Making ‘everything they want but boots’: Clothing Children in Victoria, Australia, 1840–1870

Abstract

Dress was charged with meaning in the British colonies. Its visual cues made dress an obvious vehicle for formulating identity in material ways, and as a communicative device it was a means to measure migrants of unknown social origin — though not always with success. This article explores children's clothing in south-eastern Australia during the decades spanning the mid-nineteenth century, when the Port Phillip District transformed from a pastoral settlement into the thriving gold-rush colony of Victoria, attracting migrants from around the globe. In particular, it focuses on the material practices of mothers in clothing their children. In considering the links between a mother's domestic needlework and expressions of identity, it develops the concept of clothing as a visible indicator to observers of a mother's care of and devotion to her children, while acknowledging the circumstances that may have influenced her sewing — shortages of labour and materials, isolation and the financial uncertainty of life in a new colony.