incident also captures a twin concern: Annie having made her own jacket, for as she revealed to Mrs Dodd, “my jacket was not from Portland but made by myself.”4 This chapter begins by establishing women’s dress as a communicative device on the goldfields, in country Victoria, and in the increasingly sophisticated city of Melbourne, investigating how messages were encoded in clothing. It is underpinned by new approaches to dress history that highlight clothing as a key source for cultural and social analysis. Artefact-based methodologies to dress research emphasize cultural, social, and economic frameworks, firmly based within the relevant historical context.5 This is extended by scholarship that explores the construction and expression of social identity through dress, asserting that it speaks a “language.”6 As Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen therefore explain, “Dress is a fundamental means, indeed sometimes one of the only available ways, by which groups and individuals express and negotiate their 115

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identities.”7 Such observations are significant when in mid-nineteenth-century Australia clothing expressed styles of consumption that could confirm or confuse social status. I then turn to home dressmaking, arguing that the complex links that developed in the colony between appropriate dress and domestic clothing production are deserving of consideration. Only limited attention has been paid to dressmaking in nineteenth-century Australian homes, leading Margaret Maynard to define this area more than two decades ago as one “scarcely acknowledged by historians.”8 I seek to address the expectations and attitudes that surrounded making clothing, and beyond that to the home needlework practices involved in maintaining existing dress in good order including refurbishing and mending. These were activities that relied on a woman’s skill with a needle, and in many cases reveal a determination to offset the challenges that emerged through the isolation, shortages, or financial uncertainty experienced in Australian conditions.9

Dress, Class, and Identity: Genteel Good Taste At the intersection between the private and public, the biological body and the social being, dress is, as Elizabeth Wilson articulates, “an extension of the body yet not quite part of it, [that] not only links that body to the social world, but also more clearly separates the two. Dress is the frontier between the self and the notself.”10 Judy Attfield draws on this interface between skin and fabric to explain the presentation of the self to a social world. She argues that clothing “mediates the relationship between the individual being and the act of being in the world at the most intimate level of social relations.”11 With this understanding, clothing and identity are tightly linked: clothing simultaneously conceals the body and reveals the self, bringing forth a social identity intended for public presentation. Scholars have long analyzed these connections, seeking frameworks to better understand how dress and identity link. In the late nineteenth century, Thorstein Veblen proposed that clothing expressed pecuniary standing, immediately communicating information about expenditure to observers.12 Shortly after, Georg Simmel’s theory of fashion change examined dress as a form of distinction and imitation; a process where fashion was initiated by the upper class, and through a subtle drip-down process was then adopted by the middle, and lastly the working classes. Motivated by lower social groups seeking to acquire status through assuming the style of higher-status groups, Simmel’s model suggested a

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recurrent process where the upper-class adoption of newer styles was a way of distinguishing themselves from the previous fashions now worn by their social inferiors.13 For Erving Goffman, dress was a component of “personal front”— what he defined as the “expressive equipment” used to perform identity.14 More recent scholarship notes that the gradual adoption of fashion through the classes is a complex process, with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of cultural capital recognizing how an individual’s capacity to select tasteful products, including clothing, is significant in both asserting and assessing social class.15 While all of these frameworks add depth to my discussion, the concept of taste in particular is one that I return to in order to explore aspirational and genteel dress in the social turmoil of gold-rush Victoria, with genteel commentators seizing on an understanding (or misunderstanding) of good taste to distinguish themselves and their peers from their social inferiors. As a visible marker of status, dress was a vehicle for formulating identity in material ways, offering its wearer a means for forging a “self.”16 Its signs could be read by a wearer’s peers who picked up on cues communicated not only through fabric and cut, but also through the evidence of wear, maintenance, and cleanliness: what Dianne Lawrence recognizes as the “discreet meanings” of genteel dress. She therefore asserts that “the malleability dress lends to the body assumed a particular intensity of meaning in genteel circles, signifying as it did group affiliations and one’s relative position within the group.”17 This reveals how dress could be mobilized to confirm facts about identity although, somewhat troublingly, it could also confuse them.18 At the heart of the problem lay social emulation. In societies which held a potential for mobility, emulative spending could help advance an individual’s project for betterment.19 This was precisely the challenge encountered in nineteenth-century Australia where social standing was more fluid than in contemporary Britain and where, as Emma Floyd reminds us, “Many could now afford to dress as the genteel without possessing any other discernible genteel qualities.”20 Dress had been complicated in Australia from the time of British settlement. It could be a challenge, if not near impossible, to distinguish some convict women from free settlers through dress alone, particularly when the lower orders had access to and a preference for fine clothing (over other commodities) and it was enlisted to form new identities.21 Dress was further complicated in gold-rush Victoria where emulative behavior via spending was, sometimes suddenly, available to aspirational immigrants and clothing was an immediate means of indulging it. Stores were quick to respond. When Maggie Brown arrived in Melbourne in 1854 to join her fiancé James Hoey, she described of her new

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home: “There are as splendid shops here as any in Glasgow and the folks dress just as well if not more splendidly than they do at home. It is quite a sight to walk down Bourke Street and along Collins Street on a fine day.”22 Collins Street was often noted as Melbourne’s primary site for sartorial display, its thoroughfare depicted by many artists including Nicholas Chevalier who illustrated small groups of Melbourne’s well-dressed citizens promenading past the richly arranged shop fronts (Figure  5.1). The purchasing potential of Melbourne’s residents was further echoed by Clara Aspinall, who observed of women’s dress during her three-year residence in the city from 1858 that she “never, even in the gayest English watering-place, saw such elaborate female attire as at Melbourne.”23 And while shopping on the goldfields was plagued by complications including a demand for certain goods that could result in material shortages, or when available, significantly inflated prices, Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye noted in Castlemaine: “The stores were astonishingly well stocked with everything that could be wanted . . . Some of the proprietors were London people, who had their own goods sent out, and these made the most conspicuous displays of dresses, bonnets, and quantities of china.”24 Yet genteel commentators were notoriously dismissive of the explicit display of wealth expressed through extravagant purchases, and the trope of the

Figure 5.1 Nicholas Chevalier and Frederick Grosse, Collins Street, 1864, print (wood engraving). Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, IAN25/07/64/8.

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over-dressed digger’s wife held a prominent place in gold-rush literature.25 Genteel descriptions of the display of luxury achieved through lavish dress and jewelry expressed a distinct distaste for their ostentatious choices: their clothing was seen as vulgar, gaudy, and riotously bright.26 It was an observation noted in George Lacy’s watercolor painting Digger’s Wife in Full Dress, painted around 1852, with her “full dress” ablaze in color from the pink of her jacket to her rich multicolored skirt, its width contrasting her tiny parasol (Figure 5.2). She was the kind of woman described by digger John Lees who witnessed in Ararat in 1857 the “butterflies about town, flouncing about in the most gaudy and expensive fashionable clothing, procured with the wages of prostitution and the spendings of fools.”27 When Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye recounted “the most absurd caricature of a digger’s wife,” she described how this woman contrasted her husband’s “rude costume of a digger.” Elizabeth observed how her richly trimmed velvet gown was “supported by a laughable breadth of crinoline” and finished with a pink bonnet, white satin shoes, a blue parasol, and a shawl on which a large nugget brooch was pinned.28 Here was a woman dripping in the material display of her husband’s wealth. Underpinning these remarks was the knowledge

Figure 5.2 George Lacy, Digger’s Wife in Full Dress, c. 1852, painting (watercolor), 25.6 × 32.6 cm. Collection: National Library of Australia, nla.obj-134736742.

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that good taste could not be purchased; that costly garments did not always accurately communicate status, revealed most sharply when the newly wealthy lacked the capacity to understand the modesty of good taste and its subtle variations.29 For their misunderstanding of tasteful material consumption and refined behavior, diggers’ wives were positioned in opposition to genteel women. This was most frequently played out through descriptions of the digger’s wedding, where his bride was dressed in a startling disarray of finery and, abandoning propriety, they celebrated in riotous style in a fancy open carriage. S.T. Gill illustrated such drunken revelry in Digger’s Wedding in Melbourne of 1852 (Figure 5.3). A genteel woman would never dress (nor act) in such a way. She may even have advised against such choices if her opinion—like Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye’s—was sought. Observing a digger and his fiancée buying her wedding outfit, Elizabeth noted that they quickly selected silk stockings, satin shoes, and undergarments. They hesitated over the bonnet and shawl, while the dress caused some confusion. A flounced gown of blue and white brocade chosen from two “magnificent dinner dresses” was finally paired with a maize-colored

Figure 5.3 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Wedding in Melbourne, 1852, print (lithograph), 16 × 20.4 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H7823.

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bonnet with feathers, and a crimson velvet mantle. Against this clash of colors Elizabeth’s preference was for “quieter colours,” to which the young woman agreed: “they’d be more to my likin’ too . . . but it’s him as [sic] wants me to be grand, and sure he pays for it.”30 Genteel good taste was difficult to define and relied on a nuanced understanding developed and refined over time. Taste, therefore, was deployed to create distance from those lower on the social scale. It formed part of what Steph Lawler detects as a middle-class “disgust” that was directed at the lower orders’ lack of taste made visible through their appearance, but which was also to be found in their behavior and manners.31 As the genteel understood, restrained and refined purchases enabled tasteful dressing—an understanding that retained currency throughout the gold rush (as it did around the British world) given frequent challenges to status through extravagant dress. Prescriptive literature emphasized that good taste was the result of dressing with modesty. As Emily Thornwell warned her readers in The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility, “it is alike ridiculous either to pretend to be the most showy, or to the display the meanest attire in any assembly.”32 An understanding of appropriate dress for time and place, though, could be especially puzzling to the aspirational. William Kelly mocked a digger’s wife for dressing in her finest clothing to do her laundry, donned in a satin dress “only slightly mottled with punch and mustard stains” and extravagantly layered jewelry. He wrote of her: “Thus arrayed, I presume, to show her neighbours that she did not wash for filthy lucre or contemptible economy, but only as a colonial substitute for crochet-work.”33 Commentators like Kelly seized on such solecisms, for as the genteel knew, a simple, plain or printed dress was the correct choice for domestic occupations. “[N]othing is so utterly devoid of taste,” the manual The Common Things of Every-day Life observed, than to wear a fine dress for house work.34 Yet even the genteel could stumble. Travelling from a western district property to stay with her parents-in-law in Kew, an area of Melbourne housing many well-to-do citizens, Agnes Henty revealed her struggle to meet expectation: “Mrs Henty told me my muslin was not good enough for the evening—what can I do—Richie is very good but he has not too much to spare & why should I ask him when I can do without a silk dress he is so good & I have spent all the spare money on a sewing machine.”35 Not wanting to dress “meanly,” the following week Agnes “Went into town [and] bought a black silk dress.” Just two months later she considerably expanded her wardrobe when she “Went in & paid Mrs Morris 4/10 for making 4 dresses & 4 jackets.”36 Her motivation was almost certainly a desire to dress appropriately for her status, as recognized by her peers.

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When this was not possible, one of the only viable options for a genteel woman was to remove herself from observation. Blanche Mitchell, facing the sting of reduced circumstances following the death of her father, noted in September 1858 in Sydney: “Not a penny of money anywhere, and bills all around us. Obliged to keep up appearances, but oh! with what.”37 The following day Blanche attended her dancing class but noted with some distress that she “was obliged to go in a winter’s dress, very hot.”38 That weekend, acutely aware of appearance, Blanche wrote that they did not attend church as “our old ones [bonnets] are too dirty to appear in.”39

Dress in the Colony: The Evidence of Daily Garments Beyond the stereotypes of misappropriation that circulated through gold-rush literature, the evidence of everyday clothing reveals a more nuanced picture: not all women aiming for something better dressed with complete disregard for propriety, and genteel dress responded to shifting environments, standards of living, and labor requirements. Hinted at in Agnes Henty’s writing, far from town on the family’s station her muslin gown was suitable evening wear. In fact, Maynard defines three groupings that were formed by the pressures of location in nineteenth-century Queensland: “urban dress, country dress and the dress of those women who spurned conventional behaviour such as timber cutters and goldfields women.” Maynard stresses, however, that some care needs to be taken in applying this general approach, noting “This is convenient and to a large extent sustainable, but the three categories were not always so clear cut. Each was affected not only by class, occasion and occupation, but by availability of garments, personal choice and often scarcity, which imposed its own criterion.”40 It is a useful frame to consider in Victoria, where a range of clothing was likewise worn depending on factors that included location and occasion, and the availability of fabrics and skilled dressmakers. Migrants stepped ashore and made their first impression in the clothing they had carried with them. They may have been guided on what to pack by emigrants’ manuals such as William Kingston’s How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for All Classes which provided two pages of information about the clothing a gentleman should take with him. His description for a woman’s outfit, though, was cursory: I do not think it necessary to give a lady’s outfit. All ladies who are about to become settlers in a new country will do well to leave silks and satins behind

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them, and to take plain strong washing dresses, straw bonnets, and strong boots, and a good supply of garments for four months. Young ladies may take some white muslin to run up into evening dresses, in case they should wish to grace a ball at one of the capitals. However, let them remember that a life of industry, and not of so-called amusement, is to be their lot.41

Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia outlined a similar preference for hardwearing clothes, recommending that “women shun the idle vanities of silks and satins, of lace and ribbons, of many flounces and fashionable bonnets.”42 Of immediate concern was meeting minimum clothing requirements, mandatory for migrants with free passage before they were permitted to embark. The smallest quantity of outer garments permissible for women and girls was two gowns with a range of accompanying undergarments,43 although some guides recommended more.44 As Anthea Jarvis has demonstrated, these outfits were likely to be made up of more garments than many emigrants would ever possess in Britain, with recommendations based on the length of the voyage where keeping travelers as clean as possible assisted in avoiding disease.45 Firstclass passengers carried far more, and the detailed and extensive list published for ladies in outfitter S.W. Silver & Co’s emigration guide included a dark silk dress to wear during the voyage together with other silk and muslin dresses to wear after landing, supplemented with accessories such as shawls, mantles, collars, cuffs, and silk and kid gloves.46 One way to maximize a passenger’s limited luggage allowance was to carry cut but unsewn dresses. These took up less space than constructed garments as they could be stored flat, then sewn on arrival.47 But all clothing and materials faced the risk of damage from damp conditions and sea water, both that kept in the luggage hold and worn during the voyage. Many emigrants found their clothing ruined by the inevitable contact with sea water, as English migrant Eliza Perrin recognized: “Almost anything will do to wear on board if it be tidy. Everything you wear gets spoiled.”48 Following her arrival in Melbourne, Eliza Perrin travelled to the goldfields in search of her husband John. There, the pictorial evidence of daily clothing reveals distinct patterns of dress. S.T. Gill’s painting Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo of 1869 indicates the preference for clothing in plain, dark fabrics, and skirts covered by aprons (Figure 5.4). The woman in this watercolor appears to have modified her gown for goldfields living: her skirt is shorter than conventional length which usually grazed the ground but at that length could collect dust in summer or mud in winter. It hangs close to her body, suggesting that she may also have cast off her petticoats. Her forearms are bare to the elbow, and her

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Figure 5.4 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo, 1869, painting (watercolor), 26.8 × 19.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H86.7/17.

sturdy footwear is suited to her environment. Not isolated to the Victorian goldfields, elsewhere women also adapted their clothing such as those in San Francisco for the muddy streets. As one local newspaper reported: “Desirous of saving their soles [women] have in many instances adopted the style of boots worn by men—a very admirable substitute.”49 While it is the clothes of a woman ready to make an active contribution that Gill painted in his 1869 scene of the digger’s auction, in the artist’s first depiction of this event—a 1852 lithograph of the same title—the woman is very differently attired (Figure 5.5). She wears a dark jacket with a plaid skirt that reaches the ground, demonstrating his reimagining of her dress more than a decade later. Could it be that Gill was inspired to change her dress having witnessed shifting or easing standards from those early years? Susan Lawrence’s excavation of the Moorabool diggings suggests sturdy and practical women’s garments were commonplace, but with some small concessions to fashion such as decorative fasteners and inexpensive jewelry. This leads her to argue that clothing does not appear to have differentiated social standing, being simple, inexpensive, and suited to the requirements of manual labor. She instead

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Figure 5.5 S.T. Gill, Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo, 1852, print (lithograph), 16.3 × 21.2 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library of Victoria, H7802.

proposes that differences in status were primarily expressed through behavior rather than consumption, resulting in lesser differentiation in the material goods themselves.50 Serviceable gowns with small embellishments are made visible in W. Parker’s photograph of prospectors and their wives at the unearthing of the Welcome Stranger nugget, near the Victorian town of Dunolly in 1869 (Figure 5.6). Commemorating the largest alluvial gold nugget ever found, it is certain that deliberate choices of clothing were made by its finder John Deason, his partner Richard Oates, and others of the goldfields community who pose for the photograph. The men wear the distinctive clothing of diggers. The women wear simple dresses that are largely unadorned, however one accessorizes her plain dark dress with white undersleeves and a collar, important finishing accents in the mid-nineteenth century, while the two women standing wear crinolines to give a full shape to their skirts. Parker’s photograph suggests a second point of interest: their gowns are almost certainly a number of years old. Skirts had begun to flatten at the front mid-1860s, with the bulk moving to the back ultimately to form a bustle. Yet they remained suitable wear for goldfields locations where women were sometimes unaware of, or unconcerned with, the latest styles and

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Figure 5.6 W. Parker, Unearthing the Welcome Stranger Nugget, 1869, photograph (albumen silver carte-de-visite), 6.5 × 10.7 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H13298.

where the value of all clothing was amplified when finds this rich were unlikely to be made again. While surviving examples of goldfields dress would add depth to this picture, everyday gowns are scarce. Eliza Perrin’s day dress worn in Ballarat around 1860 is extremely rare as both a provenanced goldfields gown, and because of the existence of a studio photograph of Eliza and her children in which, carefully posed for the photographer, she wears this dress (Figure  5.7). Shortly after English-born Eliza Hobson married John Perrin, a grocer, in 1851, John and his brothers joined the rush to the Victorian diggings. Eliza followed them the next year with the first of their children, for as she told her cousin “I see nothing but hard work here.”51 She located her husband on the Ballarat goldfields but soon came to realize that John’s income was uncertain. Eliza wanted something better, and in establishing a grocery store she aimed to earn a living of her own. Eliza worked hard and her business was profitable, although as she confessed to her cousin “I am not so much in the Grocery business as the Wine, Spirits, Ale and Porter. It is more like a bar than a store.”52 By the time Eliza posed in her dress for the photograph, she owned property and real estate, took in boarders, and employed a domestic servant.53 Eliza’s respectable appearance in her family portrait suggests a very different interpretation to the goldfields caricatures of

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Figure 5.7 Unknown photographer, Eliza Perrin and Children, c. 1860, photograph. Collection: Gold Museum, 91.00012.

women working in grog shops, often parodied as rough, drunk, and vulgar.54 Eliza’s dress and her decorous presentation in the portrait suggest otherwise. Eliza wore brown, a good, plain tone for a respectable woman. Bands of handworked chain stitch embroidery in green, black and white wool on the surface of the cotton and wool blend fabric lifts it modestly from everyday wear to a slightly more luxurious level, embellishing what is otherwise a simple, hand-sewn dress. The bodice of her dress has a high neckline and is typical of the period; a v-shape is created using wide fabric bands from the shoulder that narrow at the waist, further emphasized by the caps at the shoulders of her long sleeves. The photograph reveals how Eliza accessorized her dress, though these have long since disappeared: a collar finished with a black bow, a belt with a decorative buckle, and undersleeves. Her clothing is not ostentatious, correct for her station, seemly in her circumstances. Eliza and her children are clean, tidy, and neatly groomed. Their portrait makes clear the propriety in the Perrin family’s manner. Eliza Perrin’s dress, likely to be her best, casts her as a respectable business woman, perhaps like the woman standing in front of T. Tyrer’s shopfront on

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Figure 5.8 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway Dunolly], c. 1861, photograph (ambrotype), 12.1 × 16.6 cm. Collection: Picutres Collection, State Library Victoria, H26116.

Broadway, Dunolly, around 1861 (Figure  5.8). A flash of white at her throat suggests she wears a collar with her dark dress that incorporates horizonal bands decorating the bodice. Her skirt is full, though perhaps supported by petticoats rather than a crinoline. Her dress is neat, and appropriate for her location. Some genteel women, in contrast, deliberately dressed down on the diggings. Martha Clendinning was determined not to distinguish herself as a lady on the Ballarat goldfields in 1853 for fear that it would drive off custom from her tent store. She, together with her sister, aimed instead to be “merely respectable women of business.”55 But when the situation demanded it, Martha recognized the power that fine dress could command. On visiting the Government Camp to obtain her husband’s mining license, Martha wore her best gown of black cashmere with two deep flounces edged with velvet, teamed with her paisley shawl and a bonnet trimmed with white ribbon. Martha found the license was quickly granted— hastened by the genteel air which marked her apart from other female residents “of a very rough class.”56 Enlarging the spectrum of goldfields dress still further, Jane Hamilton’s descriptions of the dresses that formed her wardrobe are significant for their detail of fabrics and colors. Writing to her mother in 1860, as Jane moved

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between her husband’s villa in Brighton and the goldfields town of Eaglehawk, she recorded a black silk gown and a “very handsome lavender one,” noting that this was perhaps a poor choice—being “too pretty” for the street although suitable to wear when returning calls—and a violet brocade dress.57 Jane wore her gowns over long periods, as did many of her contemporaries, and four years later she explained to her mother: “I have not bought almost any article of dress since I was married except a little in Feb[ruar]y for mourning.”58 However, Jane had alternative strategies for clothing herself and turned to her own skills with a needle. Even as her husband’s mining enterprise was failing, Jane explained: “Still, dear Mother, do not think of us as in want. We have been in difficulty and anxiety, it is true, but we have always been able to get every necessary and good credit too and always to appear respectable . . . our dress has never cost much, I assure you!”59 It is likely that Jane spent considerable time sewing in order to both economize and carefully manage her appearance—to appear respectable, as she phrased it—making clothing anew, modifying second-hand gowns to adjust fit and style, and mending and darning, as did other women in the colony.

The Extended Lifecycle of Gowns: Second-Hand Clothing, Mending, and Refurbishing The skill to modify existing dress was heightened when gowns were valuable, worn by a woman over a period of many years before being bequeathed within the family, handed down to servants, or entering the second-hand clothing market.60 So precious was it that clothing could be stolen or pawned, or sometimes both as Blanche Mitchell recounted one Sunday morning in Sydney in 1859: This morning awoke early by Mrs Hig. [their domestic servant] rushing into Mammas’ room exclaiming “Oh Maam! I am robbed of everything every blessed thing!” When she came to reason she told us that some one had robbed her during the night of all her dresses which she kept in the kitchen—in fact, of everything she possessed . . . It is a dreadful loss to old Hig., who had just worked all the clothes out of pawn and now has lost them forever.61

Wearing second-hand clothing was perfectly acceptable in the nineteenth century as it had been before,62 and it formed a significant portion of a genteel woman’s wardrobe. As Penelope Selby explained of her clothing in 1845: “My dress is all presents.” Following the arrival of a box with the clothing of her

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deceased cousin Mary she explained “with poor Mary’s I shall have enough to last for life.”63 This emphasizes how Penelope intended to wear her gowns for many years, while underscoring the fact that inheriting the clothing of relatives was common. Its value was such that it crossed the globe, from England to Australia in the case of Mary’s clothing for Penelope, or from Australia to Scotland when Maggie Hoey passed away. But through its connection to another wearer, often much loved, second-hand clothing could also cause sorrow. When Maggie’s wedding outfit was returned to Glasgow to her younger sister Jessie, she revealed “I feel so sad when I look at dear, dear Maggie’s dress . . . I must not feel in this way, [as] it will be a very useful and valuable dress to use and all the more I will prize it because it belonged to my dear departed sister.” Acknowledging just how valuable Maggie’s dress was and how long it would remain so, Jessie wrote to her sister Jane: “I feel to take it from her own dear wee Maggie, it might have made a nice dress for her when she was bigger but if we are all spared together, I may be able to give her something in the place.”64 Clothing retained value at all stages of its lifecycle and careful cleaning, storage, and mending were encouraged.65 The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility emphasized that it was not only in the initial selection of clothing that genteel women need make thoughtful decisions, but in its ongoing maintenance over a long period, explaining “Nothing sooner betokens the real lady than good taste and judgement in the purchase of articles of dress in the outset, and afterwards good care of what is thus procured.”66 Genteel women living on a modest family income, like Isabella Ramsay, were acutely aware of the need to maintain their gowns to extend their wearable life. One day in May 1858 as the weather started to turn cold, she recorded in her diary that her sister’s family “were busy making winter dresses. I was busy mending mine.”67 Isabella was alert to the effects of her work, but for those less informed and especially for the benefit of the “poorer classes of society” including servants and “the wives of hardworking mechanics,” The Common Things of Every-Day Life stressed how “Needles and thread are cheap possessions; a patched garment is a badge of industry . . . A needle in the hands of an industrious woman becomes the wand of the fairy Order, converting rags and wretchedness into neatness and comfort.”68 Most women also refurbished existing garments, through adjustments big or small, that could transform the look of ill-fitting or unfashionable gowns. Techniques could be as simple as attaching new trims, but with skill women could also take seams in or out to respond to changing body shape, refit a secondhand gown, or replace or refashion part of a gown—its sleeves or skirt, for example, so that it more closely aligned with current silhouettes.69 This was

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dictated by an awareness of current fashion. Recent arrivals, dressed in the latest styles from London or Paris, provided a visual reference point. The stylish clothing of two ladies promenading in the foreground of Cuthbert Clarke’s pencil sketch with watercolor wash Our Tent Castlemaine of 1854 depicts both wearing full skirts that graze the ground—they appear well-dressed for their surrounds and may have served as inspiration for the dress of others (Figure 5.9). Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye almost certainly would have, and she wore her Parisian trousseau in Castlemaine despite her initial misgivings, explaining: “I felt that, at such a time, a few homespun articles would be of more use and value to me than silk and ball dresses; but, my dear lady readers, for your information let me observe, my Paris finery went out quite safely, and I had always the satisfaction of being dressed well and in good taste.”70 Elizabeth balanced a fashionable appearance with the subtleties of genteel dress. These were two distinct concepts as Dianne Lawrence reminds us: genteel dress was concerned primarily with taste, while fashion was at the mercy of vagaries in changing style.71 Fashion was

Figure 5.9 Cuthbert Clarke, Our Tent Castlemaine, 1854, drawing (watercolor wash and pencil), 22.3 × 27 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H38890.

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more readily accessible while taste could prove elusive. Elizabeth’s gowns no doubt served as a source of inspiration for genteel women aiming to update the look of their gowns, all the while confirming her good taste. What evidence, then, do we find of dress modification in surviving nineteenthcentury gowns and what might this tell us? If we start from dress historian Lou Taylor’s position that an altered garment has a “biography,” then the potential for these changes to reveal rich insights into social and cultural meaning emerges.72 Museum specimens demonstrate how skirts were adjusted to reflect changing silhouettes: those evenly pleated around the waist to give a bell shape popular through the 1850s were later unpicked at the waist seam in order to flatten the skirt’s front and draw the bulk of the fabric to the back. Additional widths of material could be inserted at the back to further increase fullness. Where such modifications appear, it is commonsense to suggest these gowns were worn over many years, certainly from the 1850s and through the 1860s, and perhaps even longer as they remained valuable for their wearer (or wearers). Skirts were also retrimmed. New frills sewn at the hemline were perhaps inspired by a desire to update a gown’s appearance, to rebalance the silhouette, or to draw the eye from one part of the gown to another, newer, feature. Other adjustments aimed to resize a gown, either to refit a second-hand garment or to improve the fit of a woman’s own gown for her changing body shape. Skirts were lengthened or shortened to suit the height of one wearer to the next. Adjusting a bodice could be a far more challenging needlework task when the aim was to create a smooth, close fit between fabric and torso. A woman might adjust her own gown as a result of pregnancy or as her weight fluctuated. The latter, Leigh Summers highlights, was common given nineteenth-century diets contained little fruit and vegetables and genteel women avoided vigorous activity. Weight gain was a widespread corporeal reality for middling women in the nineteenth century, challenging our present-day perceptions that all women had small waists. Instead, Summers proposes that “Between 1830 and 1880, the fashionable ideal was to be tiny but unless hereditarily blessed by a small frame, most middle-class women must have, at some point in their lives, struggled to achieve this impossible goal.”73 One method to accommodate an expanding waist was to extend a front-fastening bodice by attaching an additional piece of fabric at the center front. Insertions of fabric at the bodice side seams (using excess skirt fabric if required), further increased the width. Such adjustments were frequently sewn by hand, and on museum specimens often demonstrate a lesser-skilled hand to that which first made the gown. These domestic practices aimed to update the look or

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fit of a gown but were also motivated by an understanding of economy in the home. It was an articulation of the economy of decency (as opposed to economy by necessity) which could set the genteel apart from the newly wealthy who acquired the latest styles and richest fabrics, often with an explicit regard for the costs involved.74

Making Gowns Anew: Motivations for Home Dressmaking Making gowns anew was a much more challenging proposition for the home needlewoman complicated by attitudes (although shifting) towards home dressmaking. Research suggests that in Britain at the beginning of the Victorian era home dressmaking was acutely class related: poorer women made their own clothes or purchased second-hand garments, while women with financial resources called upon dressmakers or servants to produce a new gown. Sarah Levitt suggests this was a display of wealth as an indicator of class “achieved most effectively by means of expensive, individually-made garments.”75 In settler societies, however, such distinctions could not be maintained, resulting in a genteel engagement with home dressmaking. North American scholarship establishes how the absence of ready-to-wear clothing for women and girls until later in the second half of the nineteenth century mandated household clothes-making responsibilities, with a delay in the ready-made clothing industry centered on a lower population density and less urbanization than in Britain, and a developing retail sector.76 For many American women a combination of garments made at home and those made using the services of a professional dressmaker was required; underwear and dresses for everyday wear were more likely to be made at home, while dresses for special occasions were wholly or partly cut and made by a dressmaker.77 A range of approaches were common: picked-apart pieces of an existing garment were used as a template to create a new dress, or skills gained through a network of women who shared their knowledge of cutting, sewing, fashion trends, and existing patterns.78 Similar factors led to a parallel situation occurring in colonial Australia. Maynard links home dressmaking with the slow beginnings of the ready-towear market for women’s clothing, not manufactured locally in any quantity until the later years of the 1870s and initially limited to looser outerwear such as coats and mantles. On this evidence, she proposes that dressmaking in the home made up a far larger share of Australian dress than is recognized.79 Access to

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dressmakers, or isolation from them, could be a critical factor and an 1849 report encouraging migration to Australia confirmed dressmakers were in demand.80 This picture had changed markedly by the time of the 1854 census: official statistics reveal more than 2,500 women were employed in Victoria in the trades of needlewomen, dressmakers, milliners, shoe binders, and cap makers, with more than half of them located in Melbourne.81 Despite this increase in dressmakers in the colony, it was not solely the work of professionals. On Emily Fillan’s arrival in Melbourne in 1854 to join William Skinner, her digger fiancé, and wearing her up-to-date London dress, Emily describes how she was “begged” by her landlady to make a copy. Emily evidently had some skills but admitted that she “heartily wished that I had been wise enough to take lessons in dressmaking before leaving England. However, I had helped sometimes to make my own, and now by dint of careful imitating, I succeeded in making a tolerable fit.”82 Here we can see a transition in Emily’s skills—she moved from assisting to making with what seems to have been relative ease. This incident marked the end of her dressmaking for others but not for herself, and she acknowledged “many a dress I have made since.”83 Outside Melbourne, the value of home dressmaking skills heightened. In circumstances of isolation that could be brought about not only by geographic pressures but also financial difficulties, women quickly realized their own labor could contribute to appropriate, tasteful, and modest dress. Sarah Midgley’s writing reveals such potential. Following her arrival in Melbourne in 1851 with her parents and eight siblings, the family purchased 100 acres of farmland in western Victoria. The family had been tenant farmers in England and recognized the opportunities presented by farming in the colony. Sensibly avoiding the lure of uncertain profits from gold, they focused instead on the demanding work associated with developing a new property. While domestic chores claimed much of Sarah’s time, to the extent that she neglected to write in her diary for three years, an entry dated November 19, 1855, four years after her arrival, reads: “I went to Miss Roberts to get measured for a dress, the first one of mine made by another in the Colony.”84 Sarah’s statement has potential for multiple interpretations. She may not have had a new dress in those four years, wearing only what she brought with her. Or it could be that she had made her own clothing since arriving in Victoria. Sarah appears to have had (or to have developed) dressmaking abilities as she later refers to making a dress for herself and clothing for her neighbor, Mrs Knight, and this option suggests itself for a number of reasons.85 The new farm would certainly have demanded a significant financial contribution, and Sarah could perhaps not afford to have a professional

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dressmaker work on a gown for her or felt the money was better spent elsewhere. Alternatively, it is possible that Sarah’s access to dressmakers was limited, delaying her visit to Miss Roberts. The ambiguity of Sarah Midgley’s statement contrasts a candid admission made by Ada Cambridge. Ada arrived in Victoria in 1870. Her concern with a genteel appearance and the goods that expressed it—such as a buggy and horses for her husband, a clergyman, to visit his parishioners, and a piano for her home—were tempered by what she defined as “considerable ingenuity and invention” in other areas.86 Ada and her husband made their own household furniture and furnishings, while she carefully sewed clothing that communicated a middling status. As Ada explained: I take pride in announcing that I never hired a sewing-woman—that, having made all my own clothes as a girl, even to the wedding-gown, I made all my children’s, until the boys grew beyond their sailor suits, and the girl put her hair up. In fact, housework has all along been the business of life; novels have been squeezed in the odd times. It was many a long year before I had a dress-maker’s dress.87

Proud of her skill, it is also likely that her financial position weighed on her mind. Ada could locate her work in the culture of moral, economical gentility even while working as a writer and novelist during times of financial strain. Isabella Ramsay’s Melbourne diary allows us to develop further the idea of moral, economical gentility. Isabella and her husband, the Reverend Andrew Mitchell Ramsay, arrived in Australia in 1847. Like other women of her social standing, Isabella visited her peers and the poor, entertained guests, cared for her children, and went out walking. In 1858 she started a diary coinciding with the departure of her husband for Scotland, and despite her genteel consciousness Isabella wrote of days filled with household labor. She washed and cooked, and in November that year, when she was without a servant, a caller found her cleaning. Isabella’s distress that “he evidently took me for the servant” was so great that “I did not make myself known to him.”88 Isabella was reluctant to spend money when she could work on a task herself, so she cleverly economized by having the more complicated bodice of a new dress made while stitching the skirt herself—resulting in a gown that fitted well but at a lower cost.89 Possessing at least some skills in dressmaking could therefore significantly enhance a woman’s appearance. Yet a fundamental shift was underway in attitudes towards home dressmaking, most starkly revealed by socially elite women such as Eliza à Beckett. Eliza had

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access to the services of a resident needlewoman in her family home, but in her late teens, around 1860, she ambitiously attempted to make a ball dress for herself. That it turned out what she called “a ghastly failure” suggests Eliza had vastly underestimated the difficulties involved. Although unwearable for the ball, the dress was altered (it is not clear whether by Eliza herself or, more likely, the family’s needlewoman) and the reworked dress “went to a lawn party at Government House later, and led a happy, useful life.”90 Eliza’s attempt to make a gown not for wear within the home but instead for a public occasion underscores the transformation that was taking place; she had no reservations, had it been successful, about wearing a homemade garment before her peers. Elsewhere across Australia women were making their gowns—and proudly acknowledging it. When Katie Hume attended her first “public appearance” at a subscription ball in Toowoomba, Queensland, in 1867 she wore her best gown: her wedding dress. Of their closest neighbors, the genteel Ramsay’s from Eton Vale and their guest, Miss Young, Katie remarked: “Mrs R. handsomely dressed in white moire, Miss Y. looked very well in her green Tarleton (her own making!).”91 Katie’s surprise, perhaps, was that Miss Young had the skills to make herself a gown appropriate to wear at a ball—a challenging proposition and more complex than a day dress when it might incorporate flounces, ruching, puffs, and pleating. Displayed so publicly, the bodice and skirt could confirm her knowledge of current silhouettes or expose otherwise, while the difficulties of achieving a smooth-fitting bodice could give off an unwanted impression of inferior work to observers if badly done. Miss Young must have been confident that her gown could withstand scrutiny, particularly alongside other genteel women wearing their best. This shift had its foundation in the increasing availability of tools developed to assist the home dressmaker. Instruction for more advanced sewing than what had been previously available developed over the decades of the mid-nineteenth century. Sections on dressmaking were published in etiquette manuals,92 while British and North American instructional manuals devoted to home dressmaking included proportional scaled patterns, or full-sized patterns in one size only.93 Private tuition was also accessible. Miss Condon, for example, who advertised her services in the Melbourne newspaper Argus in 1855 taught six dressmaking lessons for 20 shillings, which she proposed would “convey a thorough knowledge of Dressmaking in the most finished style.” A decade later, Mrs Kennedy advertised that in six lessons ladies would learn “the art of dressmaking perfectly.”94

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Domestic sewing machines imported into Australia from the 1850s further enlarged the possibilities for home dressmaking, a fact recognized by Rachel Henning and her sister Amy. In 1861, Rachel described a visit made to their neighbor, Mrs Ranken: “She showed us her sewing-machine, which they have just set up. Amy is wild to have one, and they are now on sale at Bathurst, but £10 is a good deal of money.”95 Amy was almost certainly motivated by the exciting possibilities that emerged: long straight lines of stitching, such as the seams of a skirt, could be quickly and neatly executed at a speed much greater than was possible by hand. Yet Rachel’s remark emphasizes how sewing machines were initially seen as class markers; they could be confirmation of a family’s wealth as they represented a substantial investment. Clever marketers of the time attempted to counter this. Mr J.A. Kay’s sewing machine—of Australian design and manufacture—was claimed to be so reasonably priced “that no family need be without one.”96 Amy’s careful consideration, despite being married to a banker, reveals otherwise.

Conclusion In the fluidity of gold-rush Victoria, dress was an obvious vehicle for formulating identity in material ways: success was expressed by diggers’ and tradesmen’s wives through expensive, extravagant garments and accessories. Increasingly challenged by the growing wealth of the population, genteel women marked their difference by criticizing what they perceived to be the vulgar taste of the lower orders, carefully contrasted with their own good taste made visible through their knowledge of appropriate dress for time and place. A range of primary sources indicate that genteel women deliberately employed tasteful dressing based on a standard of modesty and careful maintenance of their clothing. Expressions of distaste for the sartorial display of “other” women were strategies intended to distinguish the genteel from working or aspiring women. Clothing offered a way of displaying the internal—knowledge and taste—externally, and as such was integral to expressions of gentility. It transformed intangible conceptions into tangible material goods. In mining genteel writing for a lessbiased portrayal of what the different social groups wore, a glimpse of everyday dress in Victoria emerges; where women dressed for their environment while remaining aware of the impression cast by style, fabric, and accessories. Combining written sources with pictorial evidence and the scarce surviving

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material culture allows us to recast our understandings of the dress of both working and genteel women, and their claims to respectability. Examining a second aspect to dress—the making and modifying of garments—demonstrates their sewing was significant. Home dressmaking could assist in articulations of social status, as with skill it could provide access to tasteful gowns that fit well, presenting its wearer’s best self. For many, developing skills in dressmaking was necessary when living in isolation in the developing colonial society, particularly for those who understood the importance of maintaining standards in dress. Some women did not question the need to make their own garments, but, rather as Annie Baxter Dawbin did in the opening to this chapter, freely admitted to it. In adapting to the constraints of their environment, genteel women repositioned themselves and their own labors to fit with notions of genteel propriety. The notion that only the poor or skilled made their own gowns was reassessed. It was more important to maintain visual cues to standing over the belief that this work was unseemly for genteel women. Modifying clothing was an equally valuable strategy that allowed garments to have a much longer life: to stay fashionable and in good repair, to change as did shape and circumstance, while remaining grounded in genteel economy and the widely acknowledged value attached to textiles. Dress was a visible marker, a public expression, and the home-based work that was required to make such a statement was worthwhile genteel labor. It was advantageous for women who recognized the power in appropriate dressing, and who sought control over their appearance. Women also took control of the appearance of their husband and children through their needlework, and it is to sewing for the family that I now turn.

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A Good Wife and Mother: Clothing the Family

With his iron store facing declining business prospects, in October 1855 James Hoey announced in a letter to family in Scotland: We are giving up business in Melbourne and are going off to the Diggings . . . We have not come to this conclusion rashly, for really business is so very dull in Melbourne now, and without the least prospect of betterness, that all we can do is to make a living and that was not the object in coming this distance.1

James was not new to testing his luck on the goldfields, however this time he was accompanied by his wife, Maggie, and their infant son. Maggie was optimistic about their new life. Without servants, noting “we would only consider them in the way,” Maggie cared for her family in a tent home: “you have no idea how comfortable they are,” she cheerfully explained to her mother.2 Alive to the idea of what observers described as the freedom and democratic state of society on the goldfields, Maggie wrote shortly after arriving: Already I like this sort of life far, far better than living in Melbourne and I doubt not that I will like it every day more and more . . . I do think it will be an easyminded life this—no rent, no taxes and plenty of wood and water free; nor is there any need for troubling about dress, we can throw anything on and go out when the fine cool air sets in in the evening.3

Standards may have relaxed, however Maggie perhaps cared more for dress than she admitted. While she waited for “great things” from James and her brother-in-law Tom, Maggie confessed to her sister Jane that she found her “sewing powers of great advantage here,” explaining “some times I have had to study economy as much as we had to at Home, so that with making and mending for James, Tom and myself and now my little [son] Robert, I need never be idle.”4 Maggie’s skills in needlework and her readiness to economize were a valuable combination in gold-rush Victoria, helping her to clothe her family well despite the uncertainties she would come to face on the goldfields. Her letters make clear 139

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that Maggie possessed the skills and a willingness to participate in domestic labor to ease her transition to colonial living. She was, as contemporary commentators encouraged of genteel women, prepared to be useful. In this chapter I investigate women’s sewing for their husbands and children— what some admitted was a huge workload when they had large families, and what others confided was overwhelming even when they didn’t. I examine genteel women’s responsibility for ensuring their husbands and children were well and appropriately dressed and consider how their needlework enabled greater control over appearance, critical when dress was a communicative device charged with meaning. I explore a range of factors that mobilized genteel women to produce clothing for their families, and while Maggie Hoey articulated economy as a primary influence in sewing for her husband, brother-in-law, son, and indeed herself on the Victorian goldfields, other stimuli were likely to guide her decisions: factors ranging from physical labor to the Australian climate which influenced shifting dress standards. Moreover, I consider the significance of sewing through the nineteenth-century ideology that defined women as wives and mothers, developing the concept of clothing as a visible indicator to observers of their care of and devotion to their families. I therefore position this sewing as a performance of self via managing the appearance of others. In exploring women’s sewing for their families, I return to the idea that women adapted genteel behaviors in response to colonial environments.5 Emma Floyd understands that gentility endured in the Australian colonies, and that while “The public performance might dwindle in the bush . . . the private maintenance of genteel notions would not be so easily renounced.”6 Against this frame, I search for insights into the lengths women went to reproduce certain values in colonial settings, despite the tension created by colonial living. This was especially visible in their efforts to clothe children and sew men’s undergarments. But scratch the surface and it becomes apparent that women’s needlework extended far beyond this into sometimes unfamiliar territory. In incorporating tailoring into their repertoire, I explore how although a shifting appearance became commonplace for gentlemen in the bush and on the diggings, even this required women’s intervention. Developing new competencies could be critical for maintaining identity.7

Clothing Children in the Colony Australian children dressed like boys and girls across the British Empire: girls in dresses similar to women’s but with shorter skirts; and boys in tunics or dresses

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(sometimes the same as their sisters) until the age of six or seven when they began to wear knickerbockers then pants.8 While students attending the Church of England School in the Victorian goldfields town of Dunolly in 1861 are recognizable as boys or girls through their clothing (Figure 6.1), the child in a short dress shoveling earth from a wheelbarrow in S.T. Gill’s lithograph of an industrious family, Zealous Gold Diggers, Bendigo of 1852 could be their young son or daughter (Figure  6.2). The child wears a simple dress of plain fabric, with a wide, square neckline and a full skirt, coupled with a broad-brimmed hat for protection against the sun—essential as it could be baking hot on the goldfields. Dressing children the same could be a blessing in the colony, as Maggie Hoey realized when two boxes sent from her family in Scotland took eighteen months (rather than the more usual timeframe of three) to arrive. Sending her thanks from Eaglehawk, she described how “As it turns out, not one of the things are out of place, for what does not fit the young gentleman for whom they were intended just suits his little sister . . . I have had the two dressed alike with them [new Turkey red dresses] several times and with their white pinafores they look very well.”9

Figure 6.1 G.H. Jenkinson, Ch. of E. [Church of England] School Dunolly, c. 1861, photograph (ambrotype), 12.1 × 16.6 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H26126.

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Figure 6.2 S.T. Gill, Zealous Gold Diggers, Bendigo, 1852, print (lithograph), 15.5 × 20.4 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H7805.

The everyday clothing of younger children, as described by Maggie Hoey, was commonly covered by pinafores to prevent soiling the gown beneath. Another picture taken in Dunolly by photographer G.H. Jenkinson captures such everyday dress (Figure  6.3). In a more relaxed setting than the photographer’s studio, a group of men stand informally outside the shopfront of A. Martin’s Timber Yard around 1861. One man holds the hand of a small child, who wears a short frock not dissimilar to the zealous young gold digger’s, but covered by a crisp, white pinafore. Against the darker tones of the child’s own dress and the clothing of the nearby men, the pinafore is so clean as to appear luminous. A pinafore is also worn by one of the younger children in the family portrait of Dr Michael Minter and his wife Eleanor, taken in their garden around 1855 (Figure  6.4). The family are arranged around Eleanor who is seated and holding a baby. The baby in Eleanor’s arms wears a long white gown, suggesting this photograph was taken on the occasion of its christening. The three oldest sisters wear matching dresses with a dark stripe running down the bodice, a v-line accentuated from the sloping shoulders to the point at the waist, and through the skirt. Their long full sleeves are pagoda-shaped, loose at the wrist in a style often seen this decade. Each appears

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Figure 6.3 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway, Dunolly], c. 1861, photograph (ambrotype), 12.1 × 16.6 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H26117.

Figure 6.4 Unknown photographer, Dr Michael Minter and Family, c. 1855–57, photograph (albumen silver), 14 × 22 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H16576.

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to be wearing a white lace collar, and the younger of the three carries her sun hat. Despite the more informal garden setting of this family portrait, the three girls are likely to be wearing their best gowns for this photograph. Two of the sisters, Flora Minter aged twelve and Ellen aged ten, are relocated from the garden to the studio in a carte-de-visite by photographic studio Trood (Figure 6.5). The girls hold a photograph and wear matching dresses. While their faces betray little, they are perhaps in mourning. The pleating on the bodices, wide necklines, and full sleeves are typical of the mid-nineteenth century, as are the skirts, knife-pleated at the waist. Both girls wear a crinoline, and while Ellen’s skirt finishes above her boots, her older sister’s skirt appears to be approaching the full-length of an adult. The sheen on the fabric suggests their gowns are silk taffeta, with the consequence that the studio lighting highlights some irregularities

Figure 6.5 Trood, Flora and Ellen Minter, 1855, photograph (albumen silver carte-devisite), 10.7 × 6.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H16572.

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in their construction. The bodices of both girls are loose, perhaps to accommodate the option of wearing their gown over several years. Flora’s skirt seam is puckered near the hem, which is caught unevenly into the lining. These small details are what most interest me as they give a clue to the potential maker: could it be that they were perhaps made by Eleanor Minter for her daughters? Sewing for children was widespread, confirmed in a range of diaries and letters. Following her arrival in Melbourne in 1841, Georgiana McCrae made an unwelcome discovery: “Unpacked George’s trowsers—the ones I had made in London; found them already two inches too short.”10 All too aware that early Melbourne held few alternatives, Georgiana realized her own labor was required to clothe her seven children. She recorded making tartan suits, trousers, shirts, caps, and dresses in her journal, in addition to altering her children’s clothes, revealing her considerable efforts.11 For a week in 1842, Mrs Osmond, the gardener’s wife and a skilled needlewoman, helped Georgiana with the boys’ winter suits.12 The rest of her sewing, though, appears to have been by her own hand and her level of skill is evident in two surviving jackets made for her sons in the 1840s. Both are hand-sewn, short in the body, and made from the same pattern. Their sleeves are long: split at the cuffs, and full and gathered at the shoulder in a style recommended as suitable for boys in The Workwoman’s Guide when it was published in 1838.13 One jacket has a fine red stripe running through

Figure 6.6 Georgiana McCrae, Boy’s Jacket, c. 1840s, (cotton), 78.8 × 34.5 cm. Collection: National Trust of Australia (Victoria), McCrae Homestead, MC 550. Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

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the blue fabric and fastens with cloth-covered buttons (Figure 6.6). This is a rare combination: Georgiana’s journal descriptions of her sewing and the surviving material evidence.14 Clothing seven children was a vast workload, particularly before sewing machines were introduced into the colony, yet fewer children also placed pressure on mothers—especially when they were expected to do more. Penelope Selby arrived in Port Phillip with her family—her husband and two sons— in 1840. Five years later she wrote to her mother in England that her son Prideaux: has [a] waist coat and jacket I made out of his Father’s old surtout, a capital fit. You cannot think what an expert tailor I have become, and all the hats the boys or their father have worn I have made from old sugar bags. George sometimes thinks I can do everything and expects accordingly. I shall knit the boys some socks this next winter, or at least try.15

The following year, Penelope noted that she was able to “make everything they want but boots” after a lesson in knitting stockings from an old Irish woman,16 but she had already cut to the heart of the problem faced by many mothers: expectation often exceeded their existing skill, and even the most accomplished needlewomen sometimes fell short. With guidance and practice, though, women were capable of more. This was essential where women found themselves separated, often by thousands of miles, from mothers and sisters who before could be called on for assistance. In Queensland throughout January and February 1868, Katie Hume turned her attention to sewing for her first baby. After a month’s work she anxiously explained to her mother back home “I occasionally have nervous fits, & fancy the things will not be ready in time.”17 While knowing it was her duty, Katie dearly wished for some assistance: “It is such pretty interesting work but I must say I often long for sisterly sympathy & assistance! . . . I find the cutting out rather tiring, but generally do it in the cool of the morning. I have cut out the little gowns & shirts, the latter are most ravishing!”18 To her sister Sophia, Katie confessed that she found she worked slowly: “I find one does not get on very fast, even with a machine, when one has to do all the fixing & fastening off etc. oneself. At least it makes a great difference! . . . I often think how much assistance I might have if only I were within reach of the sisterhood, but I must make the best of my exiled condition.”19 A month later, Katie again wrote to her mother, this time with the positive news that “I have got on nicely with my ‘little things’ since I have been so much alone.”20 In that time she had made shirts, day gowns, and

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flannels—in quantities never mentioned but presumably sufficient. And the added benefit, as she later recognized, was that once a baby’s layette had been completed it could be kept and worn by subsequent children in a family. For the birth of her second child Katie found it “a great comfort having all the ‘little things’ ready this time,” but realized that she would continue to be busy “in the extending of [her first daughter] Ethel’s wardrobe, putting innumerable tucks in all her skirts to enable her to walk etc.”21 The Workwoman’s Guide enumerated the items of a baby’s layette, suggesting twelve to eighteen shirts were necessary for an infant, in addition to caps, pinafores, bands to be worn around the stomach and hips, nightgowns, and napkins (nappies), forming an extensive list of necessary items for newborns.22 In 1852 Emily Childers wrote of preparing her infant son Charlie’s first shirts, and as he grew, his pinafores—though she sought (and presumably found) a plain needlewoman to assist with her household’s needlework.23 These shirts are likely to be similar to a surviving hand-sewn infant’s shirt in the Buda House collection, presumably made by Bertha Leviny for her children (Figure 6.7). It is finely hand stitched to prevent the seams from irritating sensitive skin. Made pretty by the addition of machine-made lace around the sleeves and neck, it must have been one of many shirts in the Leviny house; not just because Bertha

Figure 6.7 Unknown maker [possibly Bertha Leviny], Infant’s Shirt, c. 1860s, (cotton). Collection: Buda Historic Home and Garden, 205. Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

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had ten children but because when they were worn daily they soiled quickly and required frequent washing.24 Enumerating this task, Sarah Pratt wrote to her sister Julia Rendall from New Plymouth, New Zealand, in 1858 that “every day [I] wash a couple of roundabout pinafores for baby.”25 Once the extensive layette had been prepared, a new realization set in: the simple fact that children grew quickly. Sewing for even a single growing child could be a challenge, and in Melbourne in 1855 Céleste de Chabrillan focused her needlework on clothing her adopted daughter. As she observed, “With Solange, there is no lack of work to do.”26 Women with larger families sought help where they could. Eliza Lucas, who arrived in Australia as a child with her parents and eight siblings in 1848, recalled how in the early 1850s her mother’s friends, the wives of Melbourne merchants, helped make dresses for the six girls. It was a vast workload for one woman, however Susannah Lucas had an advantage: she had been a “dressmaker before marriage so she did the cutting out and these three kind friends came over every afternoon to help Mother make the dresses.”27 Women who migrated with their family took advantage of the ready assistance they could call on from daughters or sisters, and Sarah Bucknall increasingly realized the potential for her daughter Caroline to sew for her younger siblings. Sarah’s own time was limited. When she arrived in Port Phillip in 1843 with her husband Edward Gittins Bucknall, she had six children. Her family expanded to eight children born over a nineteen-year period, with her youngest, Albert, born in 1848. With Caroline completing her education at a private ladies’ college in Melbourne and more time to devote to the task, Sarah instructed: “I have sent some print, for you to make Albert’s frock . . . I should like you to buy some print or gingham, and make him another. Do not buy anything expensive as he spoils it very soon.”28 One of the dresses worn by the boys of the Bucknall family survives (Figure 6.8). Stitched by hand around the 1850s, the tartan dress features a collar, and bands running from shoulder to waist with fabric-covered wooden buttons. The bodice and long sleeves are lined; the skirt is full with a deep hem and tucks which could be unpicked to lengthen it. The dress fastens at the center back with metal hooks and eyes. The open seams are raw at the edges, and the somewhat irregular stitches suggests domestic rather than professional work. The maker of the dress is unknown; however, it is not unreasonable to suggest it was made by a woman in the family: Sarah or, perhaps as circumstances suggest, Caroline. Caroline had the resources, access to materials, and as she received her genteel education, the necessary time to help clothe her infant brother. It is conceivable that Albert wore the tartan dress just a few years after Caroline made his infant frocks.

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Figure 6.8 Unknown maker, Boy’s Dress, c. 1850s, (cotton), 58 × 30 cm. Collection: National Trust of Australia (Victoria). Photographer: Lorinda Cramer.

Pressures in the Colony: Time and Resources Sewing for children could be aided, or complicated, by the availability of domestic help and the steady financial resources needed to keep them. When Maggie Hoey wrote to her mother in Scotland in April 1858, she acknowledged that she did “not like the idea of you putting yourself to trouble about” what she described as “some more little things for the children.” Instead, with the assistance of her servant Helen, Maggie found she could “get a good deal sewed for them myself. I have just been busy making a few things to keep them warm in the very cold weather we will soon have. I made a little cloth coat for Robert and put his first pocket into it and I assure you, he is a very great man.”29 Maggie was grateful for her competent, hard-working servant; four years later, her sister Jane Hamilton faced a very different prospect. Jane acknowledged of Maggie’s children, her wards, that “Robert and Maggie are growing very fast.” Describing the pressure she felt, she explained “I find it hard to get to sewing for everybody now-a-days, especially as I am going to try for a little without a servant—till we see what

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turns up.”30 Taken side-by-side Maggie and Jane’s comments reveal how a good domestic servant could free a woman from household tasks to focus on her needlework or, when absent, chain her to her housework. Having the time was one thing, having access to fabrics was another. Some women in the colony found fabric supplies were unreliable or that well-priced materials were difficult to obtain. In 1862 Jane Hamilton requested that her mother send more fabric from Scotland that she could use for clothing the children. Jane’s needs were specific, and she particularly wanted “a few yards of gingham or regatta shirting or brown linen—suitable for pinafores—sort of overall pinafores being the coolest and best wear for little folks in the heat of summer.”31 Jane’s letters reveal that she found fabric expensive on the goldfields, asking of her mother: “If you don’t think me too troublesome, I wonder if you could fall in with remnants of prints such as Maggie had from Mr. Manson— wearable prints come about 6d and 9d per yard here—I would gladly remit you a pound or two for them.”32 Materials were eagerly sought as children wore out or grew out of their clothes. The decade before in her store on the Ballarat diggings, Martha Clendinning described how she was “constantly being asked for clothing materials by the women.” Despite understanding its value both to goldfield residents and her own business, Martha found that she was unable to stock it as “goods of that nature would have required more room than we could spare” in the store that comprised half of her tent home.33 Clothing supplies therefore crossed the Empire, sent from families in Britain at the request of those in the colonies so that boxes were always eagerly awaited and opened with great anticipation. Maggie Hoey proudly described her son’s appearance for her sister Jane in 1857 in a colorful ensemble comprising material sent from Scotland: He had on the blue dress Mamma sent which I have made up into a little frock and a loose cross cut coat with a cross fold all round . . . This I confined with a bright blue belt to match pulled far down for he’s a very long waisted little boy. He had on his little pink neckerchief and a very pretty Leghorn hat trimmed with a royal blue ribbon and a white feather in front which Tom gave him for his birthday. James remarked that he was more like rigged out for Buchanan Street [Glasgow’s main thoroughfare] than Bendigo!34

Closer to home, a supply of fabric might be found in old adults’ clothing which could be cut down, adjusted, or resized. When Jane Brown married Andrew Hamilton, her niece and bridesmaid Maggie wore a dress cut from her mother’s gown. As Jane explained: “Wee Maggie wore that white dress with the

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two insertions which her mother used to wear long ago. Poor M[aggie] had torn off the skirt and told me to make it for her wee lassie: How little did she dream when it would first be worn! The wee thing looked so nice with her blue sash and shoulder ribbons.”35 Jane cut down an old dress of her own when Maggie’s brother Robert was old enough to wear knickerbockers, making him a suit from it for church and school wear.36 This common method allowed adult clothes, no longer suitable for wear in their current form but still a valuable resource, to be reused in the family. It was favored for reasons of economy by Isabella Ramsay. Writing in her diary in June 1858, she revealed the strain on her personal finances: “I was afraid that my income would not keep a servant.”37 Determined to keep her fifteen-year-old daughter Hannah well-dressed, just a few months later she made her a frock out of her old black silk dress. Not having to pay for the fabric meant that Isabella could afford to seek the assistance of a needlewoman with the more difficult work, presumably the bodice. She spent a second day by herself “Busy at Hannah’s dress at any spare minute.”38

A Mother’s Love and Devotion Clothing children was continuous labor, relentless in its demands. Yet it was underpinned by the nineteenth-century genteel ideal of womanhood that placed women at the heart of the home and family, emphasizing their role as wife and mother.39 Maternity became an essential characteristic of femininity and Dror Wahrman, tracing a late eighteenth-century shift in the concept, locates the move “from maternity as a general ideal, broadly prescriptive but allowing for individual deviations, to maternity as inextricably intertwined with the essence of femininity for each and every woman.”40 Ideas about motherhood transformed from normative and inevitable to a meaningful expression of femininity. It was given a new emotive character: motherhood became a fulfilling career, so that sewing clothing for children extended beyond the practical concerns of keeping a child clothed and warm. On a more profound level, it made visible her “natural” maternal instincts, and in externalizing a mother’s love, her sewing was proof of devotion.41 Poorly clothed children raised an unthinkable alternative: the suggestion of poverty, but more troubling, of a willing maternal neglect. Women who were unable to clothe their children were judged, a fact laid bare in court reports of colonial newspapers. One case, reported in 1864, recounted how “the children

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lived in a state of the greatest filth, wretchedness, and neglect, suffering severely from the want of cleanliness and want of clothing,” with their mother often drunk and frequently violent. In the warm summer months, a lack of clothing could have serious consequences and a police officer observed on one visit “one of the children, aged three years, quite naked, and suffering much from sunburns over the shoulders and arms.”42 At a bare minimum, clothing protected children from the heat or the cold, but such a failing underscored a shocking lack of maternal care. In making the clothing for their children, a mother’s care could be expressed and consequently observed by others. This understanding goes some way to explaining why women made clothing—and often went to considerable lengths to do so—over purchasing it, when some ready-made children’s clothing could be found in town as well as in goldfield stores. Goldfields resident Emily Skinner quickly recognized the demand for children’s clothing on the diggings and turned to her domestic skills to supplement her family’s uncertain income. Driven by what she described as her “mercenary desire to make money” Emily took in washing and ironing.43 She also found her needlework skills could be put to good use in making children’s dresses. She was not alone in doing so and working with a woman whom Emily described as having been “reared in luxury,” she masked their paid employment as a genteel pastime. Yet, where gold seeking was uncertain business that could result in fortune, failure, or anything in between, making children’s clothing could go some way to elevating financial stress, especially where, as Emily’s friend had recognized “she could get very much more [sewing] than she and her girls could do.”44 Martha Clendinning, who didn’t make children’s dresses but rather sold them in her goldfields store, was keenly attuned to the demand. Martha’s insistence on establishing a store with her sister—despite her husband and brother-in-law’s opposition—turned out to be a shrewd business decision, and they sold the best tea, good coffee, sugar, and tobacco.45 Quickly recognizing the motivation of their customers, Martha also sold infants’ clothes and they proved to be hugely popular. As she explained, after sending an order to Melbourne they “received some dainty little garments, the likes of which had never appeared on any gold fields before. The delight of the women at the sight of them was beyond description.” They were considered a luxury, even though Martha and her sister knew them to be unassuming: “What beautiful things,” exclaimed a digger’s wife, “they make for babies now. I never saw anything like these when I lived in the old country,” and truly she

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spoke, for the wife of an English country labourer never had anything but unbleached calico, coarse flannel and poor, common print with which to clothe her little ones. Yet what we obtained from Melbourne were simple, but being all of white material and tastefully made, with little knitted woollen hoods, elicited the warmest admiration and envy.46

So great was their desire that Martha explained “those who possessed babies managed by hook or by crook, in many cases, to obtain a share of their husband’s gold, and visited our store for some of the precious articles.”47 This line of business paid off nicely, and Martha and her sister had soon made enough to place a second order.48 However, genteel mothers continued to go to great lengths to sew for their children as an expression of maternal care. They were aided by access to materials (or frustrated when this was not the case), familiarity with appropriate styles of clothing and the skills required to create them, and the time (even at the expense of other tasks, if necessary) to do so. Therefore, when Jane Hamilton resolutely continued to make her children’s clothing, together with her niece and nephew’s, on the goldfields despite pressure from all sides—material shortages, reduced support that she could call on, and the constant demand for her work—we can be sure that she understood how their dress had implications for her genteel femininity. Having bought Robert his first shirt in 1862 and paying three shillings for it, Jane reflected that she must make his shirts for school “if possible.”49 In dressing the children in her care neatly and tidily through clothing made by her own hand, Jane’s genteel sensibilities were made visible. When successful diggers’ wives purchased pretty clothing for their children it was because they now had the financial resources to do so. Dressing their children in fine garments—of a quality they had never worn as children—was certainly a display of maternal care. However, the misstep occurred in not recognizing the labor of devotion that was bound to sewing children’s clothing. Genteel women also turned to their husband’s appearance with the aim that he be correctly attired for earning the family income whether through business, trade, working the land, or digging for gold.

Protecting the Male Body When Joseph Brady travelled from Ireland to Sydney in 1850, he packed a finelymade linen shirt (Figure 6.9). It is likely to have been one of many carried with

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Figure 6.9 Unknown maker, White Linen Shirt Worn by Joseph Brady, 1849, (linen), 96.9 × 62 cm. Collection: Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2001/120/1. Photographer: Marinco Kojdanovski.

him to his new life in Australia. Made the year before Joseph sailed for New South Wales, it is believed to have been a Christmas gift sewn by a female member of his family for it bares the laundry mark “Joseph Brady Dec 25/49” in black ink. It is finely-worked and was clearly cherished—its condition reveals that it was rarely worn or perhaps worn only for special occasions.50 In material terms, Joseph Brady’s hand-stitched shirt represents many hours of work for a home seamstress; more intangibly, it reflects the devotion of his mother or sister, their care for his wellbeing that I have already touched upon and will return to again in this chapter. According to the English publication The Common Things of Every-Day Life, shirt making was the most important kind of plain sewing. Its

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author, Anne Bowman, described the best cloth and techniques to use, and gave clear instruction on stitching: the seams should be sewn with strong cotton, she advised, and the stitching “very fine.”51 Such advice was indispensable when wives, mothers, and sisters of all social levels commonly made shirts for their menfolk in the home, though large numbers of needlewomen in factories and as outworkers also made shirts for their livelihood.52 In their plainest form, shirts were relatively simple to make compared to men’s outer garments. Loose fitting—although those sewn in the home were always made with their wearer in mind—and with long straight side seams, they nevertheless demanded time of their maker. One report suggested needlewomen took an estimated thirteen-and-a-half hours to hand stitch a shirt.53 A woman in her home may have taken far longer, although even then quick work was admired. In Margaret Brown’s 1907 memoir, she recalled that her step-grandmother, Mrs Charter, could hand-stitch a frilled linen shirt in a day. Such was her regard, and so great was the change since those days, that Margaret recognized Mrs Charter’s work was “almost unbelievable in these slipshod, untidy times.”54 Good shirt-making skills were commended, but they were also essential when shirt making was considered a woman’s duty. When Penelope Selby reflected on her two surviving sons, and with sorrow seven stillborn babies including six boys and one girl, she posed the question: “What should I have done if I had had my eight boys about me? The one girl would have had plenty of shirt making.”55 Australian-born Jane Blackwood Mack exposed the extent of this potential workload, announcing that her mother “was very skillful with her needle and used to astonish us by saying that whilst she attended School regularly she had always to make two dozen white linen shirts for her Father and brothers every year.”56 These sources reveal a preference for homemade shirts that was also reflected in colonial fiction. Novelist Catherine Helen Spence wrote of her characters Grace and Margaret “sewing over again the strong shirts they have bought readymade, which Grace says are only blown together” for their brothers to take with them to the Victorian goldfields in Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever.57 Shirts “only blown together” were problematic when worn next to the skin. They soiled quickly and were frequently scrubbed in the process of washing. Small, tight stitches and turning raw edges inside were preferred, ensuring shirts could withstand this vigorous process over an extended period.58 Homemade shirts were therefore considered higher quality: they were stronger wearing and hardier when washed. They were also promoted as morally superior, communicating the domestic ideology of women’s concern for their

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family’s comfort, care, and wellbeing. Given the intimate contact between the shirt and the body, women’s selection of fabric and their careful crafting of fine, flat seams made visible this expression of devotion.59 But what of men’s outer garments: their coats and trousers, as although these could be purchased tailormade or ready-made in the mid-nineteenth century, a range of primary sources reveal women also made them in the home.

Men’s Clothing in the Colony Ready-made menswear was mass produced to standard sizes earlier than women’s and children’s clothing.60 Slop clothing or work-wear—cheap and roughly made, using coarse and hard-wearing materials—from Britain was supplied at the time of convict settlement, and more was made in the colonies in convict female factories. It was used to clothe convicts and common sailors, and was issued to guards and other government employees.61 Australian drapers carried an increasing range of ready-made clothing in the first half of the nineteenth century, sometimes together with a tailoring department for gentlemen who preferred custom-made clothing.62 Catering to increasingly diverse tastes, Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye observed that, following the rush, Melbourne’s “tailors made a great display, clothes of every kind were exhibited.”63 The growing population combined with a steady appetite for clothing stimulated the colonial clothing industry, and locally made clothing was increasingly sold beside that which was imported.64 Discerning migrants, though, retained a preference for tailor-made clothing—with British the most highly sought—over the colonial purchases that they considered to be inferior. Rachel Henning’s brother Biddulph took this view. In 1855 she sent his old coat, trousers, and waistcoat to their sister Henrietta for an English tailor to use as patterns. As Rachel explained, the cost and quality of menswear in Australia was unacceptable: Clothes are so dear and so bad out here that he wants a lot from England. He means to get them from Manchester if he can, and has written to Mr. Ellesworth about it, but if he cannot manage it Biddulph will ask you to get them for him, either in London or Taunton; the latter would be better, as Jeanes makes well and cheaply.65

It was also inevitable that new clothing would, at some stage, be required when migrants might have carried with them a minimum of two complete suits

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of clothing, six shirts, and six pairs of stockings—what Eneas MacKenzie, for example, outlined as essential items in The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia of 1853.66 That same year, G. Butler Earp listed a more extensive wardrobe for both daily and best wear: a minimum of a dozen shirts, two Guernsey shirts, a dozen pairs of cotton socks, a pair of good fustian trousers, fustian jacket and waistcoat, pea jacket, cloth cap, Sunday-going coat, waistcoat, and trousers.67 Men with greater resources carried clothing which formed a considerable wardrobe including plain, everyday garments, additional rugged clothing suitable for the weather and work should gentlemen be headed for the bush, and best dress for which to be seen in town and at formal occasions.68 Immigrants walking hundreds of miles from Melbourne to the goldfields, though, preferred to carry a lighter load.69 When John Sherer set off from Melbourne to the Mount Alexander diggings, he carried “a couple of blue woollen shirts, half-a-dozen worsted half-hose, a pair of fustian trousers, two pairs of canvas ditto, and a jacket and waistcoat of beaverteen . . . My head was covered with a black felt sombrero, which was occasionally exchanged for a Scotch cap, and I had a pilot coat, but very seldom wore it.” His two companions, he noted, were “similarly habited.”70 He was not uncommon to rarely wear his coat, and Serwyn Korzelinski observed in goldfields locations that “Overcoats, frockcoats and surtouts disappear and everyone becomes similar in outward appearance.”71 With coats expressing style, taste, and resources their excision, as Korzelinski realized, complicated readings of identity.72 Removing coats also meant exposing shirts, marking a transition in standards of dress.73 The preoccupation with aligning correct dress and status shifted as men made their selections determined by need: clothing designed for physical labor dominated over style or aesthetic preference. The favored diggers’ garb can be seen in vivid color in Eugen von Guérard’s painting I Have Got It of 1854 (Figure 6.10). The painting’s subject—a hirsute miner—proudly displays his impressive find wearing the typical costume of a broad-brimmed hat, and garments made for work including a jumper and a pair of hard-wearing moleskin trousers. This is not the typical appearance or dress of a gentleman, although he might have been one. Their common appearance highlights the challenge in goldrush Victoria of identifying social peers from laborers or ex-convicts when the confused style, cut, fabric, and quality of men’s clothing could no longer be employed as an external signifier as it was in Britain. Instead, clothing could confirm or complicate identity. The gold rush created new opportunities for consumption in which lucky diggers and tradesmen enthusiastically and audaciously adopted fine clothing. Some spent their money on extravagant new outfits, while others

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Figure 6.10 Eugen von Guérard, I Have Got It, 1854, painting (oil on canvas), 25.2 × 19.8 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H15746.

developed a taste for expensive garments incongruously combined with workwear and finished with ostentatious jewelry—and while they may have aimed to dress like a gentleman the opposite was often apparent. One swaggering digger in S.T. Gill’s illustration Improvident Diggers in Melbourne of 1869 dresses in a fine top hat absurdly teamed with a work shirt and a red waist sash (Figure 6.11). Highlights of gold pepper his person, from the rings on his fingers

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Figure 6.11 S.T. Gill, Improvident Diggers in Melbourne, 1869, painting (watercolor), 26.8 × 19.5 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H86.7/36.

to his heavy watch chain. The gold nugget pin set off by his royal blue cravat announces the source of his wealth. His companion also wears a starling mix. His richly patterned waistcoat is embellished with gold and he peers in a jeweler’s window, perhaps with the intention of adding more. Through their dress, these diggers presented a self partly at odds with reality but also distinctly exposing it—betrayed by the confused clash.74 Their dress blurred the lines, but conversely

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so too did that of gentlemen wearing practical garments made for manual outdoor work, expressing what Jane Elliott defines as the “complex colonial phenomenon that . . . gentlemen could and did dress less formally.”75 Therefore, some men overstated their status while others understated theirs, replacing the clothes they typically wore for garments suited to working the land or digging for gold. While many commentators went to great pains to describe these new modes of dressing—some with surprise, others with unease—there was, in fact, more nuance to men’s dress than that popularly noted. The digger’s dress endlessly illustrated and described in the first years of the rush suggested uniformity of appearance—and certainly there was. But not all men in goldfields camps or towns were diggers and not everyone adopted the digger’s garb or a rough approximation of it. A photograph of five men standing near the opening of a mine’s shaft on the Beechworth goldfields in 1856 better makes this point (Figure 6.12). One rests his hand on the windlass; the others stand by a small mound of extracted earth. Three of the men wear variations of the digger’s outfit; a fourth, inspecting the earth from their mine, is set apart by his dark suit. A fifth

Figure 6.12 Walter B. Woodbury, Five Unidentified Men Working a Gold Mine Near Beechworth, Victoria, 1856, photograph (sepia toned), 8.6 × 10.8 cm. Collection: National Library of Australia, nla.obj-151253457.

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man is further distinguished from the diggers: with a pipe in his mouth, he wears a top hat and suit, suggesting he holds a very different role in the enterprise. Historian Melissa Bellanta’s fine-grained reading of men’s dress in the New South Wales goldfields towns of Gulgong and Hill End in the early 1870s alerts us to the fact that even though commentators may have voiced their frustrations in distinguishing social position through dress, those who spent time in mining towns were likely to be attuned to the distinctions between what men wore—whether as miners, businessmen, or bankers—and the subtleties within each.76 This is evident in a group of photographs by G.H. Jenkinson documenting daily life in the Victorian town of Dunolly around 1861. In 1856, 12,000 diggers flocked to “an extensive rush . . . [on] some new ground near Dunolly,” and the photographs illustrate how, five years later, the town was thriving.77 In one, a group of men are gathered in front of the premises of the provision and wine and spirit merchants J. Wilson & Co (Figure 6.13). These men are dressed for work, though the nature of this work might have ranged from those who owned the business to their hired laborers. Some are distinguished by their three-piece

Figure 6.13 G.H. Jenkinson, [Broadway, Dunolly], c. 1861, photograph (ambrotype), 12.1 × 16.6 cm. Collection: Pictures Collections, State Library Victoria, H26121.

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suits and neckwear—although there is a range of quality even in this—and others are ready to haul the crates and barrels wearing garments of tougher materials and in their shirtsleeves. A second photograph of men and boys under the verandah of Harper & Ferguson’s store, which prominently displays “Gold Bought” signage, shows men in clothing that spans from crisp white shirts and neckwear, to misshapen coats and trousers soiled at the knee (Figure  6.14). Documented in this informal style, the variation in their dress suggests differences in status, background, and occupation—they are not all dressed the same and signs of social distinction are apparent. Even when men adopted a style of dress for their new location—like those in the bush with their clothing made for physical work—they also retained the dress of their class which they donned for more formal occasions and visits to town. As a photograph of a couple seated on the verandah of their log homestead dating between 1860 and 1865 reveals, they also carefully selected their best dress for portraits (Figure 6.15). Although surrounded by bushland, this couple have made a concerted effort to prepare for the photographer: the man is cleanly groomed and shaven, dressed in a well-fitted suit with his

Figure 6.14 G.H. Jenkinson, [Harper & Ferguson Store, Dunolly], c. 1861, photograph (ambrotype), 12.1 × 16.6 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H26132.

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Figure 6.15 Unknown photographer, Bush Homestead, c. 1860–65, photograph (ambrotype), 8.5 × 11.6 cm. Collection: Pictures Collection, State Library Victoria, H92.336.

boots highly polished. Without the camera present, we can imagine him very differently attired. For me it raises a question: What part might his wife have played in his appearance? Might she have sewn his shirt, replaced his buttons, and mended small tears? And while this suit is well-tailored, could she have contributed her needlework to keep him suitably clothed for his daily labor? I am interested here in investigating men’s clothing that was not purchased ready-made or by the hand of a tailor, but sewn by a woman in the home, as primary sources illustrate how increasingly, women’s labor might extend beyond conventional domestic sewing practices. For some women this required a shift in attitude, a rethinking of the long-held view that expertise in tailoring was masculine—a consequence of the industry’s male domination.78 But for women prepared to adapt, a new opportunity emerged for contributing to their husband’s personal presentation.

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Tailoring in the Genteel Home “I know nothing about tailoring,” Rachel Henning admitted in 1865. Conceding that she had learned dressmaking since her arrival in Australia, Rachel—with a confidence that may have bordered on bravado—wrote from her brother’s Queensland station to her sister in England: “no doubt the tailoring could also be acquired when necessary.”79 The following year, Rachel married Deighton Taylor, and five years later on their farm, The Peach Trees, in New South Wales her needlework skills had evolved. Rachel explained to her sister that she was motivated by economy and location, noting: “I have also just cut out and begun another pair of trousers for Mr Taylor . . . A good deal of home manufacture goes on in the bush, and it saves a great deal of money.”80 In fact, Australian dress historian Margaret Maynard recognizes that location drove many women, especially those in rural areas, to make clothes for men. Although they were not necessarily skilled with this work, women were expected to meet the increasing demand for their skills.81 It may have been that Rachel’s early attempts were rudimentary, but her tailoring no doubt served its purpose when a preoccupation with manual tasks for men in the bush meant that hard-wearing clothing was necessary. And if those garments were perhaps of a rougher appearance than what Deighton Taylor wore on trips to town, he no doubt accepted a separation between his clothing for public appearances and his everyday workwear. Newly-married Katie Hume was also busy sewing for her husband. Shortly after her arrival in Queensland in 1866, Katie wrote with barely-concealed pride to her sister Alice back home: “I have just accomplished making my husband a pair of holland trousers. The first of a set. They are pronounced a ‘stunning fit’ & quite professional!”82 Continuing in her efforts, a month later Katie wrote to her mother about how her sewing machine was “always occupied.” To the list of items she was sewing, Katie added that she was “making white alpaca coats for Walter, which is rather troublesome work.”83 Far from discouraging her, Katie persisted, and three years later Walter wrote to his sister-in-law praising the breadth of Katie’s sewing: “she’s so clever—she makes all sorts of things with her machine not only for herself & Ethel, but for me—all my light summer clothes.”84 Genteel women rarely declared these practices publicly, making Elizabeth Townbridge’s description of her experiences in Australia, published in 1869 in Sharpe’s London Magazine, an exception. Elizabeth acknowledged: “I am at work for them [her husband and sons], most unsentimentally too, not working slippers, or embroidering braces, as delicate ladies are apt to do in the old country, but—I only write it in a whisper—making their cloth caps and trousers.”85 Emma

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Floyd suggests that this whisper was a carefully constructed “device that signified recognition of the distinction between gentility and colonial necessity.”86 While she may have felt some reluctance in openly admitting to the increased scope of her work beyond what “delicate ladies are apt to do in the old country,” Elizabeth’s statement reveals how shifting notions of gentility and women’s work could be reworked and indeed, made compatible.87 Maggie Hoey was prepared to expand the focus of her work but a challenge that she encountered in tailoring for her husband and brother-in-law on the goldfields, as she explained to her sister Jane, was that though “the sewing comes quite naturally to me . . . when shaping is required I often wish I had you beside me.”88 Maggie had, she acknowledged, been fortunate enough at home to rely on Jane’s skill in this area, but alone in the colony she was forced to improve on her own. In extending on her knowledge of the cut and construction of men’s garments, and with practice and patience, Maggie reassured Jane that she found she could now “get on pretty well.”89 Jane Hamilton faced her own pressures on the goldfields, where adapting was a necessary response to her husband’s mining venture which was “so fluctuating and uncertain.” Jane acknowledged to her family in Scotland: “I have much sewing between one and another, changes of season etc. I had a young lady in last week to help me, but I don’t feel justified in spending much in that way, for things are rather at a stand-still in our mining matters.”90 Tightening her purse strings meant rethinking the paid assistance Jane might call on to help clothe her family and the only alternative was to increase her own labor. It was part of a distinctive strategy, where Maynard recognizes that: “men and women did become less inhibited about clothing . . . Yet the strengths of bourgeois codes of formality were such that, wherever possible, conventional dress practices were maintained, controlled and indeed nurtured, sometimes by the expenditure of extraordinary effort and ingenuity, by women.”91 Through Maggie and Jane’s writing, a sense of this extraordinary effort is revealed as it offset expense, the challenges of location, and the wear and tear on clothing inevitable through physical toil.92 It is apparent, too, that genteel women in more settled areas sewed for their husbands. Isabella Ramsay described in her diary the loose underclothing she made for her husband in their Melbourne home, and demonstrating she was capable of sewing more, eleven days after first starting a coat for her husband, the Reverend Andrew Mitchell Ramsay, she noted she was “busy finishing Papa’s coat.”93 Economy is likely to have been a powerful factor for Isabella; her diary reveals that she preferred not to spend money on work she could do herself when the family’s finances were strained. Emily Childers was in a much more

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comfortable financial position, but her diary records how, in December 1853, she was “Busy tailoring for Hugh.” The next day she noted that she had finished her “little tailoring affairs” for her husband.94 Highlighting the task suggests her tailoring was unusual; regrettably she gives no clue as to what it involved. Yet it was clearly distinctive in her mind, set apart from her other needlework. Emily’s sewing was almost certainly influenced by a concern for her husband’s appearance (though she could afford the costs of a tailor), while a clear sense of devotion emerges. In April 1852, Emily recorded that she was “Mending H[ugh]’s trowsers & getting his things in order before I am laid by,” yet, even pregnant, Emily remained determined to manage Hugh’s clothing.95 As the work of a loving wife, it was important to Emily’s sense of self in a similar way to sewing her children’s clothing: a duty of care, with the power to contribute to how others saw her family.

Conclusion The evidence laid out in this chapter demonstrates the fundamental relationship between a woman and her family’s clothing: she managed what they wore, cleaned and maintained the condition of their garments, produced new clothes, and extended the life of old ones. As contemporary comments and illustrations show, clothing standards on the goldfields and in the bush were more relaxed due to the practicalities of labor and weather and were further influenced by isolation and shortages. Nevertheless, that wives and mothers observed certain registers of dress, particularly for public occasions, to support their family’s claim to genteel standards is beyond doubt. Women’s labor over the clothes of men and children was therefore critical to the practices of appearance management in the colony. Considerable time and skill was invested in making clothing in the home. This is hardly surprising given the attributes of a good wife and mother— protector, nurturer, and comforter—were linked to her skills in needlework. In sewing finer items of clothing such as babies’ and children’s wear, the ideals of domestic femininity were evidenced. Stitching these items in demanding settings—in the transience of the goldfields or the isolation of the bush— revealed a determined commitment to genteel values despite the dislocations of the migration experience. Such sewing created the visual cues that helped establish a wearer’s identity, but also implied a genteel wife or mother. Sewing men’s outer garments, however, challenged genteel labor. Traditionally the work

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of tailors or professional needlewomen, tailoring was adopted in the home in response to colonial pressures. While rarely publicly acknowledged by women, sewing men’s clothing was meaningful and valuable work, giving their husbands access to the clothing needed to make their mark in the colony.

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Inspired by the growing depth of research into the lives of women in Victoria’s gold-rush history, I have unpicked the many ways in which needlework made identity visible. From a young girl’s sampler, a pretty, embroidered fire screen adorning the parlor, an infant’s first shirt to endless piles of mending, the needle was a tool for constructing identity, with each transmitting its own discrete information about the girl or woman who stitched it. Though largely unacknowledged and daily domestic work for most women, sewing acquired meaning when enlisted to communicate genteel femininity. Such statements were heightened in gold-rush Victoria where identities could be unstable or impermanent: where luck in the “lottery” of gold seeking was indiscriminate, and where abrupt wealth, small-scale success, or bitter disappointment were potential outcomes for every digger’s labor—making Victoria the location of remarkable social mobility. There, gentlemen worked side-by-side with their social inferiors, and genteel women adapted to colonial demands by rethinking their capacity for labor. Situating my work in the colonial home, I contend that women’s household labor made valuable contributions to the home, family, and domestic economy. Yet the impact of their work resonated beyond its walls as needlework was used as a vehicle for establishing, asserting, or maintaining social status. Intimate domestic practices made powerful public statements, and such was the consequence in gold-rush society that women should be placed not at the margins of colonial history but rather at its core. Focusing on themes including needlework as labor or leisure and its critical place in a girl’s education, and the needlework genres of fancywork, plain sewing, dressmaking, and tailoring, opens up for consideration those practices that transferred to the colony with seemingly little disruption and others that were tested. In concluding, I reframe this work to consider the distinct and meaningful differences between what can be understood on the one hand, as the public performance of needlework, and on the other, as private, hidden practices. Both contributed to identity with the explicit display of certain forms 169

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of sewing set against the deliberate concealment of others, though the boundaries sometimes blurred. Fancywork, both its practice and products, were highly visible to a woman’s peers and my work is not the first to establish how it heightened the presentation of the genteel self. However, it relocates decorative needlework into challenging circumstances—from establishing new homes to degrees of privation in the developing colony—to explore how it remained a signifier of leisure and the symbolic “work” of genteel women. The knowledge and resources necessary to create a pair of embroidered slippers or a smoking cap, the space or stage for its performance, combined with the placement of fancy-worked objects in the parlor, worn by a woman’s husband, gifted to friends, or sold in the charity bazaar, strengthened constructions of the genteel home and family much as they did throughout the British world. It made visible the transfer of a British middleclass culture to Victoria, and the subsequent formation of a colonial-inflected gentility. It acquired increasing value in the social turmoil of gold-rush Victoria: promoted as a land of opportunity where the poor could become rich in the blink of an eye (and lose it almost as quickly if careless), or where steady, provident choices could lead to improved standards of living. Where genteel women found themselves challenged by fortune or failure, homes that were transient, servants in short supply, and settings of isolation or hardship, fancywork could be deployed in idealized performances of the self. Even when overwhelmed by other more utilitarian forms of sewing—a real possibility when colonial women were rarely as leisured as their British counterparts—the effort invested in finding the time and materials to produce modest luxuries had implications for managing identity. Considered against this backdrop of social and geographical upheaval, the practice of fancywork made visible attempts to uphold genteel culture in new homes and locations, where frames of personal identity could wither, sustain, or be appropriated most inappropriately. As such, women’s engagement with fancywork was defensible in the face of increasing criticism and the simultaneous push for productive, industrious colonial women. I stress that despite the tendencies to reduce fancywork to something insignificant and frivolous, it was, in fact, a significant act of assertion, yielding tangible evidence of genteel values and behaviors. Other visible forms of needlework were encouraged via the nineteenthcentury ideologies that defined women through their maternal and moral roles, and in this frame sewing for children and the poor became a compelling symbol of domestic duty and public virtue. Sewing was a fundamental component of motherhood, part of the prescriptions of nineteenth-century femininity, and

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making clothing for children reflected love and devotion. As a visible indicator to observers of maternal care, genteel mothers managed their children’s clothing, cleaned and maintained its condition, produced new clothes, and extended the life of old ones. Despite the revision of standards and some downwards dressing in the colony, mothers continued to recognize that certain registers of dress— particularly on public occasions—were essential to family claims of gentility. In circumstances of transience or isolation, this revealed an unwavering commitment to preserving genteel standards. Mothers, therefore, dressed their children carefully, recognizing that such cues made visible their identity in the distinct social and cultural character of the colony and asserted their family’s status. Publicly engaging with plain sewing was more complicated for genteel women; in most cases it was hidden from an audience using careful strategies designed to shield their labor. Within a narrow band of activity, however, utilitarian sewing became a deliberate performance of gentility, revealing exemplary moral behavior. When undertaken as Christian charity, sewing for the poor was a particularly effective display of family status: indicating a woman’s time and resources, and providing evidence of her benevolent nature. It was especially significant in Victoria where destitution was widespread among the most vulnerable segment of gold-rush society: not only deserted wives and children, but men and their dependents unable to find or earn a living. Hence, where the work of plain sewing shifted to recipients outside the home, its nature and purpose formed the foundation and measure for conceptions of female virtue in the colony. In doing so it blurred conventional understandings of plain sewing as labor, to instead suggest worthy, unreproachable leisure. In the ways described here, I suggest that fancywork, sewing for children, and helping to clothe the poor were clear expressions of genteel femininity. Such acts materialized gentleness, purity, piety, domesticity, and devotion, and elevated these forms of needlework so that they now sat firmly within culturally and socially endorsed genteel performance. Yet, despite being thought of as natural, genteel and feminine behaviors were, in fact, developed then shaped over long years of home and school-based training—a process that remained important even at the margins of the Empire. Instilling and refining needlework skills was an activity that was deliberately and repeatedly enacted from an early age. It was fundamental to the gendering of girls and the social production of genteel womanhood, much as acquiring accomplishments endured as an essential part of educating Victorian girls as ladies, no matter how trying the environment or how geographically removed they were from polite society. The ultimate aim was

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that girls appear graceful, elegant, and ladylike, and that this carried into adulthood. Girls’ training in plain sewing was also indispensable, increasing in value for female migrants and their daughters as status was tested in the field of gold-rush living. Plain sewing was often conceived as working-class employment through its functional, mundane, and repetitive nature. Yet, in reality, it was necessary work that most women did in one form or another, when tensions between useful and idle (and their relationship with the genteel ideal of womanhood) clashed, and through which revised notions of what constituted genteel behavior emerged. By mid-century, commentators, moralists, and female migrants promoted diligence and duty—factors that constructed the useful, industrious woman. They stressed how changes in circumstance could bring about a real need to add to the household economy through plain sewing and other forms of labor. They also underlined the moral imperative of being capable of the work required to care for the family. Certain conventional British ideas remained strong, however the seemingly incompatible connection between a woman’s leisure and her usefulness was re-examined, as genteel women negotiated a blurred line between work and gentility, made visible in the scope and extent of their everyday sewing. Compromises were extended in goldfields and bush conditions to embrace the needlework of necessity, and these conceptual and behavioral shifts were made real as many genteel migrants adapted to their new homeland. Colonial femininity took on new purpose, aligned as it was with a woman’s industry. While genteel behaviors were a mark of status, a fracture with old-world practice could co-exist when carefully managed. Public performances of the genteel self in the colony were maintained (if not heightened) for the benefit of one’s social peers, while incompatible but necessary activities were enacted away from the public gaze—concealed to counter their challenge to women’s leisure as a fundamental tenet of the genteel lifestyle. Hidden as it was, female industry contributed significantly to assertions of identity and, as such, women found themselves taking on certain tasks not at the expense of genteel identity but in order to sustain it. This was vital where markers relating to the comfort of the home, the cleanliness of the family and a modest, tasteful outward appearance were expected by genteel observers. Through plain sewing, women ensured their home had sheets on its beds and curtains on its windows, that their family wore a full complement of undergarments, that clothing was carefully maintained and mended, and that textile items remained in good repair. These products were subtle yet purposeful expressions of genteel living. Preserving the material standards of home and family was effective non-verbal communication that

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marked a critical distinction between the genteel home and its inhabitants and the aspirational or lower ranks. And it seems likely that there was tacit collusion between genteel labor and a recognition, though silent, from their audience. Increased dressmaking and tailoring in the home further reveal the shifting ideologies of women’s labor in Victoria, underscoring the tension between genteel standards and colonial necessity. Clothing remained a visible marker of status in the colony although dress standards relaxed in some circumstances, with genteel women repositioning their needlework as a strategy for maintaining appearances. Modifying women’s clothing was a valuable practice for all. It ensured the long life of garments, kept them fashionable and in good repair, allowed them to change as shape and circumstance did, to be passed from one woman to another, all while recognizing the genteel commitment to economy. This understanding of the value of dress transferred from Britain throughout its colonies, and was heightened in goldfields or bush living. Making dresses anew, however, required skill, experience, and knowledge to achieve the close fit of a bodice and a current silhouette, and was thus commonly the work of professional dressmakers and needlewomen. But where factors demanded otherwise, it is evident that genteel women made their own. In sewing gowns that fit well and used appropriate fabrics and trims, women made public statements about their good taste. The undisclosed work to make such a statement was valuable, shifting the physical requirements of appearance management into their own hands. Home dressmaking gained in strength over following decades as sewing machines, paper patterns, fabrics, and the dissemination of fashionable styles grew more readily accessible, vastly enlarging the possibilities for sewing women’s clothing in the home. A distinct potential also emerged when tailoring their husbands’ clothing. Men’s clothing was generally available ready-made or tailor-made in the colony, but shortages could occur, quality was variable, and it came at a cost. Women therefore adapted their skills to the sometimes-unfamiliar sewing of menswear, though its pervasiveness was frequently underplayed. Mending their clothing was commonplace, an essential practice given many men’s new relationships to physical labor. Making their trousers and coats was more a challenging prospect, and one that was influenced by factors including economy and location. While little acknowledged, my research reveals how advantageous these sewing practices could be. My intention has been to position this idea within notions of genteel economy, where women recognized the sewing needed to manage the visible signs of standing. It simultaneously existed as a material means through which they communicated devotion and their responsibility for their husband’s needs.

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Surviving material culture and primary sources offer rich insights into how women struggled with or defied expectations, responded to the demands of colonial living, negotiated their place in their new environment, and redefined their identities during a turbulent period. Resolving the web of conflicting issues required compromises: between femininity and work; gentility and work; usefulness and idleness; factors that were complicated in the circumstances of gold-rush living. While some sewing practices conformed to expectation, in certain areas and often simultaneously, the boundaries of others were tested. Domestic needlework in its various forms—whether fancywork for the parlor, undergarments for the family, linen for the home, simple clothing for the poor, women’s own dress, or their husband and children’s clothing—should thus be considered a valuable material expression. Through their stitching, women constructed and expressed their genteel identity, shaping an emergent Australian middle class whose values would soon constitute the largest segment of Australian society.

Notes Introduction 1 Maggie Brown to Jane Brown, April 29, 1854, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 2 Thomas Hoey to James Brown, January 9, 1854, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 3 Ibid. 4 James Hoey to Margaret Brown, September 22, 1854, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 5 Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich, “Mapping the British World,” in The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity, ed. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 3. 6 “The Gold Field,” Argus, September 29, 1851, 2. 7 James Hoey to James Brown, March 24, 1854, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 8 William Henry Archer, Census of Victoria 1861 (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1862), Part 2, 3; Geoffrey Serle, The Golden Age: A History of the Colony of Victoria 1851–1861 (1963, repr.; Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1977), 42. 9 Michael Cannon, Melbourne After the Gold Rush (Main Ridge: Loch Haven, 1993), 15–22; Jill Roe, Marvellous Melbourne: The Emergence of an Australian City (Sydney: Hicks Smith & Sons, 1974), 54. 10 Richard Broome, The Victorians: Arriving (McMahons Point: Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates, 1984), 74–5. 11 Ibid., 76. 12 For example: Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861), 14. 13 David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (St Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1994), 149–68. 14 For example: Margaret Anderson, “Mrs Charles Clacy, Lola Montez and Poll the Grogseller: Glimpses of Women on the Early Victorian Goldfields,” in Gold: Forgotten Histories and Lost Objects of Australia, ed. Iain McCalman, Alexander Cook and Andrew Reeves (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press,

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

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Notes

2001), 225–49; Louise Asher, “Martha Clendinning: A Woman’s Life on the Diggings,” in Double Time: Women in Victoria, 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1985), 51–60; Louise Blake, “Chasing Eliza Miles: An Archive Story,” Lilith: A Feminist History Journal 21 (2015): 78; Heather Holst, “Making a Home in Castlemaine in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2008); Susan Lawrence, Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000); Sara Martin, “Striking It Rich: Material Culture and Family Stories from the Central Victorian Goldfields” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2007); Alan Mayne, “Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields,” in Gold Tailings: Forgotten Histories of Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields, ed. Charles Fahey and Alan Mayne (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 235–43; Dorothy Wickham, “Silent Screams: The Hidden Agenda,” in Deeper Leads: New Approaches to Victorian Goldfields History, ed. Keir Reeves and David Nichols (Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 2007), 85–110; Dorothy Wickham, Women of the Diggings: Ballarat 1854 (Ballarat: Ballarat Historical Services Publishing, 2009); Clare Wright, “ ‘New Brooms They Say Sweep Clean’: Women’s Political Activism on the Ballarat Goldfields, 1854,” Australian Historical Studies 39, no. 3 (2008): 305–21; Clare Wright, The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka (Melbourne: Text, 2013). William Henry Archer, Census of Victoria 1871 (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1872), Part 1, 6. Henry Mundy, “Reminiscences,” c. 1912, 225, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 607, MS 10416, State Library Victoria. James Muir, December 22, 1852, “Diary,” 1852–1856, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 138, MS 10056, State Library Victoria. Norman Campbell, Census of Victoria 1854 (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1855), 15. Charlotte Perrottet to her Mother, May 14, 1856, “Letter,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 185, MS 10257, State Library Victoria. Emily Skinner, A Woman on the Goldfields: Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1854– 1878, ed. Edward Duyker (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 93. James Muir to Charlotte King, 1859, “Letter,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 138, MS 10056, State Library Victoria. Reuben Gatward to Polly, October 11, 1858, “Letter, Life on the Goldfields, Tarrangower, Victoria,” HT 3535, Museums Victoria. Charles Fahey and Alan Mayne, “ ‘All that Glitters. . .’: The Hidden History of Victoria’s Central Goldfields Region,” in Gold Tailings: Forgotten Histories of Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields, ed. Charles Fahey and Alan Mayne (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 8, 17. Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53: Written on the Spot (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), 283–4.

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25 Ellen Clacy’s actual experiences have been questioned by present-day scholars. See, for example, Susan Priestly, “Identifying Ellen Clacy: A Cautionary Tale,” Victorian Historical Journal 85, no. 1 (2014): 119–28; Ann Standish, Australia Through Women’s Eyes (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2008) 129–30; Marjorie Theobald, “Lies, Damned Lies and Travel Writers: Women’s Narratives of the Castlemaine Goldfields, 1852–54,” Victorian Historical Journal 84, no. 2 (2013): 191–213. The authenticity of other gold-rush narratives, including those of John Sherer and John Capper, have also been questioned, with concerns about their writing based on borrowed or plagiarized accounts, on pastiches of existing gold-rush narratives, and on the reliability of such reports. See: Donald J. Golding, “Introduction,” in Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia (Melbourne: Hawthorn Press, 1973), 2; Goodman, Gold Seeking, 131–2; John N. Molony and T. J. McKenna, “All That Glitters,” Labour History, no. 32 (1977): 33–45. 26 “Literature: A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia, in 1852 and 1853,” Morning Post, November 12, 1853, 3. 27 Broome, The Victorians, 93. 28 Fred Cahir, Black Gold: Aboriginal People on the Goldfields of Victoria, 1850–1870 (Canberra: ANU Press, 2012), 5. 29 Céleste de Chabrillan, The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-rush Australia (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998), 95. 30 Sarah Davenport, “Diary,” 1841–1869, 23, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 228, MS 10541, State Library Victoria. 31 Rebecca Sarah Greaves to William Holt, November 25, 1851, “Letter,” HT 8270, Museums Victoria. 32 Clacy, A Lady’s Visit, 255. 33 G.B.W., “The Rush to Otago,” Geelong Advertiser, September 14, 1861, 3; Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly, “Ambiguities of Affluence: The Influence of Gold,” in Double Time: Women in Victoria, 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Ringwood: Penguin Books, 1985), 49; Christina Twomey, Deserted and Destitute: Motherhood, Wife Desertion and Colonial Welfare (Kew: Australian Scholarly Press, 2002); Your Reporter, “Distress in Collingwood,” Argus, July 18, 1855, 6. 34 Martha Jane Clendinning, “Recollections of Ballarat: Lady’s Life at the Diggings Fifty Years Ago,” n.d., 6, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 155, MS 10102/1, State Library Victoria. 35 James Petford to his Parents, October 22, 1862, “Letter from James Petford to his Parents,” 2012.0622, Gold Museum; Jane Petford and James Petford to his Parents, June 16, 1863, “Letter from Jane and James Petford in Napoleon Lead to his Parents in England,” 2012.0623, Gold Museum. 36 Charlotte Perrottet to her Mother, May 14, 1856, “Letter.”

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37 Jane Prendergast to James Prendergast, January 28, c. 1853–54, “Correspondence,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 31/2, MS 5405, State Library Victoria. 38 Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia, 18–19. 39 Mary Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, ed. Lucy Sussex (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 111. 40 Charles Fahey, “From Kent to New Chum: The Families of Isaac Edward Dyason and George Lansell, 1871–1915,” in Gold Tailings: Forgotten Histories of Family and Community on the Central Victorian Goldfields, ed. Charles Fahey and Alan Mayne (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 64–5. 41 Serewyn Korzelinski, Memoirs of Gold-digging in Australia (1858, repr.; St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 55. 42 John Green to Eliza Green, July 22, 1853, “Letter, Bendigo Goldfields to Eliza Green, England,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 281, MS 10619, State Library Victoria. 43 Philip Prendergast to James Prendergast, April 13, 1853, “Correspondence.” 44 Edwin Booth to his Mother, February 20, 1853, “Lithgow Papers, Letters of Edwin Booth on the Goldfields of Campbell’s Creek, Port Phillip, Woodend, Mount Macedon and Williamston to His Mother and Brother,” MS2543, National Library of Scotland. 45 John Green to Eliza Green, July 22, 1853, “Letter, Bendigo Goldfields to Eliza Green, England”; Rev. David MacKenzie, The Gold Digger: or, A Visit to the Gold Fields of Australia in February 1852 (London: William S. Orr & Co, 1852), 56; John Dunmore Lang, The Australian Emigrant’s Manual; or, a Guide to the Gold Colonies of New South Wales and Port Phillip (London: Partridge & Oakley, 1852), vii, xv; Charles Fahey, “Peopling the Victorian Goldfields: From Boom to Bust, 1851–1901,” Australian Economic History Review 50, no. 2 (2010): 154. 46 John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (1853, repr.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 13. 47 Maslen Family to their Brothers and Sisters, July 28, 1852, “Letters,” 1852–1883, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 225/2, MS 8386, State Library Victoria. 48 Lucy Ann Hart to her Mother, May 3, 1851, “Letter,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1659/2, MS 8838, State Library Victoria. 49 Serle, The Golden Age, 85. 50 Ibid., 47. 51 See, for example, Sarah Hayes, “A Golden Opportunity: Mayor Smith and Melbourne’s Emergence as a Global City,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 22, no. 1 (2018), 100–16. John Thomas Smith was born the son of a convict shoemaker and went on to become mayor of Melbourne in 1851. 52 G. Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge & Co, 1853), 9. 53 Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia, 10. 54 John Hirst, “Egalitarianism,” in Australian Cultural History, ed. S.L. Goldberg and F.B. Smith (Cambridge & Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 61.

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55 Ibid., 62. 56 de Chabrillan, The French Consul’s Wife, 132; Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia, 154–5; George Francis Train, A Yankee Merchant in Goldrush Australia: The Letters of George Francis Train 1853–55 (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1970), 83–4. 57 Clara Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne (London: L. Booth, 1862), 33. 58 Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, 5. 59 Edwin Booth to his Mother, February 20, 1853, “Lithgow Papers.” 60 Anthony Smith to his Father, Janaury 20, 1862, “Letter,” 00.0010, Gold Museum. 61 John Green to Eliza Green, July 22, 1853, “Letter, Bendigo Goldfields to Eliza Green, England.” 62 Hayes, “A Golden Opportunity,” 101. 63 G.D.H. Cole, Studies in Class Structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955), 98; Simon Gunn, “Translating Bourdieu: Cultural Capital and the English Middle Class in Historical Perspective,” British Journal of Sociology 56, no. 1 (2005): 62. 64 See, for example: Jane Hamlett, Material Relations: Domestic Interiors and MiddleClass Families in England, 1850–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010); Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Woodruff D. Smith, Consumption and the Making of Respectability 1600–1800 (New York and London: Routledge, 2002); Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 65 Emma Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint: Gentility and British Gentlewomen in Rural Australia,” in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Kranidis (New York: Twayne, 1998), 85–107; Dianne Lawrence, Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1910 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012); Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994). 66 Young, Middle Class, 15. 67 Ibid., 16. 68 Lawrence, Genteel Women, 4. 69 Ibid., 3. 70 Russell, A Wish of Distinction, 59. 71 Gunn, “Translating Bourdieu,” 55; Simon Gunn, “Between Modernity and Backwardness: The Case of the English Middle Class,” in The Making of the Middle Class: Toward a Transnational History, ed. A. Richardo Lopez and Barbara Weinstein (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 69. 72 Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint,” 86. 73 Jon Austin, “Introduction,” in Culture and Identity, ed. Jon Austin (Frenchs Forest: Pearson, 2005), 1.

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74 Laurajane Smith, “Heritage, Gender and Identity,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity, ed. Brian Graham and Peter Howard (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2008), 160. 75 Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 104. 76 Chris Fowler, “From Identity and Material Culture to Personhood and Materiality,” in The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, ed. Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 353; Maureen Daly Goggin, “Fabricating Identity: Janie Terrero’s 1912 Embroidered English Suffrage Signature Handkerchief,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 19; Lawler, Identity, 7–8, 104, 143. 77 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990). 78 Ibid., 15, 32. 79 Lawler, Identity, 142. 80 Steph Lawler, “Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-class Identities,” Sociological Review 53, no. 3 (2005), 438; Lawler, Identity, 141–2. 81 William Westgarth, Victoria; Late Australia Felix, or Port Phillip District of New South Wales; Being an Historical and Descriptive Account of the Colony and its Gold Mines (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1853), 151. 82 See also: Lorinda Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances: Genteel Women, Dress and Refurbishing in Gold-Rush Victoria, Australia, 1851–1870,” Textile: Cloth and Culture 15, no. 1 (2017): 8–9. 83 Clacy, A Lady’s Visit, 24. 84 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, repr.; Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. 85 Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997), 99; Ariel Beaujot, “ ‘The Beauty of her Hands’: The Glove and the Making of the Middle-Class Body,” in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 179. 86 Amanda Keddie, “Understanding Gender,” in Culture and Identity, ed. Jon Austin (Frenchs Forest: Pearson, 2005), 85; Michael S. Kimmel, “Introduction: The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power,” in The Material Culture of Gender, the Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 1; Smith, “Heritage, Gender and Identity,” 160.

Notes 87 88 89 90

91 92 93 94 95 96 97

98 99 100 101

102

103 104

181

Candace West and Don H. Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” in The Social Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Newbury Park: Sage, 1991), 13–14, 16. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge: London and New York, 1990), 9–10. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988), 531. Sara Salih, “On Judith Butler and Performativity,” in Sexualities and Communication in Everyday Life: A Reader, ed. Karen E. Lovaas and Mercilee M. Jenkins (London: Sage, 2007), 56. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex, (1993, repr.; Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2011), xii. Lawler, Identity, 118, 121. Chris Brickell, “Masculinities, Performativity, and Subversion: A Sociological Reappraisal,” Men and Masculinities 8, no. 1 (2005): 36–7. Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 45–56. Dorothy E. Smith, The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 78–88. Jules David Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio 17, no. 1 (1982): 1. “The Flag of the Southern Cross (Eureka Flag),” Art Gallery of Ballarat, retrieved July 30, 2018, https://artgalleryofballarat.com.au/ehive-object/882714/; Justin Corfield, Dorothy Wickham and Clare Gervasoni, The Eureka Encyclopedia (Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 2004), 163, 259, 550; Anne Beggs Sunter, “Birth of a Nation? Constructing and De-constructing the Eureka Legend” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2002), 8–89; Wickham, Women of the Diggings, 95. Wickham notes that the flag bears a small wax mark shaped like a “W” in one corner, perhaps made by Anastasia Withers. Dorothy Wickham, Clare Gervasoni and Val D’Angri, The Eureka Flag: Our Starry Banner (Ballarat: Ballarat Heritage Services, 2000), 53, 57. Wright, The Forgotten Rebels, 384–5. Joanna Sofaer, “Introduction: Materiality and Identity,” in Material Identities, ed. Joanna Sofaer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 2. Christopher Tilley, “Objectification,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuchler, Mike Rowlands and Patricia Spyer (London: Sage, 2009), 61. Laura Peers, “Material Culture, Identity, and Colonial Society in the Canadian Fur Trade,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 55. Lawrence, Genteel Women, 1. Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint,” 85.

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Chapter 1 1 Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Needlework (1870, repr.; London: Ward Lock & Tyler, 1986), n.p. 2 With early work in the 1980s including: Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987, repr.; London: Routledge, 2002), 387; Beverley Gordon, “Victorian Fancywork in the American Home: Fantasy and Accommodation,” in Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Brown (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 48–68; Laurie Yager Lieb, “The Works of Women are Symbolical: Needlework in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Life 10, no. 2 (1986): 28–44; Amy Boyce Osaki, “A ‘Truly Feminine Employment’: Sewing and the Early NineteenthCentury Woman,” Winterthur Portfolio 23, no. 4 (1988): 225–41; Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984, repr.; London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010). In Australia, important early work included that by: Jennifer Isaacs, The Gentle Arts: 200 Years of Australian Women’s Domestic and Decorative Arts (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1987); Marion Fletcher, Needlework in Australia: A History of the Development of Embroidery (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1989); Ann Toy, ed., Hearth and Home: Women’s Decorative Arts and Crafts 1800–1930 (Glebe: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1988). 3 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 72–3. 4 Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin, “Introduction: Materializing Women,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 4. 5 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 387. 6 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 17, 60. 7 Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962), 7. 8 Pat Kirkham “Preface,” in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), xi. 9 Florence Nightingale, Cassandra and other Selections from Suggestions for Thought (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 211. 10 Karen V. Hansen, “ ‘Helped put in a Quilt’: Men’s Work and Male Intimacy in Nineteenth-century New England,” in The Social Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Newbury Park: Sage, 1999), 90–1. 11 Ibid., 99. 12 Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 36.

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13 Alison Drummond, Married and Gone to New Zealand: Being Extracts from the Writings of Women Pioneers (London: Oxford University Press, 1960), 62. 14 Graeme Bucknall, and Lorna McDonald, ed., Letters of an Australian Pioneer Family 1827–1880: The Generation of Gittins and Sarah Bucknall 1797–1880 (Carsibrook: The Association of the Bucknall Family), 1984, 56. 15 Rachel Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, ed. David Adams (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988), 115. 16 Ibid., 137. 17 Andrew Hassam, Sailing to Australia: Shipboard Diaries by Nineteenth-Century British Emigrants (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 150–2. 18 Louisa Timewell, “Letter and Poem,” 1852, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 3097/6(a), MS 12353, State Library Victoria. 19 Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 152. 20 The Miner, “Our Past and Present,” Star (Supplement), November 1, 1856, 1. 21 Eneas MacKenzie, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co, 1853), 57. 22 July 10, 1855, September 2, 1855, September 11, 1855, “Diary of a Miner Working on the Ballarat Goldfields,” 1855–1856, in Manuscripts Collection, MS 13681, State Library Victoria. 23 Henry Mundy, “Reminiscences,” c. 1912, 286, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 607, MS 10416, State Library Victoria. 24 August 9, 1855, September 27, 1855, September 28, 1855, “Diary of a Miner Working on the Ballarat Goldfields.” 25 James Armour, The Diggings, the Bush and Melbourne: Reminiscences of Three Years’ Wanderings in Victoria (Glasgow: G.D. MacKeller, 1864), 6–7. 26 Ibid., 10. 27 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society (Boston: G.W. Cottrell, 1860), 215. 28 Maureen Daly Goggin, “An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 4 (2002): 312. 29 Kate Brown to Jane Hamilton, April 22, 1869, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 30 Frances Porter, Charlotte Macdonald, with Tui MacDonald, ed., “My hand will write what my heart dictates”: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 161. 31 Jean Garner and Kate Foster, ed., Letters to Grace: Writing Home from Colonial New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 2011), 83.

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32 Sophia Howard Ryerson, “The Diary of Sophia Howard Ryerson (1836–1898),” in Eldon House Diaries: Five Women’s Views of the 19th Century, ed. Robin S. Harris and Terry G. Harris (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1994), 384. 33 Jessie Nagle, “Jessie Nagle and Susan Nagle,” in The Small Details of Life: Twenty Diaries by Women in Canada, 1830–1996, ed. Kathryn Carter (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 127. 34 Fabri Blacklock, “Aboriginal Skin Cloaks,” Australia Quilt Register, retrieved February 20, 2012.Available at: www.collectionsaustralia.net/nqr/fabri.php; Museum of Victoria, Women’s Work: Aboriginal Women’s Artefacts in the Museum of Victoria (Melbourne: Museum of Victoria, 1992), 21. 35 “Blackfellows Opossum Hunting,” Australian News for Home Readers, March 24, 1864, 4. 36 Hazel King, Elizabeth Macarthur and Her World (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1980), 109–10. 37 Michelle Brown and Glynis Jones, “Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden, 1802–1803,” Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, 2007. Available at: https://collection.maas. museum/object/195005 retrieved July 30, 2018. 38 Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender, ed., Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 140. 39 MacKenzie, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia, 18. 40 Patricia Clarke, A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827–1857 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 108. 41 Ibid., 124, 218. 42 Nancy Bonnin, ed., Katie Hume on the Darling Downs, A Colonial Marriage: Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866–1871 (Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1985), 166. 43 Blanche Mitchell, Blanche: An Australian Diary 1858–1861, notes by Edna Hickson (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1980), 243. 44 Agnes Henty, August 1, 1867, August 2, 1867, August 3, 1867, August 8, 1867, August 9, 1867, August 10, 1867, August 16, 1867, August 17, 1867, “Diary,” 1867, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 3149/7, MS 12402, State Library Victoria. 45 Ibid., August 16, 1867, August 14, 1867. 46 Frank Murcott Bladen, Historical Records of New South Wales vol. 2 (1893, repr.; Mona Vale: Lansdown Slattery, 1978), 767. 47 Female Convicts Research Centre, Convict Lives: Women at Cascades Female Factory, 2nd edn (Hobart: Convict Women’s Press, 2012), 11; Eleanor Conlin Casella, “To Watch or Restrain: Female Convict Prisons in 19th-Century Tasmania,” International Journal of Historical Archaeology 5, no. 1 (2001): 48, 53. 48 Elizabeth Barrett Davis, “Autobiography 1827–1897,” c. 1897, n.p., in Manuscripts Collection, Box 2534/5, MS 12025, State Library Victoria.

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49 “Female Factory,” Australian, October 19, 1839, 3; “Notice from the Government Gazette,” Australian, July 18, 1839, 3. 50 Annette Gero, Historic Australian Quilts (Parramatta: The National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2000), 7; Annette Gero, The Fabric of Society: Australia’s Quilt Heritage from Convict Times to 1960 (Sydney: Beagle Press, 2008), 16. 51 Robert Espie, September 24, 1822, September 26, 1822, September 30, 1822, “Journal of the Female Convict Ship Lord Sidmouth,” 1822–1823, in Medical Departments: Registers, Medical Journals [Adm. 101], 1798–1856 [microform], AJCP 3201, State Library Victoria. 52 Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 12–13, 16. 53 Robert Bell, “The Rajah Quilt,” National Gallery of Australia, retrieved January 24, 2014. Available at: http://nga.gov.au/rajahquilt/; Susan McCormack, “The Rajah Quilt,” The Australian Antique Collector 40 (1990): 45–7. 54 William G. Kingston, How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for all Classes (London: Grant & Griffith, 1850), 129, 167. 55 Sidney Herbert, “Female Emigration Fund Report, March 15, 1850” (London, 1850, in Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, Wiltshire & Swindon Archives, 2057/F8/VIII/11, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke), 3; Weekly Times, “Female Emigration Fund,” Geelong Advertiser, August 1, 1850, 2. 56 Hassam, Sailing to Australia, 153. 57 Wendy Gamber, “ ‘Reduced to Science’: Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860–1910,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 3 (1995): 458; Jane Malthus, “European Women’s Dresses in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand” (PhD diss., University of Otago, 1996), 274. 58 Andrew Godley, “Homeworking and the Sewing Machine in the British Clothing Industry 1850–1905,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 255; Joan Perkin, “Sewing Machines: Liberation or Drudgery for Women?,” History Today 52, no. 12 (2002): 36; Naomi Tarrant, The Development of Costume (London and Edinburgh: Routledge and the National Museum of Scotland, 1994), 122. 59 Thomas Hood, “The Song of the Shirt,” Punch, Christmas 1843, 260. 60 W. T. Haley, Fund for Promoting Female Emigration, 24 December 1849 (4 St Martin’s Place, Trafalgar Square, London, 1849, in Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, Wiltshire & Swindon Archives, 2057/F8/VIII/3, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke), 1. 61 The Needlewomen and Slop-Workers: Being Extracts Illustrative of their Condition, from the Letters in “The Morning Chronicle,” on Labour and the Poor (London: Petter, Duff & Co, 1849, in Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, 2057/F8/ VIII/7, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke), 2–3.

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62 Ibid., 5. 63 Fund for Promoting Female Emigration, First Report of the Committee, March 1851 (London: Cox and Wyman, 1851), 1. 64 “The Distressed Needlewomen’s Society,” The Times, February 11, 1845, 5; “News in Brief,” The Times, June 27, 1846, 5; “Distressed Needlewomen’s Society,” The Times, July 13, 1848, 5. 65 Haley, Fund for Promoting Female Emigration, 1. 66 Lisa Chilton, “A New Class of Women for the Colonies: The Imperial Colonist and the Construction of Empire,” in The British World: Diaspora, Culture, and Identity, ed. Carl Bridge and Kent Fedorowich (London: Frank Cass, 2003), 39. 67 “Emigration of Needlewomen,” Argus, March 23, 1850, 1; P. Just, Australia; or Notes taken during a Residence in the Colonies from the Gold Discoveries in 1851 to 1857 (Dundee: Durham and Thomson, 1859), 254; “Mr Sidney Herbert’s Benevolent Scheme,” The Times, January 2, 1850, 4. 68 For example: “Good Needlewomen Wanted,” Argus, October 11, 1855, 1; “Wanted, A Good Dressmaker,” Argus, November 16, 1855, 1; “Wanted, A Few Good Needlewomen,” Argus, December 2, 1854, 1; “Two Good Needlewomen Wanted, Liberal Wages Given,” Argus, May 27, 1852, 5. 69 For example: “Wanted: By a Respectable Young Person,” Argus, March 18, 1851, 3; “Wanted: By a Respectable Young Female,” Argus, May 6, 1852, 5; “A Respectable Female, Lately Arrived,” Argus, October 4, 1852, 2; “Wanted: By a Lady Accustomed to Plain Needlework,” Argus, February 10, 1858, 1. 70 “Needlewomen, Letter to the Editor of the Argus,” Argus, February 26, 1856, 6. 71 Aiguille, “The Renumeration of Needlewomen,” Argus, August 21, 1856, 5. 72 “Destitution in Victoria,” Argus, June 25, 1855, 5 73 Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society, October 18, 1853, December 26, 1854, “Minute Book No. 3,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 3205/2 MS 12414, State Library Victoria; St Kilda Ladies’ Benevolent Society, First Annual Report and Rules of the St Kilda Ladies’ Benevolent Society (St Kilda: A. Goulding & Co, 1860), 7. 74 Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society, Eighth Annual Report of the Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society for the Year Ending 31 March 1871 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & Co, 1871), 5; Richmond and East Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society, Eleventh Annual Report of the Richmond and East Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society for the Year Ending 30 June 1871 (Melbourne: Clarson, Massina & Co, 1871), 7; St Kilda Ladies’ Benevolent Society, First Annual Report and Rules, 7. 75 James Simpson, “Plain Sewing and Knitting,” Argus, May 12, 1859, 8. 76 “It may be considered as an almost invariable rule. . .,” Argus, December 8, 1858, 4–5; Emily Davies, The Higher Education of Women (London: A. Strahan, 1866); Tradesman, “Distressed Needlewomen,” Argus, December 14, 1858, 7; Cora Ann Weekes, “Female Heroism in the Nineteenth Century,” in Colonial Voices: Letters,

Notes

77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87

187

Diaries, Journalism and Other Accounts of Nineteenth Century Australia, ed. Elizabeth Webby (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1989), 323. M.A., “Female Employment,” Argus, August 6, 1860, 6. “Three Years in Melbourne by Clara Aspinall,” Argus, January 17, 1863, 5. Clara Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne (London: L. Booth, 1862), 220–1. Ibid., 219. Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 6. Ibid., 7. Catherine Bishop, Minding Her Own Business: Colonial Businesswomen in Sydney (Sydney: NewSouth, 2015), 86–7, 212. Catherine Kelly, “Gender and Class Formations in the Antebellum North,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, 2002), 104. See also: Lorinda Cramer, “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria: Plain Sewing and the Genteel Woman,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 218–9. Jane Brown to Elizabeth Anderson, September 9, 1847, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” Sarah Ell, ed., The Lives of Pioneer Women in New Zealand: From their Letters, Diaries and Reminiscences (Auckland: Bush Press, 1993), 103–4.

Chapter 2 1 Jane Brown to Margaret Brown, November 17, 1859, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 2 Jane Brown to Margaret Brown, February 23, 1866, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 3 Harvey Newcomb, How to be a Lady: Book for Girls, Containing Useful Hints on the Formation of Character, 5th edn (Boston: Gould, Kendall & Lincoln, 1848), 12–13. 4 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, repr.; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. 5 Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” 18. 6 Ibid., 17–19. 7 Penelope Selby to Mary Selby, March 1, 1845, “Letters,” 1839–1851, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1134, MS 9494, State Library Victoria. 8 Ibid.

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9 See also: Lorinda Cramer, “Making ‘everything they want but boots’: Clothing Children in Victoria, Australia, 1840–1870,” Costume 51, no. 2 (2017): 192–4. 10 Miss Lambert, The Handbook of Needlework, Decorative and Ornamental, Including Crochet, Knitting and Netting (London: J. Murray, 1846), 3–22; Ann Sophia Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework (New York: Garrett & Co, 1854), 5–21. 11 Lucretia P. Hale, Plain Needlework, Knitting and Mending for All, at Home and in Schools: Giving Instruction in Plain Sewing, the Management of Classes, etc (Boston: S.W. Tilton & Co, 1879), 7. 12 Emily Anne Eliza Shirreff, Intellectual Education, and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women (London: J.W. Parker & Son, 1858), 41. 13 The Ladies’ Work-Table Book: Containing Clear and Practical Instructions in Plain and Fancy Needle-work, Embroidery, Knitting, Netting, Crochet, Tatting, &c., &c., 2nd edn (London: H.G. Clarke & Co, 1844), xi. 14 “Mixed Schools,” Gippsland Guardian, June 14, 1861, 2. 15 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949, repr.; London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 293. 16 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 522. 17 Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 12. 18 Margaret Eleanor Fraser, “With My Needle: Embroidery Samplers in Colonial Australia” (MA diss., University of Melbourne, 2008), 17; Annette Shiell, “Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century Australia” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2009), 225. 19 Wilson Hardy to Sarah Hardy, March 22, 1854, “Wilson Hardy and Family Papers,” 1851–1936, 1962.0013, 1963.0025, 1966.0020, University of Melbourne Archives. 20 Ibid. 21 Wilson Hardy to Lizzie Hardy, May 14, 1860, “Wilson Hardy and Family Papers.” 22 “Female School of Industry,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, October 19, 1827, 2. 23 Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender, Life Lines: Australian Women’s Letters and Diaries 1788–1840 (North Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992), 62; Dianne Snow, “Family Policy and Orphan Schools in Early Colonial Australia,” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 2 (1991): 279–80; “Plain Needle-Work will be taken. . .,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, February 12, 1810, 2. 24 “Ragged Schools,” Geelong Advertiser, December 5, 1863, 3. 25 Buda Historic Home and Garden, A Recipe for Living (Castlemaine: Buda Historic Home and Garden, 2006), 2. 26 Lady Elizabeth Finch, The Sampler: A System of Teaching Plain Needlework in Schools, 2nd edn (London: Rivingtons, 1855); Lady, Method for Teaching Plain Needlework in Schools, 2nd edn (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1861).

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27 Simple Directions in Needlework and Cutting Out Intended for the Use of the National Female Schools of Ireland (Dublin: Hibernia Press, 1835). 28 Laura Jocic, “A Stitch in Time: Anne Trotter’s Needlework Specimen Book, 1840,” lecture delivered at Melbourne Museum, March 14, 2018. See also: “Needlework Specimen Book: Anne Trotter, Collon, County Louth, Ireland, 1840,” Museums Victoria Collection, retrieved July 23, 2018. Available at: https://collections. museumvictoria.com.au/items/2027802. 29 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society (Boston: G.W. Cottrell, 1860), 178–9. 30 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton & Co, 1843), 32. 31 Newcomb, How to be a Lady, 119. 32 D. E. McConnell, Australian Etiquette: or The Rules and Usages of the Best Society in the Australasian Colonies, Together with their Sports, Pastimes, Games and Amusements (1885, repr.; Knoxfield: J.M. Dent, 1980), 246. 33 Shirreff, Intellectual Education, 186. 34 Newcomb, How to be a Lady, 119–20. 35 Mother, Thoughts on Domestic Education, the Result of Experience (Boston: Carter & Hendee, 1829), 96–8. 36 Shirreff, Intellectual Education, 185. 37 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (London: Frank Cass, 1969), 232–3. 38 “Patchwork Samplers (2), cotton, [Mrs E. Prince], 1850–1877,” Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: https://ma.as/140256>; “Patchwork Quilt,” Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: https://ma.as/140250. 39 Patricia Clarke, A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827–1857 (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 171. 40 Sarah Hayes, Good Taste, Fashion, Luxury: A Genteel Melbourne Family and Their Rubbish (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2014), 65. 41 Shirreff, Intellectual Education, 186. 42 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Book of Home Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857), 98. 43 Eliza Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 1920, 13, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 912/5, MS 9034, State Library Victoria. 44 Lydia Maria Child and Madame de Chatelain, The Girl’s Own Book, 18th edn (London: W. Tegg & Co, 1858), 306–7. 45 Ibid., 303–4. 46 Fraser, “With My Needle,” 31.

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47 Kathryn Ledbetter, Victorian Needlework (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 10; Margot Riley, “A Useful and Ornamental Education,” in Hearth and Home: Women’s Decorative Arts and Crafts 1800–1930, ed. Ann Toy (Glebe: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1988), 24. 48 Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide (1838, repr.; Guildford: Opus Publications, 1987), 181, 187. 49 Aimee E. Newell, “ ‘Tattered to Pieces’: Amy Fiske’s Sampler and the Changing Roles of Women in Antebellum New England,” in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin, (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 57–8. 50 Fraser, “With My Needle,” 31; Riley, “A Useful and Ornamental Education,” 24. 51 Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide, 187. 52 Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962), 163–4. 53 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984, repr.; London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 174. 54 Fraser, “With My Needle,” 42–3. 55 Newcomb, How to be a Lady, 22. 56 Maureen Daly Goggin, “An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 4 (2002): 323. 57 “Sampler: Alice Winter, ‘Honour Thy Father and Mother and Forget not Their Kindness,’ Melbourne, circa 1846–1852,” Museums Victoria Collections, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/ items/2097403; Deborah Tout-Smith, “Winter Family, English Colonists, mid 1800s,” Museums Victoria Collections, accessed June 30, 2018. Available at: https:// collections.museumvictoria.com.au/articles/14226. 58 “Embroidery Sampler, 2007.0098.0001,” National Museum of Australia, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: http://collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/ce/rose%20 pellet?object=132618. 59 Fraser, “With My Needle,” 14. 60 Vivienne Caughley, New Zealand’s Historic Samplers: Our Stitched Stories (Auckland: Bateman, 2014); Fraser, “With My Needle”; Maureen Daly Goggin “Stitching a Life in ‘Pen of Steele and Silken Inke’: Elizabeth Parker’s circa 1830 Sampler,” in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 31–49; Aimee E. Newell, A Stitch in Time: The Needlework of Aging Women in Antebellum America (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014); Patricia V. Veasey, “Samplers of the Carolina Piedmont,” Journal of Early Southern Decorative Arts 31/32, no. 2/1 & 2 (2005): 103–48; Jennifer Van Horn, “Samplers, Gentility, and the Middling Sort,” Winterthur Portfolio 40, no. 4 (2005): 219–47; William Huntting Howell, “Spirits of

Notes

61 62 63 64

65 66

67 68

69

70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78

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Emulation: Readers, Samplers, and the Republican Girl, 1787–1810,” American Literature 81, no. 3 (2009): 497–526. Tanya Evans, “The Use of Memory and Material Culture in the History of the Family in Colonial Australia,” Journal of Australian Studies 36, no. 2 (2012): 208. Alice Dolan and Sally Holloway, “Emotional Textiles: An Introduction,” Textile 14, no. 2 (2016): 157. Newell, A Stitch in Time, 140, 148–50. “Cross Stitch Sampler, ‘The Emigrants Farewell and The Emigrants Prayer’, 1854,” Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, retrieved January 18, 2013. Available at: http://from.ph/172770. Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 5. A. Mary Murphy, “The Theory and Practice of Counting Stitches as Stories: Material Evidences of Autobiography in Needlework,” Women’s Studies 32, no. 5 (2003): 641–55, 646, 648. Newell, A Stitch in Time, 2. “Academy,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, August 10, 1806, 3; “Academy,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, March 26, 1809, 2; “Mrs Speed begs to offer. . .,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, January 24, 1818, 4; “Mrs Still has been encouraged. . .,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, May 22, 1830, 1; “Mr Hoskins begs to inform his Friends. . .,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, December 28, 1833, 1. Graeme Bucknall and Lorna McDonald, ed., Letters of an Australian Pioneer Family 1827–1880: The Generation of Gittins and Sarah Bucknall 1797–1880 (Carisbrook: The Association of the Bucknall Family, 1984), 77–8. Clara Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne (London: L. Booth, 1862), 68. Marjorie Theobald, Knowing Women: Origins of Women’s Education in NineteenthCentury Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 34. Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne, 68. Bucknall and McDonald, Letters of an Australian Pioneer Family, 19. Riley, “A Useful and Ornamental Education,” 26; Marjorie Theobald, “Julie Vieusseux: The Lady Principle and Her School,” in Double Time: Women in Victoria, 150 Years, ed. Marilyn Lake and Farley Kelly (Ringwood: Penguin, 1985), 79. A.J. Campbell to John Hastie, February 10, 1865, “Mackinnon Family Papers,” 1863–1865, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 2048/2, MS 9470, State Library Victoria. Elizabeth Tripp to John Hastie, February 18, 1863, “Mackinnon Family Papers.” Elizabeth Tripp to John Hastie, April 2, 1863, February 20, 1864, “Mackinnon Family Papers.” Mildred Snowden, “Reminiscences of Mildred Snowden, 1860–c. 1882,” 1933, 10, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 313, MS 10748, State Library Victoria.

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79 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Making of an American Myth (New York: Vintage Books, 2002), 147. 80 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 522. 81 Hale, Plain Needlework, Knitting and Mending for All, 11. 82 Newcomb, How to be a Lady, 10. 83 Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4. 84 Ibid., 95. 85 Ada Cambridge, Sisters (1904, repr.; Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 27; Ledbetter, Victorian Needlework, 2. 86 Ariel Beaujot, “ ‘The Beauty of her Hands’: The Glove and the Making of the Middle-Class Body,” in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 169; Ariel Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 31. 87 Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 151. 88 Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 10. 89 Ibid., 9–10. 90 G. Curling Hope, Knitting and Crochet, Tales and Poetry: A Mélange of Instruction and Amusement for the Work-table, Being the Year’s Volume of the “Ladies’ Needlework Penny Magazine” (London: Aylott & Jones, 1849), 21. 91 Heather Pristash, Inez Schaechterle, and Sue Carter Wood, “The Needle as the Pen: Intentionality, Needlework, and the Production of Alternate Discourses of Power,” in Women and the Material Culture of Needlework and Textiles, 1750–1950, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 17. 92 Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and History (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2012), 2–3. 93 Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’, 519.

Chapter 3 1 Eliza Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 1920, 26–7, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 912/5, MS 9034, State Library Victoria. 2 Ibid, 26. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid, 24. 5 For example: Nancy Dunlap Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840–1880,” Winterthur Portfolio 26, no. 4 (1991): 231–47; Beverly Gordon, “Victorian Fancywork in the American Home:

Notes

6 7

8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16

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Fantasy and Accommodation,” in Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Brown (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 48–68; Annette Shiell, “Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth-Century Australia” (PhD diss., The University of Melbourne, 2009); Elizabeth Alice White, “Charitable Calculations: Fancywork, Charity, and the Culture of the Sentimental Market, 1830–1880,” in The Middling Sorts: Exploration in the History of the American Middle Class, ed. Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnson (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 73–85. Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): 521. Beth Fowkes Tobin and Maureen Daly Goggin, “Introduction: Materializing Women,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 1–2. Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings,” 233–4; Gordon, “Victorian Fancywork in the American Home,” 48; Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 166–7; Andrea Kolasinski Marcinkus, “Preservation and Permanence: American Women and Nature Fancywork in the Nineteenth Century,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 129; Shiell, “Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork,” 214. The Ladies’ Work-Table Book: Containing Clear and Practical Instructions in Plain and Fancy Needle-work, Embroidery, Knitting, Netting, Crochet, Tatting, &c., &c., 2nd edn (London: H.G. Clarke & Co, 1844); The Lady’s Album of Fancy Work for 1850 (London: Grant & Griffith, 1850); Isabella Beeton, Beeton’s Book of Needlework (1870, repr.; London: Ward Lock & Tyler, 1986); Ann Sophia Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework (New York: Garrett & Co, 1854); Mrs Warren and Mrs Pullan, Treasures in Needlework (London: Ward & Lock, 1855). Warren and Pullan, Treasures in Needlework, xi. Laurie Yager Lieb, “The Works of Women are Symbolical: Needlework in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Life 10, no. 2 (1986): 32. Gordon, “Victorian Fancywork in the American Home,” 49–50. “Gentleman’s Black Smoking Cap, with Blue Trim and a Blue Tassel, 2005.0005.0397,” National Museum of Australia, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: http:// collectionsearch.nma.gov.au/ce/smoking%20cap?object=74635. The Ladies’ Work-Table Book, xi; Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 10. Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House (London: John W. Parker & Son, 1854). Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1966): 152.

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17 Barbara Easton, “Industrialization and Femininity: A Case Study of Nineteenth Century New England,” Feminist Perspectives: The Sociological Challenge 23, no. 4 (1976): 395. 18 Carol Srole, Transcribing Class and Gender: Masculinity and Femininity in Nineteenth-century Courts and Offices (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 5. 19 Ariel Beaujot, Victorian Fashion Accessories (London and New York: Berg, 2012), 54. 20 Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London: Sage, 1997), 99. 21 Gordon, “Victorian Fancywork in the American Home,” 49; Barbara Morris, Victorian Embroidery (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1962), 7. 22 Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings,” 241–2. 23 Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 176–7. 24 Patricia R. McDonald, “What to do with our Girls?,” in Hearth and Home: Women’s Decorative Arts and Crafts 1800–1930, ed. Ann Toy (Glebe: Historic Houses Trust of New South Wales, 1988), 33; White, “Charitable Calculations,” 74; Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 18. 25 Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 26. 26 Ibid., 32. 27 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899, repr.; London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), 68. 28 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987, repr.; London: Routledge, 2002), 33. 29 Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (London: Phoenix, 2003), 7; Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 17. 30 Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class, 68. 31 For example: Karen V. Hansen, “ ‘Helped put in a Quilt’: Men’s Work and Male Intimacy in Nineteenth-Century New England,” in The Social Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Newbury Park: Sage, 1999), 101–2; Simon Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London and New York: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 74–106; Elizabeth Windschuttle, “Feeding the Poor and Sapping their Strength: the Public Role of Ruling-Class Women in Eastern Australia, 1788–1850,” in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978, Elizabeth Windschuttle (Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1980), 71–2. 32 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 179. 33 Henry Mundy, “Reminiscences,” c. 1912, 611, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 607, MS 10416, State Library Victoria. 34 Ibid., 421.

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35 Ibid., 657–8. 36 Ibid., 658. 37 Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975), 54; Jenni Calder, The Victorian Home (London: B. T. Batsford Ltd, 1977), 23; Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 167; Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 54–5. 38 William Kelly, Life in Victoria, or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858 (1859, repr.; Kilmore: Lowden Publishing Co, 1977), 77; Mary Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, ed. Lucy Sussex (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 160; Louisa Anne Meredith, Travels and Stories in our Gold Colonies (London: Charles Griffin & Company, 1865), 105–7; Penelope Selby to her Mother, December 15, 1848, November 1, 1850, “Letters,” 1839–1851, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1134, MS 9494, State Library Victoria; John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (1853, repr.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 10; R.E.N. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia (1883, repr.; Ringwood: Penguin Colonial Facsimiles, Penguin Books, 1973), 55. 39 Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53: Written on the Spot (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), 284-5. 40 Russell, A Wish of Distinction, 167–9; Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century, 56. 41 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, September 23, 1860, “Papers,” Australian Joint Copying Project miscellaneous series M858-863, State Library Victoria. 42 Crescy Cannan, The Iron House: Jane Cannan and the Rush to Melbourne (Seaton: Bugloss, 2013), 97. 43 Henrietta Hearn to Edith (Howitt) Anderson, February 5, [no year], “Howitt Family Papers,” in Manuscripts Collection, MS 13848, Series 1, Sub Series 1 to Edith (Howitt) Anderson, Box 2, Folder 2, File B, State Library Victoria, n.d. 44 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990), 50. 45 Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 178; White, “Charitable Calculations,” 74. 46 Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850–1930 (Rochester: Strong Museum, 1988), 59. 47 Jennifer Isaacs, The Gentle Arts: 200 Years of Australian Women’s Domestic and Decorative Arts (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1987), 16, 18; Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 35. 48 Daniel Miller, The Comfort of Things (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2008), 2; Joanna Sofaer “Introduction: Materiality and Identity,” in Material Identities, ed. Joanna Sofaer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 3; Beth Fowkes Tobin, “Introduction: Consumption as a Gendered Social Practice,” in Material Women, 1750–1950: Consuming Desires and Collecting Practices, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 2.

196

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49 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and their Possessions (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), 63. 50 Joseph Elliott, Our Home in Australia: A Description of Cottage Life in 1860 (Sydney: Flannel Flower Press, 1984), 79, 81–2. 51 Ibid., 83. 52 Grier, Culture and Comfort, 66. 53 Elliott, Our Home in Australia, 44, 48, 56. 54 Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution,” 522. 55 Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861), paragraph 31. 56 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society (Boston: G.W. Cottrell, 1860), 215; Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 11. 57 Stephens, The Ladies’ Complete Guide, 9. 58 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine (1984, repr.; London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010), 6. 59 Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings,” 238; Maureen Daly Goggin, “An Essamplaire Essai on the Rhetoricity of Needlework Sampler-Making: A Contribution to Theorizing and Historicizing Rhetorical Praxis,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 4 (2002), 312; Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 149. 60 “The Husband’s Complaint,” London Saturday Journal, June 25, 1842, 5–6. 61 Morgan, A Victorian Woman’s Place, 78; White, “Charitable Calculations,” 73–85. 62 Kathryn Ledbetter, Victorian Needlework (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 9; McDonald, “What to do with our Girls?,” 33; Parker, The Subversive Stitch, 162–3. 63 Shiell, “Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork,” 213, 235; Annette Shiell, Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork: Charity Bazaars in Nineteenth Century Australia (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 174, 195. 64 Warren and Pullan, Treasures in Needlework, iv. 65 Emily Childers, October 18, 1855, November 7, 1855, November 10, 1855, November 12, 1855, November 13, 1855, November 14, 1855, November 15, 1855, November 17, 1855, “Diary” 1855, Royal Commonwealth Society Library, RCS/RCMS 37/8, 8/3, Cambridge University Library. 66 Ibid., November 20, 1855. 67 “The Hospital Bazaar,” Argus, November 22, 1855, 5. 68 Sarah Midgley, The Diaries of Sarah Midgley and Richard Skilbeck: A Story of Australian Settlers 1851–1864, ed. H.A. McCorkell (Melbourne: Cassell, 1967), 160–1. 69 Ibid., 189. 70 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861), 165. 71 Ibid., 18–19.

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72 Emma Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint: Gentility and British Gentlewomen in Rural Australia,” in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Krandis (New York: Twayne, 1998), 90. 73 Susan Lawrence, Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 142. 74 Ibid., 129. 75 Grier, Culture and Comfort, 1. 76 See: Deborah Tout-Smith, “Martha Bergin (later Tipping), Irish Migrant & Quiltmaker (1822–1883),” Museums Victoria Collections, 2007, retrieved June 30, 2018. Available at: https://collections.museumvictoria.com.au/articles/2205. 77 “Hobart Town, 1st Sept. 1851,” Colonial Times, September 5, 1851, 4; “Tasmanian Female Immigration Association,” Colonial Times, September 2, 1851, 4. 78 Dianne Lawrence, Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1910 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 8. 79 Kirsten Wehner and Martha Sear, “Engaging the Material World: Object Knowledge and Australian Journeys,” in Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagement, Interpretation, ed. Sandra H. Dudley (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010), 148. 80 G. Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge & Co, 1853), 8. 81 Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia, 18. 82 Lauretta Zilles, Buda and the Leviny Family (Castlemaine: Buda Historic Home & Garden Inc, 2010), 10–15. 83 James Muir to Charlotte King, 1859, “Letter,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 138, MS 10056, State Library Victoria. 84 Zilles, Buda and the Leviny Family, 16–77. 85 Marjorie Theobald, The Wealth Beneath Their Feet: A Family on the Castlemaine Goldfields (North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010), 140–1. 86 Heather Holst, “Making a Home in Castlemaine in the Nineteenth Century” (PhD diss., University of Melbourne, 2008), 108. 87 Jane Hamilton to Margaret, James and Kate Brown, June 24, 1865, “Brown-HamiltonHoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 88 Kate Brown to Jane Hamilton, June 25, 1867, “Papers.” 89 Lucy Frost, A Face in the Glass: The Journal and Life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992), 209. 90 Annie Baxter Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 1858–1868, ed. Lucy Frost (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 16, 25, 29. 91 “New Insolvents,” Argus, August 21, 1861, 6 92 Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 296, 510.

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93 Cohen, Household Gods, 116. 94 Amy Boyce Osaki, “A ‘Truly Feminine Employment’: Sewing and the Early Nineteenth-Century Woman,” Winterthur Portfolio 23, no. 4 (1988): 227; Shiell, “Fundraising, Flirtation and Fancywork,” 230–1. 95 Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 414. 96 Ibid., 173, 387, 480, 514. 97 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 45–6.

Chapter 4 1 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, February 23, 1862, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 2 Ibid. 3 For example: John Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia (Liverpool: George Philip & Son, 1852), 61–2; Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53: Written on the Spot (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), 284; G. Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge & Co, 1853), 11; Mary Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, ed. Lucy Sussex (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 111. 4 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990), 50–2. 5 This chapter builds on: Lorinda Cramer, “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria: Plain Sewing and the Genteel Woman,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 213–26. 6 Jennifer Isaacs, The Gentle Arts: 200 Years of Australian Women’s Domestic and Decorative Arts (Sydney: Lansdowne, 1987), 114; Kathryn Ledbetter, Victorian Needlework (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2012), 3. 7 Lady, Method for Teaching Plain Needlework in Schools, 2nd edn (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1861), 4. 8 Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S.O. Beeton, 1861), paragraph 2325, 2356, 2397, 2432; Emily Childers, March 30, 1852, “Diary,” 1852, in Royal Commonwealth Society Library, RCS/RCMS 37/8, 8/1, Cambridge University Library; Jane Hamilton to Margaret, James, Kate, and William Brown, November 25, 1864, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 9 “Board and Lodging,” Argus, January 10, 1853, 8; “Wanted by a Respectable Young Person,” Argus, February 24, 1855, 1; Eliza Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 1920, 26, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 912/5, MS 9034, State Library Victoria; Anita Selzer, The Armytages of Como: Pastoral Pioneers (Melbourne and Sydney: Halstead Press, 2003), 124.

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10 Childers, March 30, 1852, April 4, 1852, “Diary.” 11 Maggie Hoey to Margaret Brown, July 17, 1855, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 12 Florence Hartley, The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness: A Complete Hand Book for the Use of the Lady in Polite Society (Boston: G.W. Cottrell, 1860), 288–90. 13 Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son & Co, 1839), 169. 14 Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (Boston: Thomas H. Webb & Co, 1843), 190. 15 Emily Davies, The Higher Education of Women (London: A. Strahan, 1866), 46. 16 William G. Kingston, How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for all Classes (London: Grant & Griffith, 1850), 221. 17 “Immigration,” Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, February 2, 1853, 2. 18 Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide, 68. 19 Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, 11. 20 John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (1853, repr.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 14. 21 John Green to Eliza Green, July 22, 1853, “Letter, Bendigo Goldfields to Eliza Green, England,” in Manuscripts Collection, Box 281, MS 10619, State Library Victoria. 22 Cramer, “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria,” 220–1. 23 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861), 12. 24 Clacy, A Lady’s Visit, 284–5; Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, 160; William Kelly, Life in Victoria, or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858 (1859 repr.; Kilmore: Lowden Publishing Co, 1977), 77; Louisa Anne Meredith, Travels and Stories in our Gold Colonies (London: Charles Griffin & Company, 1865), 105–7; Penelope Selby to her Mother, December 15, 1848, November 1, 1850, “Letters,” 1839–1851, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1134, MS 9494, State Library Victoria; R.E.N. Twopeny, Town Life in Australia (1883, repr.; Ringwood: Penguin Colonial Facsimiles, Penguin Books, 1973), 55. 25 A. James Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), 114–15. 26 Robert Grant, “‘The Fit and Unfit’: Suitable Settlers for Britain’s Mid-NineteenthCentury Colonial Possessions,” Victorian Literature and Culture 33, no. 1 (2005): 176. 27 Frances Porter, Charlotte Macdonald, with Tui MacDonald, ed., “My hand will write what my heart dictates”: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 160. 28 Lillian Schlissel, “Women’s Diaries on the Western Frontier,” American Studies 18, no. 1 (1977): 92, 94.

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29 Jo Ann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden: Archin Books, 1990), 67. 30 Porter and MacDonald, “My hand will write what my heart dictates,” 167. 31 For example: Patricia Grimshaw, “Women and the Family in Australian History,” in Women, Class and History: Feminist Perspectives on Australia, 1788–1978, ed. Elizabeth Windschuttle (Sydney: Fontana/Collins, 1980), 42; Patricia Grimshaw and Graham Willett, “Women’s History and Family History: An Exploration of Colonial Family Structure,” in Australian Women: Feminist Perspectives, ed. Norma Grieve and Patricia Grimshaw (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1981), 137; Marilyn Lake, “Helpmeet, Slave, Housewife: Women in Rural Families 1870–1930,” in Families in Colonial Australia, ed. Patricia Grimshaw, Chris McConville and Ellen McEwan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 177–84. 32 Bernice McPherson, “A Colonial Feminine Ideal: Femininity and Representation,” Journal of Australian Studies 18, no. 42 (1994): 12–13. 33 John Capper, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia: Containing the Fullest Particulars Relating to the Recently Discovered Goldfields, the Government Regulations for Gold Seeking etc, 2nd edn (Liverpool: George Philip & Son, 1853), 236. 34 Ibid. 35 Cramer, “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria,” 222–3. 36 Nancy Bonnin, ed., Katie Hume on the Darling Downs: A Colonial Marriage, Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866–1871 (Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1985), 36. 37 Ada Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia (1903, repr.; Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2006), 32. 38 Céleste de Chabrillan, The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-Rush Australia, introduced and translated by Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 94. 39 Blanche Mitchell, Blanche: An Australian Diary 1858–1861, notes by Edna Hickson (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1980), 269. 40 Penny Russell, “In Search of Woman’s Place: An Historical Survey of Gender and Space in Nineteenth-century Australia,” Australasian Historical Archaeology 11 (1993): 30. 41 Mrs Warren and Mrs Pullan, Treasures in Needlework (London: Ward & Lock, 1855), xi. 42 The Miner, “Our Past and Present,” Star (Supplement), November 1, 1856, 1. 43 Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide, 73; “Suggestions for Emigrants on Clothes Needed for Australia and Luggage,” in Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, Wiltshire & Swindon Archives, 2057/F8/VIII/44, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke; Kingston, How to Emigrate, 221. 44 James Petford to his Parents, January 24, 1861, “Letter from James Petford to his Parents in England,” 2012.0617, Gold Museum.

Notes

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45 James Armour, The Diggings, the Bush, and Melbourne: Reminiscences of Three Years’ Wanderings in Victoria (Glasgow: G.D. MacKeller, 1864), 23. 46 Clacy, A Lady’s Visit, 94. 47 Maggie Hoey to Margaret Brown, July, 1857, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 48 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, June 16, 1860, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 49 Cramer, “Making a Home in Gold-Rush Victoria,” 223–6. 50 Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide (1838, repr.; Guildford: Opus Publications, 1987), 178–80; Eliza Leslie, The House Book: or, A Manual of Domestic Economy (Philadelphia: Carey & Hart, 1840), 240–1. 51 For example: “Criminal Sittings, Thursday October 16,” Argus, October 16, 1863, 5; “Bourke General Sessions,” Argus, August 4, 1868, 6; “Police, District Court, Saturday 22nd February,” Ballarat Star, February 24, 1868, 2; “Melbourne, from our own correspondent,” Bendigo Advertiser, April 30, 1867, 2; “Police Court, Thursday December 15th,” Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, December 16, 1853, 4; “Tuesday 20th March, Before His Worship the Mayor and Police Magistrates,” Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, March 23, 1855, 2; “Palmerston General Sessions,” Gippsland Guardian, September 23, 1864, 2; “Notes and News,” South Bourke Standard, November 18, 1864, 2; “Eastern Police Court, Wednesday 1st May,” Star (Supplement), May 2, 1861, 1; “Larceny from a Dwelling,” Telegraph, October 10, 1868, 3. 52 Annabella Boswell, Annabella Boswell’s Journal (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1965), 81. 53 Thérèse de Dillmont, Encyclopedia of Needlework (Mulhouse: Brustlein & Co, 1886), 15. 54 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Book of Home Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857), 148. 55 Annie Baxter Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 1858–1868, ed. Lucy Frost (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 97. 56 Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (New York: Routledge, 1995), 162. 57 Thomas Anne Ward Cole, January 16, 1867, February 5, 1867, February 7, 1867, March 1, 1867, “Diary,” 1867, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1473, MS 10570, State Library Victoria. 58 Ibid., January 15, 1867, January 22, 1867, February 6, 1867, February 15, 1867, March 19, 1867, May 13, 1867, July 15, 1867; Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 99. 59 Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin, 16, 303; Mitchell, Blanche: An Australian Diary, 79. 60 Sarah Hayes, Good Taste, Fashion, Luxury: A Genteel Melbourne Family and Their Rubbish (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2014), 60. 61 Goffman, The Presentation of Self, 114.

202 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70

71

72 73 74 75 76

77

Notes

Ibid., 56. Ibid., 50–6. Ibid., 222. Grace Evans, “Underwear,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, ed. Lise Skov (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 389–95; Phyllis G. Tortora and Keith Eubank, A Survey of Historic Costume (New York: Fairchild Publications, 1989), 239. Jill Fields, An Intimate Affair: Women, Lingerie, and Sexuality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 24; Vivienne Richmond, “Stitching the Self: Eliza Kenniff ’s Drawers and the Materialization of Identity in Late-Nineteenth-Century London,” in Women and Things, 1750–1950: Gendered Material Strategies, ed. Maureen Daly Goggin and Beth Fowkes Tobin (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 48. Fields, An Intimate Affair, 19. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 198. Lauretta Zilles, Buda and the Leviny Family (Castlemaine: Buda Historic Home & Garden Inc, 2010), 11–13. Phillis Cunnington and Cecil Willett Cunnington, The History of Underclothes (1951, repr.; New York: Dover, 1992), 15; Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 106–7. “Suggestions for Emigrants on Clothes Needed for Australia and Luggage,” c. 1849, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide, 73; Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, 246; Eneas MacKenzie, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co, 1853), 179; Reverand D. MacKenzie, The Gold Digger: or, A Visit to the Gold Fields of Australia in February 1852 (London: William S. Orr & Co, 1852), 65; S.W. Silver & Co, Emigration Guide and Colonial Itinerary to Australia and New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, The Faulkland Islands, the Canadas, Vancouver Island, and British Columbia (London: S.W. Silver & Co, 1862), 24. “Ladies’ and Children’s Underclothing,” Argus, November 17, 1858, 8. “Coroner’s Inquest,” Argus, May 25, 1852, 3. “A Sad Case,” Argus, January 3, 1862, 7. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, 175. “Police Office,” Argus, August 6, 1852, 2; “City Court,” Argus, April 11, 1856, 5; “City Court,” Argus, October 2, 1857, 6; “Criminal Sessions,” Argus, September 17, 1858, 5; “Municipal Police Court,” Bendigo Advertiser, August 24, 1857, 3; “Impudent Robbery,” Bendigo Advertiser, May 28, 1860, 3; “District Police Court,” Star, June 18, 1858, 2; “Ballarat General Sessions,” Star, April 13, 1860, 2; “Eastern Police Court,” Star, January 25, 1860, 3. Armour, The Diggings, The Bush, and Melbourne, 43; Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia, 255–6.

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78 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life, 15. 79 H.B. Macartney, “Winter Clothing for the Poor,” Argus, June 3, 1867, 6. 80 Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society, First Annual Report of the Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society for the Year Ending 31 March 1864 (Melbourne: Blundell & Ford, 1864), 8; Richmond Ladies’ Benevolent Society, Third Annual Report of the Richmond Ladies’ Benevolent Society (Melbourne: Lucas, 1863), 5; St Kilda Ladies’ Benevolent Society, First Annual Report and Rules of the St Kilda Ladies’ Benevolent Society (St Kilda: A. Goulding & Co, 1860), 3. 81 “Ballarat (From our own Correspondent),” Argus, November 27, 1867, 7; “News and Notes,” Ballarat Star, January 12, 1865, 2; “Ballarat East Borough Council,” Ballarat Star, July 28, 1869, 3; “Our Charitable Institutions and the Ladies,” Star, February 8, 1864, 3. 82 Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society, First Annual Report, 6; Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society, Eighth Annual Report of the Brighton Ladies’ Benevolent Society for the Year Ending 31 March 1871 (Melbourne: Mason, Firth & Co, 1871), 5; Prahran and South Yarra Benevolent Society, Twelfth Yearly Report of the Prahran and South Yarra Benevolent Society for the Year Ending 31 December 1870 (Melbourne: Herald Office, 1871), 5. 83 Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 121-2. 84 “The Lying-In Hospital,” Argus, August 12, 1859, 5; “The Lying In Hospital,” Argus, January 10, 1859, 1; “To Samartan Ladies,” Bendigo Advertiser, May 10, 1860, 2; H.E. Combe, “To the Editor of the Advertiser,” Geelong Advertiser, July 11, 1851, 2; “To the Editor of the Geelong Advertiser,” Geelong Advertiser, December 6, 1851, 2; “Heathcote Hospital,” McIvor Times, May 15, 1868, 2; “Benevolent Asylum,” Portland Guardian and Normanby General Advertiser, July 8, 1862, 2; “A Plea for the Poor,” Star, May 20, 1859, 3. 85 “The Forthcoming Bazaar in Aid of the Hospital,” Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer, September 15, 1855, 2.

Chapter 5 1 Lucy Frost, A Face in the Glass: The Journal and Life of Annie Baxter Dawbin (Port Melbourne: William Heinemann Australia, 1992), 209. 2 “New Insolvents,” Argus, August 21, 1861, 6. 3 Annie Baxter Dawbin, The Journal of Annie Baxter Dawbin 1858–1868, ed. Lucy Frost (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1998), 45. 4 Ibid., 45. 5 Lou Taylor, The Study of Dress History (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002), 52.

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6 Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002), viii; Diana Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 16; Margaret Maynard, Fashioned From Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 101. 7 Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen, “Introduction: Dress History Now: Terms, Themes and Tools,” in Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice, ed. Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollen (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 1. 8 Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 126. 9 This chapter builds on: Lorinda Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances: Genteel Women, Dress and Refurbishing in Gold-Rush Victoria, Australia, 1851–1870,” Textile: Cloth and Culture 15, no. 1 (2017): 48–57. 10 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London: Virago, 1985), 3. 11 Judy Attfield, Wild Things: The Material Culture of Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 77. 12 Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (1899, repr.; London: Allen and Unwin, 1970), 167. 13 Georg Simmel, “Fashion,” American Journal of Sociology 62, no. 6 (1904, repr.; 1957): 545. 14 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959, repr.; London: Penguin, 1990), 34. 15 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1979, repr.; Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58. 16 Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas, 1; Jane Malthus, “European Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand” (PhD diss., University of Otago, 1996), ii. 17 Dianne Lawrence, Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840– 1910 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 12. 18 See also: Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances,” 6–7. 19 Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J.H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialisation of Eighteenth-century England (London: Europa, 1982), 20–1. 20 Emma Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint: Gentility and British Gentlewomen in Rural Australia,” in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Krandis (New York: Twayne, 1998), 87.

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21 Jane Elliott, “The Colonies Clothed: A Survey of Consumer Interests in New South Wales and Victoria 1787–1887” (PhD diss., University of Adelaide, 1988), 7; Jennifer Clynk and Sharon Peoples, “All Out in the Wash: Convict Stain Removal in the Narryna Heritage Museum’s Dress Collection,” in Dress History: New Directions in Theory and Practice, ed. Charlotte Nicklas and Annebella Pollan (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 56. 22 Maggie Hoey to Margaret, Jane, Jessie and James Brown, October 27, 1854, “BrownHamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 23 Clara Aspinall, Three Years in Melbourne (London: L. Booth, 1862), 125. 24 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861), 36. 25 For example: Ellen Clacy, A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53: Written on the Spot (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1853), 25; P. Just, Australia; or Notes taken during a Residence in the Colonies from the Gold Discoveries in 1851 to 1857 (Dundee: Durham & Thomson, 1859), 86–7; John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (1853 repr.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 184, 338–9. 26 For example: Mary Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, ed. Lucy Sussex (Ringwood: Penguin, 1989), 162–3; Just, Australia, 85; William Kelly, Life in Victoria, or Victoria in 1853, and Victoria in 1858 (1859 repr.; Kilmore: Lowden Publishing Co, 1977), 47; Louisa Anne Meredith, Travels and Stories in our Gold Colonies (London: Charles Griffin & Company, 1865), 227. 27 John Lees, September 8, 1857, “Letters,” 1847–1867,” in Manuscripts Collection, MSB 505, MS 10083, State Library Victoria. 28 Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners, 166. 29 See also: Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances,” 8–10. 30 Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners, 36–7. 31 Steph Lawler, “Disgusted Subjects: The Making of Middle-Class Identities,” Sociological Review 53, no. 3 (2005): 431; Steph Lawler, Identity: Sociological Perspectives (Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 141–2. 32 Emily Thornwell, The Ladies Guide to Perfect Gentility: In Manners, Dress, and Conversation (New York: Derby & Jackson, 1856), 123. 33 Kelly, Life in Victoria, 66–7. 34 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Book of Home Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857), 153. 35 Agnes Henty, January 31, 1867, “Diary,” 1867, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 3149/7, MS 12402, State Library Victoria. 36 Ibid., February 5, 1867, April 3, 1867. 37 Blanche Mitchell, Blanche: An Australian Diary 1858–1861, notes by Edna Hickson (Sydney: John Ferguson, 1980), 113. 38 Ibid.

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39 Ibid., 115. 40 Margaret Maynard, “‘A Great Deal Too Good for the Bush’: Women and the Experience of Dress in Queensland,” in On the Edge: Women’s Experiences of Queensland, ed. Gail Reekie (St. Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1994), 61. 41 William G. Kingston, How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for all Classes (London: Grant & Griffith, 1850), 221. 42 John Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia (Liverpool: George Philip & Son, 1852), 21. 43 “Suggestions for Emigrants on Clothes Needed for Australia and Luggage,” c. 1849, in Papers of Sidney Herbert, First Baron Herbert of Lea, 2057/F8/VIII/43-46, Wiltshire & Swindon Archives, 2057/F8/VIII/45, by kind permission of the Earl of Pembroke; Eneas MacKenzie, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co, 1853), 179; Reverand D. MacKenzie, The Gold Digger: or, A Visit to the Gold Fields of Australia in February 1852 (London: William S. Orr & Co, 1852), 65; S.W. Silver & Co, Emigration Guide and Colonial Itinerary to Australia and New Zealand, the Cape of Good Hope, Natal, The Faulkland Islands, the Canadas, Vancouver Island, and British Columbia (London: S.W. Silver & Co, 1862), 24. 44 Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide, 73; G. Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge & Co, 1853), 246. 45 Anthea Jarvis, “Kitted Out for Australia: Dress and Chattels for British Emigrants, 1840–70,” Costume 44 (2010): 84. 46 Silver & Co, Emigration Guide and Colonial Itinerary, 19. 47 Kingston, How to Emigrate, 117. 48 Eliza Perrin to Eliza Bate, c. 1857–58, “Letter to her Cousin,” 91.011.7, Gold Museum. 49 Jo Ann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden: Archin Books, 1990), 180. 50 Susan Lawrence, Dolly’s Creek: An Archaeology of a Victorian Goldfields Community (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2000), 152–5. 51 Eliza Perrin to Eliza Bate, February, 1853, “Letter to Eliza Bate,” 91.011.1, Gold Museum. 52 Eliza Perrin to Eliza Bate, May 7, 1860 “Letter to Eliza Bate from Black Hill, Ballarat,” 91.011.10, Gold Museum. 53 Eliza Perrin to Eliza Bate, January 14, 1859, “Letter to Eliza Bate,” 91.011.8, Gold Museum; Eliza Perrin to Eliza Bate, May 7, 1860, “Letter to Eliza Bate,” 91.011.10, Gold Museum. 54 Clacy, A Lady’s Visit, 106; Fortune, The Fortunes of Mary Fortune, 119; Meredith, Travels and Stories in our Gold Colonies, 248. 55 Martha Jane Clendinning, “Recollections of Ballarat: Lady’s Life at the Diggings Fifty Years Ago,” n.d., 8, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 155, MS 10102/1, State Library Victoria.

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56 Ibid., 11. 57 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, August 23, 1860, “Papers,” Australian Joint Copying Project miscellaneous series M858-863, State Library Victoria. 58 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, September 23, 1864, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 59 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, January 24, 1868, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 60 Karen Baclawski, The Guide to Historic Costume (London: B.T. Batsford Ltd, 1995), 17; Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life, 154; Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas, 3; Bronwyn Labrum, “Hand-Me-Downs and Respectability: Clothing and the Needy,” in Looking Flash: Clothing in Aotearoa New Zealand, ed. Bronwyn Labrum, Fiona McKergow and Stephanie Gibson (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007), 113. 61 Mitchell, Blanche: An Australian Diary, 223–4. 62 Elliott, “The Colonies Clothed,” 77; Margot Riley, “Cast-Offs: Civilization, Charity or Commerce? Aspects of SecondHand Clothing Use in Australia, 1788–1900,” in Old Clothes, New Looks: Second-Hand Fashion, ed. Alexandra Palmer and Hazel Clark (Oxford: Berg, 2004), 49–66. 63 Penelope Selby to Mary Selby, March 1, 1845, “Letters,” 1839–1851, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1134, MS 9494, State Library Victoria. 64 Jessie Stewart to Jane Hamilton, August 24, 1861, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 65 See also: Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances,” 12–13. 66 Thornwell, The Ladies Guide to Perfect Gentility, 138. 67 Isabella E. Ramsay, May 8, 1858, “Diary,” 1858–1859, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 543, MS 11021, State Library Victoria. 68 Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life, 148. 69 Eliza Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 1920, 26, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 912/5, MS 9034, State Library Victoria; Rachel Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, ed. David Adams (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988), 143; Georgiana McCrae, Georgiana’s Journal: Melbourne 1841–1865, ed. Hugh McCrae, 2nd edn (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), 115, 160; Penelope Selby to Mary Selby, March 1, 1845, “Letters.” 70 Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners, 2–3. 71 Lawrence, Genteel Women, 13. 72 Taylor, The Study of Dress History, 18. 73 Leigh Summers, “Sanitising the Female Body: Costume, Corsetry, and the Case for Corporeal Feminism in Social History Museums,” Open Museum Journal (2000): n.p. 74 See also: Cramer, “Keeping up Appearances,” 15–16. 75 Sarah Levitt, Victorians Unbuttoned: Registered Designs for Clothing, their Makers and Wearers, 1839–1900 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986), 8.

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76 Marguerite Connolly, “The Disappearance of the Domestic Sewing Machine, 1890–1925,” Winterthur Portfolio 34, no. 1 (1999): 32; Sarah A. Gordon, “ ‘Make It Yourself ’: Home Sewing, Gender and Culture, 1890–1930” (PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2004), 18–19; Joan Severa, Dressed for the Photographer: Ordinary Americans & Fashion, 1840–1900 (Kent, Ohio and London: The Kent State University Press, 1995), 90; Kathryn E. Wilson, “Commodified Craft, Creative Community: Women’s Vernacular Dress in Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 143; Andrew Godley, “Homeworking and the Sewing Machine in the British Clothing Industry 1850–1905,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 260. 77 Gordon, “ ‘Make It Yourself,’ ” 18–19; Severa, Dressed for the Photographer, 90; Wilson, “Commodified Craft, Creative Community,” 143. 78 Mary C. Beaudry, Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework and Sewing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 170; Julie A. Campbell, “Wearily Moving Her Needle: Army Officers’ Wives and Sewing in the Nineteenth-Century American West,” in The Culture of Sewing: Gender, Consumption and Home Dressmaking, ed. Barbara Burman (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999), 134; Margaret Walsh, “The Democratization of Fashion: The Emergence of the Women’s Dress Pattern Industry,” The Journal of American History 66, no. 2 (1979): 300. 79 Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 125–9. 80 “Colonization,” Argus, October 9, 1849, 4. 81 Norman Campbell, Census of Victoria 1854 (Melbourne: John Ferres, 1855), Part 5, 10. 82 Emily Skinner, A Woman on the Goldfields: Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1854– 1878, ed. Edward Duyker (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 33. 83 Ibid. 84 Sarah Midgley, The Diaries of Sarah Midgley and Richard Skilbeck: A Story of Australian Settlers, 1851–1864, ed. H.A. McCorkell (Melbourne: Cassell, 1967), 21. 85 Ibid., 47, 96, 105. 86 Ada Cambridge, Thirty Years in Australia (1903, repr.; Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2006), 60. 87 Ibid., 32. 88 Ramsay, November 10, 1858, “Diary.” 89 Ibid., July 16, 1858, July 22, 1858. 90 Chomley, “My Memoirs,” 26. 91 Nancy Bonnin, ed., Katie Hume on the Darling Downs: A Colonial Marriage, Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866–1871 (Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1985), 75.

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92 Thornwell, The Ladies Guide to Perfect Gentility, 221–6. 93 Joy Spanabel Emery, A History of the Paper Pattern Industry: The Home Dressmaking Fashion Revolution, (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 28. 94 “Lessons in Millinery and Dressmaking,” Argus, November 22, 1855, 1; “Ladies Taught the Art of Dressmaking,” Argus, May 20, 1865, 1. 95 Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, 76. 96 “Sewing Machines,” Argus, March 6, 1860, 8; “Sewing Machines,” Argus, July 1, 1862, 8.

Chapter 6 1 James Hoey to Margaret Brown, October 23, 1855, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters,” transcribed by Agnes Mary Alison Walker Weir, Acc.12100, MS.2543, National Library of Scotland. 2 Maggie Hoey to Margaret Brown, March 30, 1856, January, 1856, “Brown-HamiltonHoey Family Letters.” 3 Ibid., January, 1856. 4 Maggie Hoey to Jane Brown, May, 1856, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 5 Emma Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint: Gentility and British Gentlewomen in Rural Australia,” in Imperial Objects: Essays on Victorian Women’s Emigration and the Unauthorized Imperial Experience, ed. Rita S. Krandis (New York: Twayne, 1998), 85–107; Dianne Lawrence, Genteel Women: Empire and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1910 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2012), 8; Penny Russell, A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1994), 5; Linda Young, Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 56. 6 Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint,” 87. 7 This chapter builds on two previously published articles: Lorinda Cramer, “Making ‘everything they want but boots’: Clothing Children in Victoria, Australia, 1840– 1870,” Costume 51, no. 2 (2017): 190–209; Lorinda Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity on the Victorian Goldfields, Australia, 1851–1870,” Fashion Theory 22, no. 1 (2018): 85–108. 8 Anne Buck, Victorian Costume (London: Herbert Jenkins, 1961), 2; Lenore Frost, Dating Family Photos 1850–1920 (Essendon: Lenore Frost, 1991), 90–1; Margaret Maynard, Fashioned From Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 81; Viveka Berggren Torell, “Children’s Clothes,” in Berg Encyclopedia of World Dress and Fashion: West Europe, ed. Lise Skov (Oxford: Berg, 2010), 462–8.

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9 Maggie Hoey to Margaret Brown, October 12, 1857, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 10 Georgiana McCrae, Georgiana’s Journal: Melbourne 1841–1865, ed. Hugh McCrae, 2nd edn (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1966), 45. 11 Ibid., 40, 71, 88, 89, 109, 122, 132, 142. 12 Ibid., 65. 13 Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide (1838, repr.; Guildford: Opus Publications, 1987), 88. 14 See also: Cramer, “Making ‘everything they want but boots,’ ” 197. 15 Penelope Selby to Mary Selby, March 1, 1845, “Letters,” 1839–1851, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1134, MS 9494, State Library Victoria. 16 Penelope Selby to her Mother, August 27, 1846, “Letters.” 17 Nancy Bonnin, ed., Katie Hume on the Darling Downs: A Colonial Marriage, Letters of a Colonial Lady, 1866–1871 (Toowoomba: Darling Downs Institute Press, 1985), 100. 18 Ibid., 94–5. 19 Ibid., 98. 20 Ibid., 100. 21 Ibid., 136. 22 Lady, The Workwoman’s Guide, 16. 23 Emily Childers, March 6, 1852, March 20, 1852, March 30, 1852, August 23, 1852, December 3, 1852, December 6, 1852,“Diary,” 1852, in Royal Commonwealth Society Library, RCS/RCMS 37/8, 8/1, Cambridge University Library. 24 See also: Cramer, “Making ‘everything they want but boots,’ ” 199–200. 25 Frances Porter, Charlotte Macdonald, with Tui MacDonald, ed., “My hand will write what my heart dictates”: The Unsettled Lives of Women in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand as Revealed to Sisters, Family and Friends (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1996), 163. 26 Céleste de Chabrillan, The French Consul’s Wife: Memoirs of Céleste de Chabrillan in Gold-Rush Australia, introduced and translated by Patricia Clancy and Jeanne Allen (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2003), 109. 27 Eliza Lucas, “Autobiographical Reminiscences, 1848–1876,” 1913, 6, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 2590/8(b), MS 12104, State Library Victoria. 28 Caroline Bucknall Joyce, “Recollections of Rodborough Vale,” n.d., 3, in Bucknall Family Collection, 1975.0100, 1/1, University of Melbourne Archives. 29 Maggie Hoey to Margaret Brown, April 13, 1858, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 30 Jane Hamilton to Margaret, Jessie and James Brown, August 24, 1862, “BrownHamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid.

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33 Martha Jane Clendinning, “Recollections of Ballarat: Lady’s Life at the Diggings Fifty Years Ago,” n.d., 17, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 155, MS 10102/1, State Library Victoria. 34 Maggie Hoey to Jane Brown, November 11, 1857, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 35 Jane Hamilton to Margaret Brown, June 16, 1860, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 36 Jane Hamilton to Margaret, Jessie and James Brown, May 24, 1865, “BrownHamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 37 Isabella E. Ramsay, June 18, 1858, “Diary,” 1858–1859, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 543, MS 11021, State Library Victoria. 38 Ramsay, October 14, 1858, “Diary.” 39 Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), 75. 40 Dror Wahrman, Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 13. 41 Sarah A. Gordon, “ ‘Make It Yourself ’: Home Sewing, Gender and Culture, 1890–1930” (PhD diss., Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, 2004), 35; Laurie Yager Lieb, “The Works of Women are Symbolical: Needlework in the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth Century Life 10, no. 2 (1986): 32; Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 126. 42 “Police, City Court,” Argus, December 10, 1864, 1. 43 Emily Skinner, A Woman on the Goldfields: Recollections of Emily Skinner, 1854– 1878, ed. Edward Duyker (Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1995), 76. 44 Ibid., 68. 45 Clendinning, “Recollections of Ballarat,” 7, 17. 46 Ibid., 17. 47 Ibid. 48 See also: Cramer, “Making ‘everything they want but boots,’ ” 203. 49 Jane Hamilton to Margaret, Jessie and James Brown, August 24, 1862, “BrownHamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 50 Sarah Bendall and Lindie Ward, “Joseph Brady’s White Linen Shirt,” Australian Dress Register, retrieved July 30, 2018. Available at: http://www.australiandressregister.org/ garment/442/. 51 Anne Bowman, The Common Things of Every-Day Life: A Book of Home Wisdom for Mothers and Daughters (London: G. Routledge, 1857), 149–50. 52 Lieb, “The Works of Women are Symbolical,” 32. 53 New York Herald, “Sewing Machines,” Hobart Town Daily Mercury, April 11, 1860, 3.

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54 Margaret Emily Brown, “Memoirs of Margaret Emily Brown: A Recording of 58 Years of Life Mainly in Port Fairy,” 1907, 6, in Manuscripts Collection, Box 1833/4, MS 11619, State Library Victoria. 55 Penelope Selby to her Mother, August 17, 1851, “Letters.” 56 Jane Blackwood Mack, “Journal: Early Days in Australia,” 1881, 1–2, in Manuscripts Collection, Acc.9754/1, National Library of Scotland. 57 Catherine Helen Spence, Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever (1854, repr.; Netley: Wakefield Press, 1986), 221. 58 Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (Williamsburg: The Colonial Williamsburg Collection, The Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, 2002), 40. 59 See also: Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity,” 99–100. 60 Maynard, Fashioned From Penury, 125. 61 J.T. Campbell, “Government and General Orders,” Sydney Gazette and New South Wales Advertiser, August 29, 1818, 1; John Lakeland, “Government Notice,” Hobart Town Gazette, May 27, 1826, 3; H.E. Robinson, “Government and General Orders,” Hobart Town Gazette and Southern Reporter, December 26, 1818, 2. 62 “James Simeon, Clothier (of Melbourne),” Geelong Advertiser, March 27, 1841, 1; “New Drapery Establishment,” Geelong Advertiser, September 4, 1841, 3; “Opening of Commerce House,” Geelong Advertiser, December 27, 1850, 2; “Donaldson and Budge,” Argus, August 17, 1847, 3; “Bray’s Cheap Drapery and General Clothing Warehouse,” Geelong Advertiser, July 18, 1850, 4. 63 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye, Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience (London: Longman, Green, Longman & Roberts, 1861), 89. 64 “The Forthcoming Exhibition,” Argus, July 16, 1861, 6; “Monster Clothing Company,” Argus, May 23, 1863, 7; “Encourage Native Industry,” Argus, May 11, 1864, 8; see also: Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity,” 95–6. 65 Rachel Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, ed. David Adams (Ringwood: Penguin, 1988), 35. 66 Eneas MacKenzie, The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia (London: Clarke, Beeton & Co, 1853), 179. 67 G. Butler Earp, The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual (London: George Routledge & Co, 1853), 245. 68 John Capper, Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia (Liverpool: George Philip & Son, 1852), 74. 69 See also: Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity,” 97–8. 70 John Sherer, The Gold-Finder of Australia (1853, repr.; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 12. 71 Seweryn Korzelinski, Memoirs of Gold-digging in Australia, ed. Stanley Robe (1858, repr.; St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1979), 21.

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72 Diana Crane, Fashion and its Social Agendas: Class, Gender, and Identity in Clothing (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 28. 73 See also: Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity,” 90–1. 74 Ibid., 93–4. 75 Jane Elliott, “The Colonies Clothed: A Survey of Consumer Interests in New South Wales and Victoria 1787–1887” (PhD diss., University of Adelaide, 1988), 284. 76 Melissa Bellanta, “Business Fashion: Masculinity, Class and Dress in 1870s Australia,” Australian Historical Studies 48, no. 2 (2017): 201–2. 77 “A Great Rush,” Age, July 2, 1856, 3. 78 Wendy Gamber, “ ‘Reduced to Science’: Gender, Technology, and Power in the American Dressmaking Trade, 1860–1910,” Technology and Culture 36, no. 3 (1995): 458; Jane Malthus, “European Women’s Dress in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand” (PhD diss., University of Otago, 1996), 273. 79 Henning, The Letters of Rachel Henning, 192. 80 Ibid., 255. 81 Maynard, Fashioned From Penury, 127–9. 82 Bonnin, Katie Hume on the Darling Downs, 34. 83 Ibid., 41. 84 Ibid., 172. 85 Floyd, “Without Artificial Constraint,” 102. 86 Ibid. 87 Ibid., 101. 88 Maggie Hoey to Jane Brown, May, 1856, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 89 Ibid. 90 Jane Hamilton to Margaret, James, Kate and William Brown, November 25, 1864, “Brown-Hamilton-Hoey Family Letters.” 91 Maynard, Fashioned From Penury, 115. 92 See also: Cramer, “Diggers’ Dress and Identity,” 101–2. 93 Isabella E. Ramsay, January 2, 1869, January 11, 1869, February 11, 1869, January 13, 1869, “Diary,” 1869, in Manuscripts Collection, MS 12406, Box 3204/8, State Library Victoria. 94 Emily Childers, December 8, 1853, December 9, 1853, “Diary,” 1853, in Royal Commonwealth Society Library, RCS/RCMS 37/8, 8/2, Cambridge University Library. 95 Childers, April 27, 1852, “Diary.”

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Index A. Martin’s Timber Yard, Dunolly 142, 143 Adelaide Register 79 agency, of objects 86 The Angel in the House 74 Ararat 119 Argus 3, 42, 67, 82, 136 Armour, James 30–2, 104 Aspinall, Clara 15, 43–4, 66–7, 118 Athlone 85 Avoca diggings 104 baby’s layettes 147 Ballarat, Art Gallery of 21 Ballarat diggings Ballarat Ladies’ Benevolent Clothing Society 112 destitution and 111 Golden Point, Ballarat 1851 5, 7 goldfields dress 123–9 Martha Clendinning and 128, 150, 152–3 Prospector’s Hut Balaarat (Ballarat) 31 rebellion/Flag of the Southern Cross 21–2 richness of 4 Smythdale, near Ballarat 104 women going to 10–11 Barber, Margret 58 Baxter, Andrew 91 Baxter, Annie (Dawbin) 91–2, 93, 107, 115, 138 Beauvoir, Simone de 50 Beckett, Eliza à (Chomley). See Chomley, Eliza Beckett, Thomas Turner à 71 Beechworth goldfields/township 11, 160 Beeson, Mary 107 Beeton, Mrs 81 Beeton’s Book of Needlework 25 Begbie, Margret 63, 64 Belfast (Port Fairy) 49, 82

Bendigo diggings class and 13 Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo 123–4, 125 James and Maggie Hoey’s home 104, 105 James Armour and 30–1 Jane Hamilton and 47, 90–1, 105 Maggie Hoey and 2 richness of 4 women suitable to come to 99 Zealous Gold Diggers, Bendigo 141, 142 benevolence, female 111, 113, 171 benevolent societies 43 Bergin, Martha (Tipping). See Tipping, Martha Berlin woolwork 76, 79, 81, 82, 89 Bongmire Station 115 Booth, Edwin 13, 15 Botany Bay 63 Bourdieu, Pierre 19, 48, 117 Bourke Street, Melbourne 118 Bowman, Anne 57, 111, 155 Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden 34 Brady, Joseph 153–4 Brainard, Clementine 100 Brighton 47, 78, 129 Britain dressmaking in 136 needlewomen of London 40–1 tailor-made clothing 156 British Empire mobility and 9 women’s needlework and 33, 45, 47 British Society for the Reformation of Female Prisoners 37 Brown, Jane (Hamilton). See Hamilton, Jane Brown, Jessie 44 Brown, Kate 33, 91 Brown, Maggie (Hoey). See Hoey, Maggie Brown, Margaret 155

235

236 Brown, Robert 44 Brownrigg, Maria 79 Brown’s diggings 15 Buckie, Catherine 104 Bucklands goldfield 7 Bucknall, Albert 148 Bucknall, Caroline 65–6, 67, 148 Bucknall, Edward Gittins 28, 148 Bucknall, Sarah 148 Buda House 88–90, 106, 107, 109, 147 Buninyong 3 business women 8, 44, 126, 128, 152 Butler, Judith 19–20, 50, 67, 69, 72, 80 California, gold rush in 44, 100 California Gulley 91 Calvert, Samuel 5 Cambridge, Ada 101, 135 Cameron, John 28 Campbell, Jessie 28 Campbell, Moses 28 Campbell’s Creek 15 Cannan, Jane 78 Canvass [Canvas] Town 4 capital, cultural 19, 48, 64, 117 Capper, John 98, 100, 177n.25 Castlemaine diggings/town Buda House 88–90, 106, 107, 109, 147 discovery of gold and the development of the town 87–90, 102 education of girls in needlework 52 Elizabeth Ramsay-Laye and 12, 131 Mary Isaacs and 109 numbers of women there 7 Our Tent Castlemaine 131 Petticoat Flat 7 the stores in 118 tent life in 12, 83, 131 Chabrillan, Céleste de 9, 101, 148 character, creation of 48 charitable needlework 82–3, 111–13 charitable organizations, women’s 112 charity schools 51–2 Charter, Mrs 155 Chevalier, Nicholas 118 Child, Mrs 57 Childers, Charles 147 Childers, Emily 82, 97, 147, 165–6

Index Childers, Hugh 166 children baby’s layettes 147 Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden 34 Boy’s Jacket 145 child labor 54 the clothing of 140–9, 150–3, 166, 170–1 dresses worn by boys 34, 148–9 education of girls in needlework 47, 49–50, 52, 56–7, 68, 69–70, 171–2 Infant’s Shirt 147 moral education of girls 60 pinafores 142, 147–8, 150 poorly clothed 151–2 poverty and 111 Chinaman’s Flat 77 Chisholm, Caroline 35 Chomley, Eliza 57, 71, 76, 135–6 Chomley, Henry 76 Christian conduct 113 Christmas on the Diggings or the Unwelcome Visitor who Came Uninvited 105, 106 civilizing mission 112 Clacy, Ellen 8–9, 9–10, 19, 77, 104, 177n.25 Clara Morison: A Tale of South Australia During the Gold Fever 155 Clarke, Cuthbert 131 class class identity 18, 19 cleanliness and 110, 172 clothing and 115, 117, 173 in the colony 12–17 dress, identity and 116–22, 162–3, 173 dressmaking and 133 education and 49, 67 elites 65–7, 89, 135–6 female industry and 101 femininity and 75 gender and 17–20, 75 genteel good taste and 120–1 gentility and 16–17 middle-class women 26, 27, 44–5, 75, 76 middle-classes 15–16, 19, 79, 170 needlework and 27, 90 preference for working class women 98–9 samplers and 59 self-made men and women 14–15

Index sewing machines and 137 skilled workers 13 taste and 137 women’s lives and 71 work, leisure and 76–7 working-class respectability 112 cleanliness rising standards of 109, 110 as a social marker 172 Clendinning, George 10–11 Clendinning, Martha 10–11, 128, 150, 152–3 cloth. See fabrics clothing baby’s layettes 147 black velvet smoking cap 73, 74 Boy’s Dress Worn by John Marsden 34 Boy’s Jacket 145 caring for 130 of children 140–9, 150–3, 166, 170–1 class, identity and 115, 116–22, 173 the clothing of families 139–40 cost of 156 dresses worn by boys 34, 148–9 fashion and 131–2, 173 identity and 157–61, 173 increasing use of underclothes 109–10 industry 133, 156 Infant’s Shirt 147 inheritance of 130 maintenance of 172 mending of 130, 173 men’s clothing in the colony 156–63, 173 men’s coats 157 men’s shirts 154–6 messages encoded in 115 pawning of 129 pinafores 142, 147–8, 150 ready-made 133, 156, 173 refurbishment of 130–1, 132, 138, 173 second-hand 129–30 shortages of 36 slop clothing 37, 41, 156 social status and 124–5, 171, 173 tailor-made 156 theft of 111, 129 White Linen Shirt Worn by Joseph Brady 154

237

Collingwood 1 Collins Street, Melbourne 118 colonial social systems, identities in 22–3 comfort in the home 83–90, 101–7, 172 idea of 84 The Common Things of Every-Day Life 111, 121, 130, 154 Condon, Miss 136 conspicuous consumption 16 control, sewing as 36–9 convicts arrival of 3 convict female factories 37, 156 sewing and 36–9 shipboard sewing 37 cotton cloth, mass production of 109 Creswick 76 crinolines 109 Culloden 39 cultural history, samplers and 63 culture(s) British middle-class 170 class and gender cultures 76–7 cultural capital 19, 48, 67, 117 genteel 72, 170 material culture 16, 20–1, 22, 25, 79, 83–4, 105 needlework as a cultural performance 2 Daintree, Richard 102 Dale Park 53 dangers, of the goldfields 10, 30 The Daughters of England 53 Davenport, Sarah 9 Davis, Elizabeth Barrett 37 Dawbin, Annie. See Baxter, Annie (Dawbin) Dawbin, Robert 91–2, 115 Deason, John 125 decorative needlework. See needlework degeneracy, female 111 democracy, on the goldfields 139 demographics, of the goldfields 5–8 destitution of families/women 10 of the genteel 43 gold-rush society and 171 of needlewomen 41 difference, creating 75

238

Index

Digger’s Auction Eagle Hawk, Bendigo 123–5 The Digger’s Road Guide to the Gold Mines of Victoria and the Country Extending 210 Miles Round Melbourne 4–5, 6 Digger’s Wedding in Melbourne 120 digger’s weddings 120 Digger’s Wife in Full Dress 119 digger’s wives, over-dressed 119 The Diggings, The Bush, and Melbourne: Reminiscences of Three Years’ Wanderings in Victoria 32 disgust, concept of 18–19 Distressed Needlewomen Emigrating to Australia for a Better Life 42 Distressed Needlewomen’s Society 41 Dodd, Mrs 115 dolls clothes 57 domestic arts 53 domestic roles, alternative gendered 29–30 domesticity creating comfortable homes 83–90, 101–7, 172 femininity and 75 genteel ideals of 104 needlework and 25, 93, 170–1 drawers 109–10 drawing rooms, fancywork and 78–81 dress business women and 128 of children 140–5 class, identity and 116–22, 137, 162–3, 173 in the colony 122–9 as a communicative device 140 Eliza Perrin’s day dress 126–7 the extended lifecycle of gowns 129–33 genteel dress 117, 121–2, 128, 131, 171 of genteel men 160 home dressmaking 133–7, 138 the power of 128 respectability and 137–8 shifting dress standards 140 status and 117 dressmaker, term 40 dressmaking 73, 133–7, 138, 152, 153, 173 Duke, Anne 21

Dunolly A. Martin’s Timber Yard 142, 143 Church of England School in 141 daily life in 161–2 Harper & Ferguson’s store 162 J. Wilson & Co. 161 T. Tyrer’s shopfront, Broadway 127–8 Welcome Stranger nugget 125 Eaglehawk 91, 129, 141 Earp, George Butler 14, 157 East Leigh Ladies’ College, Prahran 67 economy of decency 133 gold rush 14–15 education charity schools 51 Church of England School in Dunolly 141 a correct education 48–9, 66–7, 70 in decorative needlework 67, 70 in domestic arts 53–5 early elite colonial 65–7 East Leigh Ladies’ College, Prahran 67 female 43 Female Free School, Collon 52 Female Orphan Institution 51 Female School of Industry 51 of girls in needlework 47, 49–50, 52, 56–7, 68, 69–70, 171–2 marking samplers 57–65, 70 moral and religious training 59 moral education of girls 60 Mr and Mrs E.A. Samson’s School for Young Gentlewomen 67 Mrs Henderson’s private boarding school in Melbourne 65–6 and needlework as women’s work 45 for poor girls 51–2 ragged schools 51–2 training girls to be mothers 57 wealthy colonists sending children to Europe for 67 elites in Castlemaine 89 early elite colonial education 65–7 women 135–6 Elliott, Joseph 79 Ellis, Sarah Stickney 53

Index The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia: Containing the Fullest Particulars Relating to the Recently Discovered Goldfields, the Government Regulations for Gold Seeking etc 100 The Emigrant’s Guide to Australia 157 employment, of women 32–6 (see also labor) English Paper Piecing method 55 Espie, Robert 37 An Evening at Yarra Cottage, Port Stephens 79–80 exploitation, needlework and 45 fabrics access to 150, 153 availability of 122 mass production of cotton cloth 109 reuse of 150–1 the value of 34–5 Faithfull family 73 families the clothing of 139–40 desertion/destitution of 10 genteel 12 migration of 8 The Family Economist: A Penny Monthly Magazine Devoted to the Moral, Physical, and Domestic Improvement of the Industrious Classes 55 fancywork Applique Quilt 85 Berlin woolwork 81, 82 Berlin Woolwork Firescreen 89 black velvet smoking cap 73, 74 for charity bazaars 82–3 contradictions of 81–3 as feminine performance 72, 78–81, 170 femininity and 72–5 as genteel labor 71, 72, 75, 93, 170 leisure and 78 management of identity and 91, 92, 93 parlors, drawing rooms and 78–81 term 73 fashion, clothing and 131–2, 173 Female Emigration Fund 39, 41 Female Free School, Collon 52 Female Orphan Institution 51

239

Female School of Industry 51 femininity colonial 98–101, 172 domestic 99 domesticity and 75 fancywork and 72–5 genteel 93, 153, 169, 171 maternity and 151, 166 middle-class women and 75 motherhood and 151 needlework lessons and 69 performance of 69, 70, 72, 73, 78–81, 90, 92, 170 production of 50, 62 sewing and 49 Fillan, Emily (Skinner). See Skinner, Emily First Fleet 36 Five Unidentified Men Working a Gold Mine Near Beechworth, Victoria 160 Flag of the Southern Cross (Eureka Flag) 21–2 footwear, mending of 28 Fortune, Mary 12 Fry, Elizabeth 37 Fryer’s Creek goldfield 7 Geelong Advertiser and Intelligencer 112–13 Geelong Hospital and Benevolent Asylum 112 gender acquisition of 50, 69 alternative gendered domestic roles 29–30 class and 17–20, 75 the “doing” of 19 gender cultures 76–7 gender expectations 81 gender performativity 72, 80 gendered material practices 72 the goldfields and 5–8 identity 19, 90 needlework and 26–32, 50 genteel men, the dress of 160 genteel women dressmaking and 138, 152, 153, 173 femininity and 93, 153, 169, 171 household labor of 135 idleness and 71, 75–6, 82, 95, 99 leisure and 75–8, 108, 170

240

Index

migration of 8–9, 12 as paid labor 43–5, 91, 152 plain sewing skills and 69–70, 95–6, 97 sewing for men 153–6, 164, 166–7, 173 gentility active 96, 98 adapted genteel behaviors 140, 165, 172, 173 class and 16–17 colonial necessity and 165 genteel culture 72, 170 genteel dress 117, 121–2, 128, 131, 171 genteel good taste 116–22, 132, 137 genteel ideals of domesticity 104 genteel identity 2, 17, 25, 67, 91, 172, 174 genteel labor 71, 72, 75, 93, 135, 166–7, 170 genteel paid labor 43–5, 91, 152 genteel performance 17, 20, 80, 91, 92, 171, 172 the genteel poor 43 genteel values 113, 166 maintaining 44, 90–3 marriage and 89 needlework and 27, 45, 68–9 revised notion of genteel behavior 95–6, 97–8, 100 gentlemen 14–15 geographical dislocations, migration and 2 gift giving, relationships and 92 Gilks, Edward 4–5, 6 Gill, S.T. 10, 11, 86, 87, 120, 123–5, 141, 142, 158, 159 girls (see also children) education of in needlework 47, 49–50, 52, 56–7, 68, 69–70, 171–2 education of poor girls 51–2 moral education of 60 The Girl’s Own Book 57 Goffman, Erving 18, 20, 78, 92–3, 96, 108, 117 The Gold Colonies of Australia, and Gold Seeker’s Manual 14 gold digging, as a lottery 15 gold rush social issues and 10 social order and the gold rush economy 14–15 Victoria 1, 3–12

The Gold Rush in Victoria: On the Road to the Diggings, Deserted Ships in Hobson’s Bay in 1852 5 Golden Point, Ballarat 1851 5, 7 goldfields (see also names of individual goldfields) associated occupations 14 dangers of 10, 30 wages/earnings made on 14 The Gold-Finder of Australia 13 Government Camp 128 Great Britain, SS 1 Greaves, Sarah 9 Green, John 13, 15 Grosse, Frederick 118 Guerard, Eugen von 157, 158 Gulgong, New South Wales 161 Hainsselin, Henry 30, 31 Hale, Lucretia P. 49, 68 Hall, Rose 33 Ham, Thomas 5, 6, 7 Hamilton, Andrew 1, 47, 91, 150–1 Hamilton, Jane 78, 90–1, 95, 128–9, 149–50, 150–1, 153, 165 Hamilton, Robert 153 Hardy, Wilson 50–1 Harper & Ferguson’s store, Dunolly 162 Harris, Sophia 33 Hart, John 13–14 Hart, Lucy 13–14 Hastie, Jane 67 Hastie, John 67 Hayes, Anastasia 21 Hayter, Kezia 38, 39 health, of needlewomen 41, 43, 82 Hearn, Henrietta 78 Henning, Amy 137 Henning, Annie 28 Henning, Biddulph 28, 156 Henning, Rachel 28–9, 137, 164 Henty, Agnes 36, 121, 122 Herbert, Sidney 41 Hill End, New South Wales 161 Hobhouse, Mary 100 Hobson, Eliza (Perrin). See Perrin, Eliza Hoey, James 1, 3, 91, 105, 117, 139 Hoey, Maggie 1–2, 47, 97, 104, 117–18, 130, 139–40, 141–2, 149–50, 165

Index Hoey, Maggie Jr. 149 Hoey, Robert 47, 139, 149 Hoey, Thomas 1, 105, 139 homes creating comfortable 83–90, 101–7, 172 genteel 172–3 as status symbols 101 homeworkers 40 Hood, Thomas 40 Hope, G. Curling 69 Horden, Ann 35 Hotham, Lady 82 household labor 78 (see also labor) household linen linen, quantities recommended by emigrant guides 103 the marking of 58 recycling of 106 Sheet for a Cot or Pram 107 housing crisis, Melbourne 4 How to be a Lady: Book for Girls, Containing Useful Hints on the Formation of Character 53, 68 How to Emigrate; or the British Colonists, A Tale for all Classes 98, 122–3 Hudson, Bertha (Leviny). See Leviny, Bertha Hume, Ethel 147 Hume, Katie 35–6, 101, 136, 146, 164 Hume, Walter 164 The Husband’s Complaint 81 I Have Got It 157, 158 identity(ies) class identity 18, 19 clothing and 157–61, 173 in colonial social systems 22–3 dress, class and 116–22, 137, 162–3, 173 gender 19, 90 genteel 2, 17, 25, 67, 91, 172, 174 identity performance 18, 19, 72, 79, 170 management of 91, 92, 93 material culture and 22–3 the nature of 18 needlework and 17–18, 20, 169 new competencies and 140 objects and 22, 79, 83 samplers and 65

241

social identity 18, 115–16 struggles for 91–2 of women in colonial environments 2 idleness 68, 71, 75–6, 82, 95, 99 Illustrated London News 42 Immigrants Home, Melbourne 112 impression management 108 Improvident Diggers in Melbourne 158, 159 Indigenous people needlework and Indigenous women 33 samplers of Indigenous girls 59 squatters taking their land 3 industrialization 74 industry a life of 68, 98 needlework industry 40–3, 45, 54 Inglewood 78 Innes, Annabella 106 institutions, needlework and 43 Intellectual Education, and its Influence on the Character and Happiness of Women 49 Isaacs, Mary 109 isolation, of women on the goldfields 7 J. Wilson & Co, Dunolly 161 Jenkinson, G.H. 128, 141, 142, 143, 161–2 jewelry, men’s 158–9 Justinian 36 Kelly, William 121 Kennedy, Mrs 136 Kew, Melbourne 121 Kingston, William G. 98, 122 Korzelinski, Seweryn 12–13, 157 La Trobe, Charles 62–3 labor alternative gendered domestic roles 29–30 businesses supporting the mining industry 87–8 child labor 54 class and 76 of convict women 37–9 genteel 71, 72, 75, 93, 135, 166–7, 170 genteel paid 43–5, 91, 152 household labor 78 manual and the colonies 99

242

Index

needlework and 45 pieceworkers/homeworkers 40 plain sewing. See plain sewing skill-shortages 97 of women 37–9, 169 Lacy, George 118 The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness 32, 53, 97 The Ladies’ Complete Guide to Crochet, Fancy Knitting and Needlework 65, 69, 81 The Ladies’ Work Table Book 49 The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility 121, 130 A Lady’s Visit to the Gold Diggings of Australia in 1852–53 8 land, the purchasing of 86 leather work 28 Leech, John 15, 16 Lees, John 119 leisure appearance of 78 class and 76, 77 the genteel women and 75–8, 170 gentility and 75–8, 108, 170 idleness and 95 Leviny, Bertha 88–9, 106, 147 Leviny, Ernest 52, 87–90, 106, 109 Leviny family 109 Leviny, Hilda 52 literature emigration literature and gold-rush guides 8 (see also names of individual guides) written by genteel women 20–1 London, needlewomen of 41 London Saturday Journal 81 Lord Sidmouth 37 Lucas, Eliza 148 Lucas, Susannah 148 Lucky Digger that Returned 10, 11 Lyall, Charles 103 Macarthur, Elizabeth 33–4 Macarthur, John 33 Macarthur, Samuel 33 Mack, Jane Blackwood 155 MacKenzie, Eneas 157 Maclean, Mary 39 marriage, gentility and 89 Marsden, Elizabeth 34

Marsden, John 34 Marsden, John Jr. 34 Martin, Jemima 33 Martin, Lucy 56, 108 Martin, Robert 56 Maslen brothers 13 Mason, Cyrus 9 material consumption 120 material culture 16, 20–1, 22–3, 25, 79, 83–4, 105 maternity, femininity and 151, 166 McCrae, Georgiana 145–6 McCrae, Prideaux 146 Mediaeval guild workshops 26 Melbourne Brighton 47, 78, 129 Collingwood 1 dressmaking in 134, 136 the gold rush and 3–4 housing crisis 4 Immigrants Home 112 Kew 121 life in 9–10, 101, 110, 117–18 Melbourne Ladies’ Benevolent Society 112 Melbourne’s Benevolent Asylum 43 Provident Diggers in Melbourne 86, 87 society in 15, 19 St Kilda 57, 71 men dress of genteel men 160 jewellery 158–9 labor, class and 76 men’s clothing in the colony 154–63, 173 needlework and 26–32, 40 Method for Teaching Plain Needlework in Schools 96 middle-class women femininity and 75 leisure/idleness and 76 needlework and 26, 27 paid labor of 44–5 middle-classes 15–16, 19, 79, 170 Midgley, Sarah 134–5 migration advice on clothing requirements 122–3 assisted passengers 39, 123 emigrants manuals 122–3 (see also names of individual manuals)

Index of English needleworkers 41 of families 8 female emigration schemes 39, 41 first class passengers 123 genteel migrant women 8–9, 12 geographical dislocations and 2 the gold rush and 3 internal 9 a life of industry and 98 objects and 85–6 plain sewing and 101 preference for working class women 98–9 social/geographical dislocations and 2 wealthy migrants 14 mining 8, 128, 129, 165 Minter, Eleanor 142, 144 Minter, Ellen 144–5 Minter family 143 Minter, Flora 144–5 Minter, Michael 142 Mitchell, Blanche 36, 101, 122, 129 mobility, the British Empire and 9 modesty the hiding of plain sewing and 96, 108–10, 113, 171 underclothes and 109–10 Moorabool diggings 124 morality charitable sewing and moral character 113 the female form and 109 moral education of girls 60 moral qualities of men’s shirts 155–6 moral qualities of women 41 moral training 59 moral underpinning of needlework 45 plain sewing and moral behavior 97, 98 Morning Post 8 motherhood, femininity and 151 mothers love and devotion of 151–3, 154, 166 responsibility to train daughters in domestic arts 53–5 Mount Alexander diggings 4, 9, 14, 157 Mowle, Florence 56 Mowle, Mary 35, 56 Mowle, Stewart 35

243

Mr and Mrs E.A. Samson’s School for Young Gentlewomen 67 Mrs Henderson’s private boarding school in Melbourne 65–6 Muir, James 7–8, 87–8 Mundy, Ann 77 Mundy, Henry 6–7, 30, 77 Nagle, Jessie 33 needlewomen distressed needlewomen 40–3 health of 41, 43, 82 term 40 needlework (see also sewing) the attributes of a good wife and mother and 151–2, 153, 154, 156, 166 charitable 82–3, 111–13 class and 27, 90 as cultural performance 2 decorative needlework 54, 67, 70 (see also fancywork) domestic duty of women and 53 domesticity and 25, 93, 170–1 as a form of self-writing 65 the gendering of 26–32, 50 gentility and 27, 45, 68–9 history of 26–7 identity and 17–18, 20, 169 as a means of expression for women 65 men and 26–32, 40 middle-class women and 26, 27 moral underpinning of 45 as a performance for the parlor 80–1 performances of femininity through 70 social status and 169 needlework industry 40–3, 45, 54 Needlework Specimen Book, Collon, County Louth, Ireland 53 Nelson, New Zealand 100 Neptune 36 New Plymouth, New Zealand 99, 148 New South Wales Gulgong and Hill End 161 The Peach Trees 164 population expansion in 35 Springfield Station 73 New Zealand Nelson 100 New Plymouth 99, 148

244

Index

Newcomb, Harvey 54 Nightingale, Florence 27 Nims, Brigham 27 North America Californian diggings 44, 100 dressmaking in 133, 136 frontier housekeeping 99–100 San Francisco 124 Norton, Charles 84 Oates, Richard 125 objects agency of 86 produced by gentile women 20–1, 22 projecting public identities 22, 79, 83 Off to the Diggings 9, 10 Osmond, Mrs 145 Our Tent Castlemaine 131 outworkers 40 Ovens diggings 7 palms (sewing) 30 Parker, W. 125, 126 parlors, fancywork and 78–81 Parramatta Female Factory 37 Patmore, Coventry 74 The Peach Trees, New South Wales 164 Pellet, Charlotte 62 Pellet, Rose Augustine 60–3 performance concept of performativity 19–20 of femininity 69, 70, 72, 73, 78–81, 90, 92, 170 gentility and 17, 20, 80, 91, 92, 171, 172 identity performance 18, 19, 72, 79, 170 Perrin, Eliza 123, 126–7 Perrin, John 126 Perrottet, Charlotte 7, 11 Petford, James 104 Petford, Jane 11 Petticoat Flat. See Castlemaine Philips’ Emigrants’ Guide to Australia 123 pieceworkers 40 pinafores, worn by children 142, 147–8, 150 Plain Needlework, Knitting and Mending for All, at Home and in Schools 49

plain sewing as a foundation skill 54, 73, 172 genteel women and 69–70, 95–6, 97 as a hidden practice 96, 108–10, 113, 171 mending 106–7 migration and 101 moral behavior and 97, 98 plain sewing samplers 52 shirt making 154–6 term 96 as a virtuous activity 96, 98 Port Fairy (Belfast) 49, 82 Port Phillip Bay 1, 39 Port Phillip District 3, 4, 6–7, 49, 62, 146, 148 Port Stephens, An Evening at Yarra Cottage 79–80 poverty children and 111 the clothing of the poor 112 cycle of 43 the genteel poor 43 gold-rush society and 171 Pratt, Sarah 148 Prendergast, Jane 11 Prendergast, Michael 11 Prendergast, Philip 13 Presbyterian Female Visiting Society 112 Prince, Mrs E. 54–6 property ownership 86–7, 92, 126 Prospector’s Hut Balaarat (Ballarat) 31 prostitution, needlewomen and 41 Provident Diggers in Melbourne 86, 87 public and private spheres 76, 78, 90, 169 Pullan, Mrs 73, 82, 102 punishment sewing as 36–9 of women 37 Quakers 37 Queensland 35, 122, 136, 146, 164 quilt making 38–9, 55 ragged schools 51–2 The Rajah Quilt 38–9 Rajah (ship) 38 Ralfe, Catherine Hester 44–5

Index Ramsay, Andrew Mitchell 135, 165 Ramsay, Hannah 151 Ramsay, Isabella 130, 135, 136, 151, 165 Ramsay-Laye, Elizabeth 12, 83, 87, 99, 118, 119, 120, 131–2, 156 Ranken, Mrs 137 ready-made clothing industry 133, 156, 173 religious training 59 Rendall, Julia 148 respectability dress and 137–8 maintaining 44 working-class 112 Richmond, Maria 99 Roberts, Miss 134–5 Rodborough Vale 65 samplers biographical samplers 64–5 class and 59 commemorative samplers 65 Embroidery Sampler 62 The Emigrant’s Farewell and The Emigrant’s Prayer 65, 66 “Honour Thy Father and Mother and Forget Not All Their Kindness” 61 identity and 65 of Indigenous girls 59 made by adults 64–5 marking samplers 57–65, 70 Needlework Sampler on Woollen Even Weave Fabric Featuring Boats and the Text “Botany Bay” 64 Patchwork Samplers 55–6 plain sewing samplers 52 “Remember Thy Creator in the Days of Thy Youth” 60 social and cultural history and 63 San Francisco 124 Sawtell, Miss 110 Scarborough 36 Second Fleet 36 Selby, Penelope 49, 129–30, 146, 155 self-possession 68 servants 77–8, 92, 97, 99, 100, 107, 129, 149 sewing (see also needlework) as control/convicts and 36–9 in an elegant manner 68–9, 70 femininity and 49

245

as invisible work 36 as a performance of self via the management of the appearance of others 140, 166 performances of 73 plain sewing. See plain sewing for the poor 111–13, 171 pressures of in the colony 149–51 as proof of devotion 151–2, 153, 154, 156, 166 shipboard sewing 37 tailoring. See tailoring value of sewing skills 35 sewing machines 101, 137, 146, 164 Sharpe’s London Magazine 164 Sherer, John 13, 14, 98, 157, 177n.25 Shirreff, Emily 49, 57 shirt making 154–6 shops, Melbourne 118 Simmel, Georg 116 Simple Directions in Needle-work and Cutting Out; Intended for the Use in the National Female Schools of Ireland 52 Sinclair West 115 Skilbeck, Richard 82 skill-shortages 97 Skinner, Emily 7, 134, 152 Skinner, William 134 slop clothing 37, 41, 156 Smith, Anthony 15 Smythdale, near Ballarat 104 Snowden, Mildred 67 social anxieties 18 social dislocations, migration and 2 social emulation 117 social history, samplers and 63 social identity 18, 115–16 social issues, gold rush era 10 Social Life and Manners in Australia: Being the Notes of Eight Years’ Experience 12 social mobility 13–15, 92–3, 169 social order, gold rush economy and 14–15 social relations, gift giving and 92 social status (see also class) clothing and 124–5, 171, 173 dressmaking and 138 fluidity of 117 needlework and 169

246

Index

the parlor and 79 Society for the Protection of Distressed Needlewomen in London 41 The Song of the Shirt 40 Spence, Catherine Helen 155 Springfield Collection, black velvet smoking cap 73, 74 Springfield Station, New South Wales 73 squatters 3 St Kilda 57, 71 status, dress and 117 (see also class; social status) steerage class 29 Stephens, Ann S. 65, 81 Surprize 36 S.W. Silver & Co, emigration guide 123 Sydney, business women in 44 T. Tyrer’s shopfront, Broadway, Dunolly 127–8 tailoress, term 40 tailoring in the genteel home 164–6, 173 as skilled/paid labor 73 tailor-made clothing 156 Tankard, Mary Ann 51 Tasmania 38, 85, 88 taste concept of 117 genteel good taste 116–22, 132, 137 vulgar taste of the lower orders 119, 137, 158 Taylor, Deighton 164 technology, textile and clothing manufacture 40 (see also sewing machines) tent life basic 103 Canvass [Canvas] Town 4 caring for a family in 139 in Castlemaine 12, 83, 131 furnishings and objects in tents 83, 104, 105 high standards of 12 repairing/improving tents 30 textile and clothing manufacture 40 theft of clothing 111, 129 of textile goods from homes 105 Thomson, Mrs 95

Thornwell, Emily 121 Thoughts on Domestic Education 54 Three Years in Melbourne 43 Tilley, Maria 65, 66 Timewell, George 29 Timewell, Louisa 29 Timewell, William 29 Tipping, Andrew 85, 87 Tipping, Martha 85, 86, 87 Tooralle, Clunes 84 Toowoomba, Queensland 136 Topsy Turvey, or our Antipodes 15, 16 Townbridge, Elizabeth 164 transportation, of women to Australia 37–9 Treasures in Needlework 73, 82 Trood photographic studio 144 Trotter, Anne 52–3 True Womanhood 74 tuition, in dressmaking 136 (see also education) Tulloch, David 5, 6, 7 underclothes, increasing use of 109–10 value(s) attached to textiles 138 in colonial settings 140 feminine 48 genteel 113, 166 of sewing skills 35 Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania). See Tasmania Veblen, Thorstein 76, 116 Victoria (see also names of individual diggings/towns) class in 13 genteel aspiration or association and 72 genteel femininity and 93 gold rush in 1, 3–12 population of 3 Viewbank Homestead 56, 108 virtue female 170, 171 plain sewing and 96, 98 vulgarity, of the lower orders 19, 119, 137, 158 wages/earnings, of needlewomen 42, 43 Waldick, Mr 92

Index Wangaratta 101 Warren, Mrs 73, 82, 101 wealth explicit displays of 118–19, 133 freedom from a master-servant relationship and 13–14 weddings, digger’s 120 Welcome Stranger nugget 125–6 wellbeing, sewing creating an atmosphere of 104 widows 43 Winter, Alice 59–60, 61 Winter, Eliza 59 Winter, Richard 59 Withers, Anastasia 21 women business women 8, 44, 126, 128, 152 comfort and 104 degeneracy of 111 desertion/destitution of 10 dress of 115–38 elite 135–6 employment of 32–6 (see also labor) Female Emigration Fund 39, 41 female virtue 170, 171 femininity and 74 genteel. See genteel women Indigenous women’s needlework 33 labor of 37–9, 169 labor of convict women 37–9 learning to clothe their families 140, 146, 164, 166, 170–1 leisure and 75–8, 108, 170 the love and devotion of mothers 151–3, 154, 166

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men’s garment trade and 40 middle-class weight gain 132 moral qualities of 41 in the needlework industry 40–3 numbers of on the goldfields 5–8 as participants in the gold rush 44 preference for working class women 98–9 property ownership by 126 punishment of 37 samplers made by 64–5 “standpoint of women” 20 Tasmanian Female Emigration Scheme 85 transportation of to Australia 37–9 True Womanhood 74 underwear and 109–10 vulnerability of on the goldfields 9 widows 43 womanly failure 111 work/employment 32–6 (see also labor) Woodbury, Walter B. 160 work class and 76–7 needlework as 26, 32, 40–3, 44-5 of women 32–6 workhouses, female factories 37 working-class respectability 112 work-wear 156 (see also slop clothing) The Workwoman’s Guide 51, 58, 145, 147 Young, Miss 136 Zealous Gold Diggers, Bendigo 141, 142

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