Journal of Australian Studies,

Vol. 36, No. 2, June 2012, 207
228

The use of memory and material culture in the history of the family
in colonial Australia
Tanya Evans*

Macquarie University, Sydney

This article explores the use of memory and material culture in the history of
families who travelled between Britain and Australia and settled in the early
colonies from 1788 until 1901. It draws on diaries, memoirs, letters, and objects
belonging to a variety of cultural institutions including the Museum of Childhood
in Perth, Museum Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum, and the Historic Houses
Trust of New South Wales, as well as those within private collections, to explore
some of the meanings of objects brought by families from Britain to Australia.
Certain objects connected their owners with past lives back in Britain, reminded
them of home, family ties and duty and were transferred to new owners to remind
the next generation of their journeys round the world. It argues that a focus on
material culture enriches our understanding of the economic, social and cultural
history of the family in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and
Australia and allows us to appreciate the labour of mothers in creating family
histories.
Keywords: history of the family; material culture; memory; dress; quilts; dolls;
motherhood; museums

Introduction
This article explores the use of memory and material culture in the history of families
who travelled between Britain and Australia and settled in the early colonies from
1788 until the late nineteenth century. It is part of a wider project exploring the
meanings and experiences of family life amongst diverse social groups including
British convicts, ex-convicts, the free population (both rich and poor) and indigenous
families.1 The article draws on printed, oral, pictorial and material sources: diaries,
memoirs, letters, and objects belonging to a variety of cultural institutions including
the Museum of Childhood in Perth, Museum Victoria, the Powerhouse Museum
(PHM) in Sydney, and the Historic Houses Trust (HHT) of New South Wales, as
well as those discovered within private collections, to explore some of the meanings
of objects brought by families from Britain to Australia. It suggests that a focus on
material culture enriches our understanding of the economic, social and cultural
history of the family in late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and Australia.
Numerous mothers and their children, thousands of them prisoners of the crown,
many accompanying fathers and husbands and some of whom travelled without their
men hoping to be reunited with their transported breadwinners, endured the journey
of, on average, four months to Australia from Britain.2 It is important that the

*Email: tanya.evans@mq.edu.au
ISSN 1444-3058 print/ISSN 1835-6419 online
# 2012 International Australian Studies Association
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2012.678584
http://www.tandfonline.com
208 T. Evans

history of these migrant families, both forced and free, is examined in its
transnational context because, as numerous scholars have shown, metropole and
colony are intimately linked in the construction and experience of the family.3
Evidence of what families brought with them on their journeys is not, of course,
extensive but this article focuses on some of the objects I have discovered so far to
explore some of the meanings, synchronic as well as diachronic, of these items and
the role they have played in the construction of family histories.4 Collecting the
biographies of these belongings, rare though they are and unusual because they have
survived and/or come to light, and linking them to their family histories and
journeys, enriches our understanding of the history of the family in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth-century. It also allows us to examine their influence on the
construction of public and private memory in post-settlement Australia.5 I have
written elsewhere that my research on the family, which questions peoples
assumptions about the structure and experience of the so-called traditional family
in the past, focuses on womens mental and historical landscapes*their lived
histories.6 In this article, I shine a spotlight on colonial womens material worlds. It
builds on my arguments about the value of family history to academic historians, and
revisits some of the groundbreaking work by feminist art historians Rozsika Parker
and Griselda Pollock to urge us to revalue womens labour and its products within
British and Australian colonial homes.7
We can learn something about the everyday lives of mothers and children in the
past from material culture but the multiplicity and particularity of the reasons why
certain journals, diaries, letters and objects survived mean that we cannot talk about
any of them as being representative. Care needs to be taken to interpret these
possessions through the lens of survival, curatorial practices, and the meanings and
uses different generations of adults and children have subsequently given them.
Journals, like objects, often exist due to the assiduousness of individual family
members keen on memorialising the experiences of past generations but sometimes
just luck has ensured their survival.8 It is my argument here that different family
members created their own cultural scripts to construct and relate their family
histories and played diverse roles in the memorialisation of their genealogy. These
roles were marked by gender, age and marital status. My focus here is on different
womens roles within the family, but the practices of fathers and sons remain ripe for
further study.
Up until recently, the preservation of family histories through the safeguarding of
diaries, journals and objects, often linked with the construction and sharing of family
trees, has often lain in the hands of women.9 Objects have played an important part
in the construction of genealogies by women.10 Some scholars have suggested that
diaries, portraits, paintings and large objects of obvious economic value tended to be
passed down the male line and were often displayed publicly but I want to suggest
here that more intimate familial objects, of perhaps less obvious economic value,
have been deliberately passed down the maternal line of families and usually kept
within the home.11 Womens roles within their family economies were far from
passive. Few women made wills but some used the law to ensure that their property
passed to those they wanted, often female relatives and friends.12 While elite women
could use objects to convey a multitude of meanings, from fashion, taste, and style
to wealth and status, history and lineage, and from science, education, political
allegiance, and religious conviction to personality, relationships, memory and
 Journal of Australian Studies 209

mortality most colonial women used them to sustain a specifically matrilineal

family history.13 Like many processes that occurred within private contexts, they are
difficult to uncover and therefore remain often under- and unvalued.
Collating, analysing and displaying objects of this material culture allows us to
fill in some of the silences about the experiences of women and children in the extant
written sources*the diaries and letters mostly penned by men rather than women
and belonging to the elite rather than the poor.14 Evidence of the material culture of
mothers and children, especially that of the poor, remains a sparsely populated field
of work. Items like toys, games and clothes predominate in all museum collections
in Britain15 but there are important differences within the Australian museum
context because of the role migration has played in the construction of Australia as a
nation. Migration remains a central theme in contemporary Australian art as well as
the history of its material culture.16 Technological change, bringing with it the
widespread digitisation of museum and library collections particularly within a large
land-mass like Australia, and the self-conscious recasting of museums as research
institutions, has made my task much easier, so that more links can be made and
patterns of collection and possession detected.17 A focus on objects allows us to
acknowledge the agency of women within the family and to explore and analyse their
role in the material as well as emotional economies of families.
My focus here is mostly on the experiences of a handful of white free mothers and
children, few objects belonging to convict migrants have survived, though there is
more detail waiting to be discovered than we might assume on convict possessions.18
I want rather to share my discoveries of the products of female needlework, the few
samplers, quilts, clothes and dolls that have survived many journeys from Britain to
Australia, from state to state following arrival and passed down through families and
then donated to or bought by museums.
Clothes and fabrics represent the largest category of objects collected in British
and Australian museums under the subject of family and childhood. Mostly it is girls
and womens clothes rather than boys and mens costumes that have been more
readily preserved within museums because they are deemed to be prettier, more
aesthetically appealing and more likely to change over time.19 The culture of clothes
was one in which women predominated, in its construction as well as consumption.
Decorative sewing work was practiced by elite women as a leisure and culturally-
creative pursuit and there is much mention of these practices in womens diaries and
letters.20 Most women were taught and were expected to sew either for themselves or
for others. Louisa Meredith, like many other women, made all of her own dresses.21
The sewing machine did not come into common use in Australia until after the 1860s.
Sewing was also part of most poor womens economies of makeshift but the
industrial revolution and the supply of cheap, printed cottons, predominately from
India, transformed many families material lives in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth-century world.22 As John Styles has argued, during the eighteenth century
ordinary peoples clothing [was] in the vanguard of a humble consumer revolu-
tion.23 Textiles could be amongst womens most valuable and desired commodities,
often owned entirely by them, and they therefore played an important part in both
rich and poor families material and emotional worlds.24
Clothes and textiles had other meanings for the vast majority of early-colonial
settlers who had arrived in New South Wales following conviction for the theft of
clothing and fabric.25 Many brought clothes with them but some were forced to wear
210 T. Evans

convict uniform unless they were in private service. There were few shops that sold
clothes in the colony until the early nineteenth century and convicts seemed to fare
the worst from the severe clothing shortage that characterised the first few decades
following settlement. There was a lucrative black market in slops provided by the
state and clothes were eagerly sought as commodities of exchange and expected as
payment for goods and services amongst both forced and free settlers.26 Many
settlers brought clothes and material with them as well as sewing goods that would
allow them to work with their needle once landed. Catherine Cain had been
transported to Sydney in 1814 and by the late 1820s had established her business as a
dressmaker. Sewing trades expanded in the early years and the 1828 NSW Census
recorded that seventy women worked as dressmakers, milliners, seamstresses and
mantua makers comprising a significant minority of just over 4 percent of the female
labour force. Few women might have described their occupation as sewing-based but
many would sew informally. As women moved through the life-cycle their employ-
ment often also changed.27 The existence and overwhelming popularity of the Rajah
quilt on occasional display at the National Gallery of Australia (the quilt is the most
sought-after object in the National Museum of Australias collection*most recently
on display as part of Not Just Ned: a true history of the Irish in Australia exhibition)
tells us how Elizabeth Fry established the British Ladies Society for the Reformation
of Female Prisoners to supply materials required to occupy convict women with
quilt-making on their journey across. The Rajah quilt is a testament to her success.28
Once they arrived, many convict women laboured making woollen cloth in the
Parramatta Female Factory and all early settlers eagerly awaited the arrival of ships
bringing clothes and other provisions from abroad. Supplies remained insufficient
until the local market was able to meet demand from the 1820s. Due to the
irregularity of supply, the gaps in the local market and the fluidity of social
boundaries, much anxiety was experienced and articulated about dress and status
amongst many social groups in early colonial Australia.29
Numerous mothers and their daughters occupied their passage on the long
journey to Australia by working with their needle. Girls made doll clothes and
mothers sewed clothes for these as well as for their children.30 Samplers were made
by young girls, under the supervision of their mothers and grandmothers, to practice
their sewing techniques and skills. Literacy and numeracy skills were also honed
when alphabets, numbers, names and places were designed and stitched. Many
samplers were displayed within the home and sometimes used to demonstrate the
skills of young women within the family to potential suitors. Good needleworkers
made good wives.31 These as well as quilts were often also constructed on the journey
and there are some lovely samplers, sewn by two generations of migrant women in
the same family, in the Museum of Childhood in Perth.
Sarah King made a sampler in 1830 when she was only five and brought it with
her to Australia. At the age of 16 in 1841 she travelled with her sister to Western
Australia on the Sterling along with other servants and staff of Thomas and Eliza
Brown, originally from Oxfordshire. Sarah and her sister were the daughters of an
English carpenter. Both worked for Eliza Brown as servants on the journey across
and then at York as the Browns established their property with difficulty, beginning
with a two-roomed hut and an outbuilding for labourers. This left little space for
indoor servants to help Eliza with her two small children. The family eventually
moved to Perth in 1851. Eliza seemed fond of her servants, and discussed their
 Journal of Australian Studies 211

movements in her letters. Sarah left her service to marry William Boles Coates in
1849. William and his sister Jane Eliza travelled to Western Australia as orphans in
1834. They both worked for Governor Stirling on arrival in the colony, Jane as a
nursemaid and William as a goat-herd.32 Sarah and William had ten children
together (two died as infants and one when she was six). One of the seven who
survived, Annie born in 1863, sewed a second sampler when she was seventeen (it is
dated 1880) in Carringa where her family had set up a farm. Both samplers were kept
together and donated to the MWA by Annies grandmother.33
Another migrant, Mary Murphy, well known amongst her family for her
embroidery skills, brought the samplers and other specimens of needlework that
she made while training to be a governess at the Female Model School in Dublin in
the mid-1830s with her to Australia. Marys mother Renata Sautelle was a French
Hugenot and had fled to Ireland with her family during the French revolution.34
Mary utilised these samplers as models when employed as a governess by her brother
in Moryua to teach her nieces. When she died, having left no children herself, her
collection was divided between her nine nieces and subsequently donated to the
Powerhouse Museum by two descendants of these women in 1992.35 As we will see,
this pattern was often repeated with possessions created by women.
Basic sewing skills taught by mothers often laid the foundation of more complex
material constructions. Australias valuable quilt history has received painstaking
attention from quilters and their historians, especially following the Australian quilt
revival from the 1980s, though it has been suggested that few quilts survive in this
continent compared with Europe and America due to the climate. It is claimed that
sunlight has damaged fabrics and there is supposedly less need for the warmth
provided (although having just lived through a third Sydney winter, I find this last
argument unconvincing). Moreover it is suggested that the preponderance of wool in
colonial Australia discouraged quilting. Others suggest that quilts have not survived
because they were used frequently and were often worn out and then discarded.
When they have survived it was often because they were unfinished and not put to
everyday use. This allowed an individual to return to its construction when
convenient. Quilts take a long time to create and progress through several stages
to reach completion.36 Few women may have had the time to sew decorative quilts
during the nineteenth century but anniversaries of the settlement of Australia*the
sesquicentenary in 1938 and the bicentenary in 1988*have brought the existence of
more to light and they have subsequently been incorporated into a narrative of
pioneer settlement. The innovative National Quilt Register compiled by volunteers at
the Pioneer Womens Hut details the valuable histories of numerous Australian
quilts: http://www.collectionsaustralia.net/nqr/.37
Large families were common in early colonial Australia, averaging eight children
per family, although numbers varied enormously across the country. Marriage rates
were higher in colonial Australia than they were in England at the time but spinster
sisters remained common in some, especially elite, families. Many played vital roles in
many large colonial families and numerous diaries, memoirs, and letters attest to
their importance to many household units and to the strength of sibling relation-
ships. Single women became family standbys and frequently provided free
childcare for the progeny of their siblings during holidays, sickness and other times
of need. If spinsterhood was shared among sisters or even friends, they frequently
lived together to maximise their resources, both economic as well as emotional.
212 T. Evans

When one died her estate would be left to her spinster sister.38 A focus on material
culture enables us to challenge conventional histories of the family that ignore or
downplay the contribution of unmarried members and to move our narrative focus
away from the normative marital unit. It allows us to address the historical neglect of
spinsters and to acknowledge that they were often the guardians of their familys
history in their search for a permanent place in the family narrative.39 A number
of museum collections that I have researched, including Pauline Rileys in the
Museum of Western Australia, Margery Harveys quilts, one of which is held by
Megan Martin who works for the HHT, Florence Faithfulls belongings in the
National Museum of Australia, and Eliza Marsden Hassells collection of family
clothes in the Powerhouse Museum exist today due to the hard work of these
spinsters preserving their family histories. Without children themselves, these women
consciously, sub- or unconsciously placed themselves as integral to the family story
by controlling its narrative and description and by inserting a counter-narrative in
their family trees. By forcing their families to acknowledge the deviation from the
linear birth, marriage, children, death construction, spinsters situated themselves
into the family story which gave them one strategy to make sense of their lives as
individuals but also provided them with a means to represent themselves to their
relatives and the wider social and cultural world. It enabled them to validate their
lives within a society deeply anxious about family formation and reproduction.40
Two spinster sisters Eliza (Lizzie) (1845
1925) and Margaret Roebuck (1842

1917) made their quilt on a journey between India and Australia.41 Their Scottish
father was an officer in the 71st Native Infantry. He died and was buried in India.
After his death their mother then returned to Scotland with her children before then
leaving for Australia with some of them to live with her brother James Andrew. He
had settled on the Darling Downs in Queensland. Neither sister married but shared a
home until Margarets death in 1917 when Lizzie moved to Sydney to live with other
members of her family. She brought the quilt with her. This was then passed down to
their sister Henrietta Maria Howe and is currently owned by a direct descendant.42
Megan Martin, Head of the Caroline Simpson Library & Research Collection at
the Historic Houses Trust of NSW, owns a quilt that was made by her great, great,
grandmother Margery Harvey who arrived in New South Wales in 1838. This
followed one year after her marriage to Edmund Harvey at the age of twenty at
Laneast in Cornwall. They emigrated to Australia with several members of their
family on the recommendation of a member of the Dangar family, who spoke highly
of the opportunities to be made in the colony.43 Margery was to have eleven children
after her arrival and settlement first in Bathurst and then in Oberon and made
several quilts throughout her lifetime but concentrated towards the end of her life in
the late nineteenth-century, when she had more time on her hands.
These were then passed down to her daughters. Megans quilt was given to
Margerys youngest daughter, also named Margery, then passed to her own daughter
Linda, then to her cousin and finally to Megan who was well-known amongst family
members as one of their passionate family historians. Margery was a makeshift
quilter, though not economically poor, and Megans quilt was one of her last. Close
examination of the quilt reveals that she was a highly proficient seamstress because
she did not use templates and was able to creatively piece together mismatched
pieces, tones and colours of fabric. Towards the end of the nineteenth century as the
Aesthetic movement gained currency, craft and design within the home were
 Journal of Australian Studies 213

Figure 1. Margery Harvey. Courtesy of Megan Martin.

revalued, domestic crafts were increasingly exhibited at colonial and inter-colonial

exhibitions and quiltmaking became a widely admired skill publicly.44 However, its
value within this home and family was never under question. This quilt was
cherished by successive generations as a testament to a mothers skill, her ingenuity
and good taste as well as the feelings and emotions stitched together within. The
Sunday Sun and Guardian celebrated the achievements of this pioneer family in
1938 and reported that one of the quilts was in the possession of Miss Elizabeth
Harvey, over 92 years of age, who proudly told the reporter that There are two types
of old maids*some from choice and some from compulsion. Im one from choice.
She revelled in the details of her mothers history and skills and went on to recount
Margerys struggles as she established their property and reared eleven children.
214 T. Evans

She described how the quilts were made by her mother using little scraps of material,
all with their own history:

This was a piece of Mothers wedding gown. And this was Mothers old blue dress.
Dont you remember, Elizabeth? [her sister with whom she shared a house] The one she
was wearing the day you fell off your pony.45

Most of the quilts on the National Quilt Register were passed down the maternal
lines of families establishing a female lineage in which the women became the
proprietors of their oral and textile history.46 They were often made to mark
particular moments in the life-cycle*marriages, births and deaths*times when
families transformed and restructured, and given as gifts to celebrate or mourn these
moments in peoples lives.47 Families with more resources would plan and design
their quilts and buy material in advance. For others, quiltmaking was a practice of
making shift, of gathering what material was available and responding to its lack or
surplus as the construction progressed and the design altered in response. They were
often made out of recycled clothes*pieces of wedding, christening, mourning and
other costumes*material with many memories attached and used as mnemonics to
spark further recollection and contemplation. Quilting, sewing and the making and
altering of clothes might have been motivated by economic need and utilitarianism
but it was also educative for individuals as well as their pupils (familial and not). It
could be work as well as a leisure pursuit, practiced in private as well as communally
but perhaps most importantly it marked a process of remembering and history-
making in the fabric of time.48 As described by Sue Pritchard quilts are key objects
of emotion carefully positioned within familial heritage.49 Pritchard curated a
phenomenally successful exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London
on quilts during the southern winter 2011. It is significant that Rozsika Parkers The
Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine was reissued to
coincide because it establishes the revaluation of womens craft skills.50 An early
twenty-first-century context has found a space for the widespread recognition of the
value of womens needlework skills, the production of crafts within the home and the
pro-active role women played to ensure the survival of these objects through future
generations.
Amelia Brown (nee Parsons, born in Devon in 1817) made one medallion quilt to
occupy her time on the journey out to Australia and another following her arrival in
NSW in 1857 as an assisted migrant. She travelled with her husband John Brown
whom she had married in 1836 and their seven children from Devon during the
height of the gold rushes. In the ships records John is listed as a farm labourer while
Amelia was labeled a home servant. We do not know much about her life following
settlement but this utilitarian quilt constructed carefully from scraps of available
material was passed down to her granddaughter Una Braby (via her father William,
Grannie Browns son, with whom she lived towards the end of her life) and taken
to the family home at Binalong near Yass where it was stored in a succession of linen
cupboards before being bought by the PHM in 2004.51
The second quilt made following her arrival (similarly constructed by herself and
reputedly her children) was passed down to Margaret Swann (born in 1871). The
quilt was not particularly well-made according to curators, which support the
familys belief, that it was used to teach the children how to sew. Its construction also
 Journal of Australian Studies 215

Figure 2. Amelia Browns quilts.

suggests the quilt was created with economy from scraps of available material and
backed cheaply.52 Margaret was the Swanns eldest daughter. Her father, William had
arrived in NSW in 1864 and married native-born Elizabeth Devlin in 1870 with
whom he had twelve children. William was headmaster of Bowning Public School
from 1877 to 1880 and he, his wife and their many daughters became firm friends
with the Browns (despite the age gap between the children). William Swann
vehemently believed in the need for his children to be well-educated and to pursue
professional careers, Margaret worked along-side him at school. Many of his girls
216 T. Evans

Figure 2. (Continued ).

became active in the suffrage movement and Margaret, like other members of the
family, was passionately interested in history, heritage and education. It is believed
by family descendants that this is why she was given this quilt.53
The Browns and Swanns were neighbours until the Swanns moved to Parramatta.
There they leased what had been the Macarthur family home, Elizabeth Farm, from
1904 until 1968 when it was sold to the Elizabeth Farm Museum Trust after careful
preservation of the original property by the Swann family. Margaret, like her father,
built on her Quaker upbringing and devoted much of her life to those less fortunate
than herself. She became a teacher, then a headmistress and wrote several pieces on
 Journal of Australian Studies 217

Australian history including a biography of Caroline Chisholm and an article on

Louisa Meredith and Louisa Atkinson for the Journal of the Royal Australian
Historical Society.54 In 1896 she became the President of the Granville branch of the
Womens Suffrage League.55 After Margarets death, the quilt was inherited by her
sisters Edith and Ruth. Many of the objects belonging to the family moved with them
to a cottage in Dural and then passed, after their deaths, down to their niece
Margaret. In 1978 she sold the quilt to Leigh Tamoefalou who in turn sold it to an
antiques dealer in Melbourne from whom it was bought by the PHM.56 The quilt
was used by Quilt Australia as their official logo during the Bicentenary celebrations
in 1988.
Sewing skills were central to the production of other key items made, owned and
passed on by women to other women in colonial Australia and used to construct and
record family history. Clothes and material brought from Great Britain were
frequently travellers most valuable goods both economically as well as emotionally.
These were often womens most precious commodities.57 Ladies were devastated to
discover that many clothes were ruined by salt water on the journey across or lost
following shipwrecks.58 Steerage passengers were most at risk of losing their
possessions because they were kept in the hold and brought up periodically when
needed. Cabin passengers were more likely to have theirs safe to hand with the
possibility of salvage following a particularly bad storm. Anna King bemoaned the
loss of ten pounds of calico muslin and her many gowns destroyed by seawater on
board the Speedy in 1799.59 Despite tortuous journeys, others managed to preserve
their possessions. The Marsden familys collection of clothes that survives in the
Powerhouse Museum courtesy of the Royal Australian Historical Society is a
particularly wonderful resource for contemporary historians.60 These survived their
journey from England despite the Marsdens rough passage and marked by
Elizabeths labour during a bad storm as they neared Port Jackson.61 Figure 3
shows examples of the Marsden dresses.62
Elizabeth loved her clothes, avidly followed European fashions from New South
Wales and later passed on many of her dresses to her daughter Ann, the infant born
on their initial journey across.63 She and Ann were skilled seamstresses and Ann was
also a keen amateur artist. Their letters are scattered with references to sewing,
knitting, their love of clothes and their delight at receiving these from friends in
England. They made new dresses out of old ones and altered existing ones to suit
their Australian home and their journeys through the life-cycle. European clothes
were refashioned for the Australian climate.64 It is claimed that Anns wedding dress
that she wore when she married Rev Thomas Hassall in 1822 (her father, Samuel,
conducted the ceremony) had first belonged to her mother and was worn for her own
wedding to Samuel in Hull, Yorkshire in 1793. Little two-year-old Johns dress only
survives because he was wearing it when he tragically fell into a pot of boiling water
in the Marsdens kitchen and died in 1803.65 Eliza experienced extreme loneliness
and depression following the deaths of two of her young sons. This was heightened
when she was later disabled by a stroke resulting from the birth of her daughter
Martha on May 6, 1811. Long before then she articulated her sense of loss in letters
she sent to friends in London despite her appreciation of the warm climate in her
newly adopted land. We seem in our present situation to be almost totally cut off
from all connexion with the world especially the virtuous part of it. Old England is
no more than like a pleasing dream. In a letter Eliza sent to her friend Mary Stokes
218 T. Evans

Figure 3. The Marsden familys collection of dresses.

who lived in Cheapside London in September 1799 she asked for some white ribbon
so she could copy the new fashion in England. Other requests followed for different
articles of ladies dress and for ribbons, sewing silk etc. Samuel often conveyed his
daughters orders for clothes, straw bonnets and material from England and
organised for their payment. He was grateful to Mrs Stokes and hoped you could
have seen them dancing round the Ribbons the night I brought them home and
shared details of the dreams his daughters had of receiving boxes sent from her.66
Following Elizas stroke in 1811 her daughter Ann penned her letters and presumably
took charge of the familys sewing because her mother could no longer use her right
arm. The Marsdens, in turn, sent their friends sewing items, amongst other gifts from
Australia, including a netting box in 1804.67 Elizabeth was devastated when Samuel
insisted that her children return to England for their education and Ann was sent
back to her English grandparents at the age of five between 1800 and 1810 when she
returned to Parramatta. She later fondly remembered in a letter to Mrs Stokes, her
joy at being taken to a toy shop in London and being presented with the largest doll
I had ever seen! by Mrs Stokes.68 It is possible that Eliza and Anns clothes
reminded them of England and of themselves in past times and they remained
important to their female descendants as they carved new lives in Australia. The
striped dress on the right is a 1830s-styled dress. It is possible that it was made from
an earlier dress. The front-opening bodice is apparently unusual for the time.
Curators have suggested that it was remade from an earlier gown and that the front
opening made it easier for Elizabeth to dress after her stroke, which left one arm
paralysed. It is also possible, and much more interesting to me that the dress was
 Journal of Australian Studies 219

passed down to Ann following her marriage to Thomas Hassall in 1822 and was
worn while she breastfed her eight children, the opening making it easier to nurse.
The family was renowned for being hoarders both of their writing and their
possessions.69 Eliza Marsden Hassall, seventh child of Thomas and Ann, never
married but worked as a philanthropist and missionary, took an intense interest and
part in the lives of her siblings and their children, as well as the families who lived on
the Hassall estate while also being the primary carer for her invalid (and increasingly
difficult) mother until her death in 1885. She was passionately interested in the
preservation of her familys history and was responsible for keeping many of the
documents and objects belonging to them that exist today. The dresses and habit
shirt were donated to the Royal Australian Historical Society from the estate of Eliza
Hassall in 1919. A miniature of Elizabeth Marsden was passed on to them from
Elizabeth Betts (daughter of John Betts and Mary Marsden). Many of the notes
which have been used to detail the provenance of the costumes appear to be written
in Eliza Hassalls handwriting.70
I will conclude by stitching together some of these themes discussed above by
focusing on two types of objects which were also created by women, passed down the

Figure 4. Doll and sampler belonging to Mary Spencer. Courtesy of Museum Victoria.
220 T. Evans

Figure 4. (Continued ).
 Journal of Australian Studies 221

maternal line and used to record family history. This peg doll or penny wooden and
sampler were made by immigrant Mary Spencer between 1806 and 1810 and brought
to Australia. Dolls were amongst the most treasured possessions that families
brought with them across the seas and also often handmade by settlers. Mary
travelled from England in 1842 as part of a large family chain migration. She worked
as a seamstress before marriage. These dolls, also known as Nurnberg fillies
because they were often constructed in Austria/Germany, were popular amongst
children, especially of the poor, because they were easily constructed and far cheaper
than wax or bagman dolls.
Mary had been born in Mildenhall, Suffolk, in 1808. She was the eldest of three
children in a family she described as though poor . . . exceedingly honest and
industrious and careful. While she lacked formal education, she was taught to read
by her local parish minister at Sunday school, and a friend later taught her to write.
Her daughter was to speak highly of both her intelligence and skills in later life.
There are conflicting accounts of how she met her husband. Mary was either
working as a companion to her husband-to-bes mother or working as a seamstress
and they met through her brother William with whom Stephen worked at the corn
mill that he managed on the Moulton estate. Her sister Elizabeth (who worked as
housekeeper to the Spencer family) married the eldest Spencer son, William. There
was a wide gap in the families social status and the Spencer grandparents were
appalled at the matches that their grandsons made and funded their migration to
Australia in order to bury the stain on the family name. The Spencer family was
distantly related to Lord Althorpe and apparently never recovered from the disgrace
of the circumstances surrounding the familys migration to Australia. Two years after
Mary married Stephen Spencer in 1840 they, their servant Rebecca Free (who had
worked as a nurse in the family since Stephens infancy) and several other members
of the family left London for Australia on the Spartain. Stephens brother Charles
had already settled in Australia in 1838 as a chaplain to convicts and he advised his
brother where to buy his farm. Another brother, James, came in 1849 and settled in
Stewarts Creek and John arrived as a ships doctor during the gold rush in 1851. His
sister Ellen married in 1840 and came with her husband William Smith (Marys
brother) to Australia in 1842. Marys sister Susan accompanied her on the journey to
Australia where she married a man who worked as a groom for Arthur Blaxland in
the Hunter Valley and Elizabeth followed them in 1845 (with Marys parents) and
married an unrelated William Spencer. When Mary and Stephen first arrived, they
spent three months in Sydney before moving to the Hunter Valley near Singleton
where they lived in two dilapidated old huts almost roofless and floorless.71
Mary gave birth to her daughter Mary Anna there, with no medical help, in 1844
and passed her doll on to her, a symbol of her roots in Europe, carefully preserved on
numerous hazardous journeys and a memento from her own childhood. The family
moved 200 miles to Iron Bark in 1846 and then travelled for four months to settle in
Mt Abundance (now in Queensland but then in NSW) in 1858. The family remained
small. Mary and Stephen had only one more child in 1846 (following a dangerous
labour) who died after one week. Mary lived until 1866 when she was buried with her
brother William near Mount Abundance. The Spencer family eventually moved to
Armidale following years of drought, debt and disaster before selling the farm in
1869. Stephen became depressed and remained ailing in Armidale for eighteen years
before dying in 1890 at the age of 81. Mary Anna took pride in her mothers sewing
222 T. Evans

skills, she was a lovely needlewoman and her fine sewing was a real work of art and
she treasured the doll after her marriage to John McManus until her death in 1926.72
The doll was carefully preserved by Mary, who remained passionately interested in
her family history (she compiled her memoirs in 1901) despite, or perhaps because of
the fact that she had no children herself, before being bought by Museum Victoria in
1988 where it remains one of the oldest provenanced dolls in Australia.73

Conclusion
The samplers, quilts, clothes and doll discussed in this article can easily be
interpreted superficially. They can tell us something about the work as well as the
leisure time of mothers and their children. Their practical use on board ships and
after arrival in Australias early colonies are evoked with little trouble but their
meanings are complex and emotional and have changed considerably over time as
ownership has been transferred between different generations of families. It is
significant, I think, that most of these objects were created by women and then
passed down the maternal line of families, from one mother to her daughter to the
next or to alternative female relatives. The reason many exist today is because
mothers and others were keen to transfer their knowledge and skills and to preserve
family traditions, oral as well as material, in new environments first onboard ships
and then following settlement. They were often preserved with written accounts of a
familys history and treasured by individuals with a keen sense of the importance of
the past for present and future generations. Tracing the movement of objects through
families allows us to appreciate the complex construction of family life, historical
change and continuity, the varieties of family forms, both then and now and the ways
in which the construction and representation of the family reached between public
and private worlds. While mothers were keen to pass their belongings on to their
daughters, those who had no children themselves, the many spinsters written about
here, were more likely to ensure the survival of dolls, clothes and quilts because they
were not ruined through over-use and preserved for posterity. Some of these objects
connected their owners with past lives back in Britain, reminded them of home,
family ties and duty and were transferred to new owners to remind the next
generation of their journeys round the world. Others were used to pass on skills and
knowledge, both practical and emotional. This was a culture within which women
predominated, they made and refashioned clothes appropriate to their and their
familys needs, taught their daughters and pupils how to sew and guided them to
create dolls, clothes, quilts, and accessories for their comfort, enjoyment, and to
treasure. All the while they insisted on keeping, constructing, and conserving a little
piece of home, while establishing family ties and new homes, on the other side of the
world. In the process, they provided their daughters, granddaughters, and others with
proof, material and oral, of their crucial contribution to their familys story.

Notes
1. One of the outputs of this research will be an exhibition at the Museum of Sydney
provisionally entitled Family Life in Colonial New South Wales which will run from
March
July 2013.
 Journal of Australian Studies 223

2. Between 1821 and 1840, 82,000 convicts and 75,000 immigrants travelled to Australia.
Mark Staniforth, Diet, Disease and Death at Sea on the Voyage to Australia, 1837

1839, International Journal of Maritime History 8.2 (1996): 119
56, 119. On the reunion
of families in the colony see Tina Picton-Phillips, Convicts, Communication and
Authority: Britain and NSW, 1810
1830, (PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2002)
and Perry Mcintyre, Deserted and Despised Innocent Sufferers: The Immigration of
Free Families of Convicts to New South Wales 1788
1853, with particular reference to the
Irish, (PhD thesis, University of Western Sydney, 2006). Few women proactively chose to
travel to Australia to live in the early nineteenth century, see Emma Curtin, Gentility
Afloat: Gentlewomens Diaries and the Voyage to Australia, 1830
80, Australian
Historical Studies 103 (1995): 634
52, 637. The length of the journey decreased as time
passed and ships became more efficient.
3. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in
Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
4. On the many meanings of objects, see John Styles and Amanda Vickery, Gender, Taste and
Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700
1830 (London: Yale University
Press, 2006).
5. For an introduction to how an appreciation of material culture enriches our under-
standing of the past, see Karen Harvey, ed., History and Material Culture: A Students
Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (London: Routledge, 2009). For a warning of
the value and danger associated with the use of such sources see Carolyn Steedman,
What a Rag Rug Means, Journal of Material Culture 3.3 (1998): 259
81.
6. See Tanya Evans, Secrets and Lies: The Radical Potential of Family History, History
Workshop Journal 71 Spring (2011): 49
73.
7. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London:
Pandora, 1981) and Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch (London: The Womens
Library, 1984).
8. The methodological problems involved with using diaries, letters and objects have been
discussed extensively elsewhere. With regard to shipboard diaries, most were not written
with publication in mind but usually with a family member or friend as the perceived
audience. Some were sent back home to be shared amongst family and friends. If they
survive its usually as a result of chance or family sentiment and individual determination.
See Andrew Hassam, No Privacy for Writing: Shipboard Diaries, 1852
1879 (Melbourne:
Melbourne University Press, 1995), xiv and Robin Haines, Life and Death in the Age of
Sail: The Passage to Australia (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2003).
9. For further discussion of the popularity of genealogy and the potential of its impact on
academic social and cultural history see Evans, Secrets and Lies. Im gesturing here to
the growth of family history amongst military history enthusiasts which is changing the
gendered nature of genealogists.
10. Much of my thinking on this subject has been informed by some excellent work by
cultural historians of colonial America see Susan Stabile, Memorys Daughters: The
Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2004) and Margaretta Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution: Artisans
and Patrons in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Penn Press, 2005).
11. On a British early-modern example, see Claire Smith, The Governors Daughter, in
Quilts 1700
2010, Hidden Histories, Untold Stories, ed. Sue Pritchard, (London: Victoria
and Albert Publishing, 2010), 54. For a brief mention of the challenge of some collections
to Australian patrilinearity, see Chris Healy, From the Ruins of Colonialism: History as
Social Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 104.
12. Only three in Alan Atkinsons, Camden: Farm and Village Life in Early New South Wales
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 174
79. See also Patricia Grimshaw and Charles
Fahey, Family and Community in Nineteenth Century Castlemaine, Australia 1888 9
(1982): 88
125 and John Ferry, The Will and the Way: Inheritance Practices and Social
Structure, Journal of Australian Colonial History 1. 2 (1999): 122
41.
13. Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste 12, 9. For an excellent account of the use of portraiture
as genealogy by British aristocratic women challenging patriarchal representations of
family lines which emphasised the contribution of women to aristocratic lineage see Kate
224 T. Evans

Retford, Patrilineal Portraiture? Gender and Genealogy in the C18th English Country
House, in Styles and Vickery, Gender, Taste, 315
40.
14. On the gender and class bias of surviving diaries, see Hassan, Privacy for Writing, preface
passim. There are 800 shipboard diaries known to be in existence, 30 percent have been
written by steerage passengers and about 13 percent are written by women.
15. Sharon Brookshaw, The Material Culture of Children and Childhood: Understanding
Childhood Objects in the Museum Context, Journal of Material Culture 14. 3 (2009):
365
83, 371.
16. One example is the exhibition by The Australian Quilters Association in 2001 at the
Museum of Craft & Folk Art in San Francisco, Quilted Journeys: Immigration Stories
by Australian Artists. This included 25 works.
17. Many thanks are also due to the archivists and curators who informed me about the
objects in the possession of their respective cultural institutions as well as their own
personal collections. They include Deborah Tout Smith at Museum Victoria, Stephen
Anstey at the Museum of Western Australia, Lindie Ward and Glynis Jones at the
Powerhouse Museum, and Megan Martin at the Caroline Simpson Research Library of
the Historic Houses Trust of NSW. On the potential of digitisation see Chris Healy,
Histories and Collecting: Museums, Objects and Memories, in Memory and History in
Twentieth-Century Australia ed. Kate Darian-Smith and Paula Hamilton (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 47
9. On museums as research institutions see Kylie Message,
Meeting the Challenge of the Future, Recollections 2.1, March (2007).
18. Christine Leppard, There Are Besides Many Little Articles Too Numerous and
Insignificant to be Noted Here, Paper presented at Oceanic Passages Conference,
Hobart, June 24, 2010. My searches so far have not revealed comparable items of
Aboriginal material culture for this period apart from skin rugs.
19. Brookshaw, The Material Culture, 376
77 and Marion Fletcher, Clothes in Australia
1788
1901 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), 20.
20. Margaret Rolfe, Patchwork Quilts in Australia (Sydney: Greenhouse Publications, 1997),
9. Elizabeth Macarthurs quilt made in the 1830s when she was living at Elizabeth Farm is
one of the earliest known survivors in Australia but Lady Fitzroy who lived at Old
Government House in Parramatta was also a keen quilter. Her sewing box is on display in
the museum at Old Government House.
21. Fletcher, Costume, 81.
22. On sewing in eighteenth-century London, see Peter Earle, The Female Labour Market in
London in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reprinted in Womens
Work: The English Experience 1650
1914, ed. Pamela Sharpe, (London: Arnold, 1998).
On the role of sewing in late nineteenth-century Australian makeshift economies see
Beverley Kingston, My Wife, My Daughter and Poor Mary Ann: Women and Work in
Australia (Melbourne: Nelson, 1975), 65.
23. John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England
(London: Yale University Press, 2007), 14.
24. Styles, The Dress of the People and his exhibition at The Foundling Museum in London
Threads of Feeling on the material tokens left by mothers with their children when they
were admitted into the Foundling Hospital during the eighteenth century: http://www.
foundlingmuseum.org.uk/exhibit_temp.php. See also the pieces of textile discovered under
the floorboards of the Hyde Park Barracks which resemble many of these fragments of
tokens in London. See the on-line exhibition on the Barracks:http://www.migrationheri-
tage.nsw.gov.au/exhibitions/friendlessfemale/index.html.
25. Beverley Lemire, The Theft of Clothes and Popular Consumerism in Early Modern
England, Journal of Social History 24 Winter (1990
91): 255
79 and Deborah Oxley,
Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996), 49, 55.
26. Margaret Maynard, Fashioned from Penury: Dress as Cultural Practice in Colonial
Australia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 10, 32. On dress as payment see
Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University
Press, 1998), 164.
 Journal of Australian Studies 225

27. On Cain, see Katrina Alford, Production or Reproduction? An Economic History of Women
in Australia, 1788
1850 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1984), 170 and the Census
178 and for other references to sewing as a skill used by early Australian women 162
5,
170
8, 191 and also Leppard, Too Many and Monica Perrot, A Tolerable Good Success:
Economic Opportunities for Women in New South Wales 1788
1850 (Sydney: Hale and
Iremonger, 1983), 24, 53, 54, 81, 87 and Karskens, The Rocks, 157.
28. The Society was formed in 1817. Sue Pritchard, Creativity and Confinement, in Quilts,
93
4. The Rajah Quilt is held by the National Gallery of Australia: http://nga.gov.au/
rajahquilt/. See also Not Just Ned: A True History of the Irish in Australia (Canberra:
National Museum of Australia Press, 2011).
29. Maynard, Dressed in Penury, 31, 38, 53.
30. Objects: 27170, 27151, 27157, 27154, 27148, 27160, 27173, 27185. Museum of Childhood
Western Australia. This is a significant collection of dolls clothes made by three
generations of women. The first were made by Mary and Henrietta Stephens (in c. 1840s)
for a little girl in England. The sisters moved to Melbourne in 1855 and the clothes were
later returned to Mary for her to show her children. They were passed down the women in
the family. Donor: Dorothy H. Dunbabin (who made her contributions between 1910 and
1920). Louisa Cliftons mother busied her last few days on board finishing a bonnet she
wanted to wear when she reached land see Clifton diary, March 1841, MS 2801, National
Library of Australia.
31. Jutta Lammer, Making Samplers, New and Traditional Designs (New York: Sterling, 1984),
8; Jennifer Isaacs, The Gentle Arts: 200 Years of Australian Womens Domestic and
Decorative Arts (Sydney: Lansdowne Press, 1987), 115
18.
32. Western Australian Museum welcome wall, http://www.museum.wa.gov.au/welcomewalls/
names/coates-jane-eliza accessed May 2, 2011.
33. Museum of Childhood Western Australia, Items: 27069 and MC 90.79. Sarahs is on the
quilt register see http://www.collectionsaustralia.net/nqr/. See also The Bicentennial
Dictionary of Western Australians, vol. III and vol. I. Unfortunately theres no more
detail on the provenance of the samplers than presented here. The Browns letters provide
fascinating detail on early settlement in Western Australia see Peter Cowan, ed. A Faithful
Picture: The Letters of Eliza and Thomas Brown at York in the Swan River Colony
1841
1852 (Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, (1977, 1991).
34. One is on display at the Castel Hill Discovery Centre,http://www.powerhousemuseum.
com/collection/database/?irn127927&searchmary  murphy  sampler&imageson
&c&s. See the Acquisition and content file for object 92.72 at the Powerhouse
Museum.
35. Powerhouse Discovery Centre, Objects 92/73, 92/75, 92/81, 92/69, 92/74 and 92/72 made
between 1837
1860. Unfortunately no more is known about these objects than this.
36. I thank Dianne Finnegan for sharing her knowledge of quiltmaking and for her research
assistance on Margery Herveys quilt. Dianne is a quilt artist: http://diannefinnegan.com.
au/.
37. Sheridan Burke, Sydney Quilt Stories, 1811
1970, Elizabeth Bay House (Sydney: Historic
Houses Trust, 1998) and Annette Gero, Historic Australian Quilts (Sydney: Beagle Press,
National Trust of Australia, 2000), 19. On the quilt revival see Emma Grahame, Making
Something for Myself: Women, Quilts, Culture and Feminism (PhD thesis, University
of Technology Sydney, 1998). For a critique of the pioneer narrative with regards to
womens crafts see Wendy Hucker, Functional Quilts in Quilt Perspectives, Papers of the
Seminar held on July 21, 1996 at the Powerhouse Museum (copy in possession of Dianne
Finnegan).
38. There are many examples. For one amongst many see the evidence on the role of sisters in
the Macarthur family. On the role of spinster sisters in twentieth-century families and the
phrase family standbys see Katherine Holden, The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in
England, 1914
1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), ch.3. and Virginia
Nicholson, Singled Out: How Two Million Women Survived without Men after the First
World War (London: Viking, 2007), ch. 5. On the long duree of spinster-clustering see
Olwen Hufton, Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the
226 T. Evans

Eighteenth Century, Journal of Family History 9 (1984). On spinsters leaving their estates
to their sisters see Ferry, The Will and the Way, 134.
39. Margaretta Lovell uses this phrase in a different context in her discussion of the use of
portraiture by colonial American men in her Art in a Season of Revolution, 138.
40. Tina Millers, Making Sense of Motherhood: A Narrative Approach (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2005) has helped me to think about different familial narrative
strategies (though in this context those of mothers are her focus). Thank you to Joanne
Bailey for the reference.
41. To view the quilt, see http://www.collectionsaustralia.net/nqr/result.php?ID79&
restypet.
42. Quilt 79AR. Detailed research on this familys history was provided by Megan Martin for
the National Quilt Register.
43. Margery Herveys Diary, in the possession of Megan Martin.
44. Cassells Household Guide (London, c. 1875), 337.
45. Sunday Sun and Guardian, April 10, 1938 (copy in the possession of Megan Martin).
46. Quote from Smith, The Governors Daughter, 54. Those that were passed down the
maternal line on the Quilt Register include: 686 NTV, 1041JJ, 79R, 153MR, 203WO,
25NTA, 386CW, 717EGV, 913 AK, 1033 NG and 1114JH. For further evidence on quilts
not on the register see Annette Gero, The Fabric of Society; Australias Quilt Heritage
from Convict Times to 1960 (Sydney: Beagle Press, 2009).
47. A mourning sampler is on display in the Powerhouse Discovery Centre at Castle Hill
marking the death of a three week old infant Edward Quartermain in 1872, Not lost but
gone before. Object 2001/45/1.
48. On the pleasure to be gained from sewing see Joanne Bailey, Stitchers in Time and Space:
Women in the Long Eighteenth Century, in Quilts, 153
5.
49. Pritchard, Quilts, 7.
50. The Guardian obituary, November 21, 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/
21/rozsika-parker-obituary accessed 5.5.2011. The Subversive Stitch was first published in
1983.
51. Acquisition folder PHM.
52. Acquisition file on the Logo quilt at PHM.
53. Amelia died in 1905 at Bowning. See the Powerhouse statement of significance on the
objects: 2004/74/1 and 90/732. File on the quilt PHM, letter from Una Brady to Sue Shaw
in the Social History Department at the PHM 22.11.1999. There is a lengthy
correspondence between staff at the PHM and the Swann and Brown family establishing
provenance. See also Gero, The Fabric, 121. Margaret lived from 1871
1963. Gero
discovered these details about the Swann family from personal communication with
Elizabeth Plimer nee Swann. Members of the Swann family were keen amateur historians.
Elizabeth Plimer (Margaret Swanns niece) wrote two accounts of the family history
including A House Re-Born (Sydney: Lindfield, 1991) and Once Upon a Family: One
Hundred Years of History 1871
1976 as seen through the eyes of the Nine Swann Sisters of
Elizabeth Farm House, Parramatta (Springwood: Butterfly Books, 1995).
54. Margaret Swann, Caroline Chisholm, The Immigrants Friend (Sydney: A. J. Kent:, 1925)
and her Mrs Meredith and Miss Atkinson, Writers and Naturalists, Journal of the Royal
Australian Historical Society 15 (1929):1
29.
55. Gero, The Fabric, 120.
56. PHM file.
57. Moira McDonald and Linda Hurcombe, ed. Gender and Material Culture in Historical
Perspective (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2000), xvii.
58. On the problems of leaking ships see Woolcock, Rights of Passage, ch. 7 Life at Sea. See
Sarah Davenports account of the loss of her clothes in Lucy Frost, No Place for a Nervous
Lady, Voices from the Australian Bush (University of Queensland Press: Brisbane, 1995),
241. Two of her boxes were saved following the ship hitting a sand bank but she assumed
other passengers got hold of her other boxes because she saw her childrens clothes for sale
following their arrival in Sydney.
59. Anna Kings Journal, December 29, 1799, MF, CY2253, Mitchell Library.
60. These were passed from the ownership of the Royal Australian Historical Society in 1981.
 Journal of Australian Studies 227

61. Samuel Marsdens account of a voyage from London to Port Jackson on the William, 27 July
1793
15 July 1794, December 28, 1793, January 4, January 15, January 28, 1794, C245,
Mitchell Library.
62. A portrait of Elizabeth can be found here: Read, Richard, ca. 1765
1827?, Mrs Elizabeth
Marsden, 1821, MIN 74, State Library of NSW. Mrs Eliza Marsden, GPO original
locations or series - St11724. Information from NSW Government Printer
Copy, digital
order no: d1_14014.
63. Elizabeth Macarthurs friend Bridget Kingdon kept her informed of European fashions.
See their letters in Sibella Macarthur Onslow, ed. Some Early Records of the Macarthurs of
Camden (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1914), 53. Mary Putland also eagerly awaited her
mothers and sisters letters from England because of the detail they contained about
fashion see William Bligh Correspondence Safe 1/45, 105 Mitchell Library cited in
Fletcher, Costume in Australia, 39.
64. Maynard, Fashioned from Penury, 6, Cedric Flower, Clothes in Australia: A Pictorial
History 1788
1980 (Kenthurst: Kangaroo Press, 1984), 23. On Ann Marsdens skills as an
artist and sketcher see Australian Dictionary of Women Artists http://www.daao.org.au/
main/read/4241 accessed May 5, 2011.
65. See also Helen Heney, Dear Fanny: Womens Letters to and from NSW, 1788
1857
(Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1985). The dress is printed cotton. Most
elite children at this time would have worn white muslin. Michele Brown, PHM, 2007.
Elizabeth lost her first son Charles in a carriage accident in August 1801, Letter from
Elizabeth Marsden to Mary Stokes, Nov 13, 1802, transcript of a1755080. The intense
grief she felt over this death prevented her from writing to her friend until 15 months after
his death. Rowland Hassall opened the first Sunday school in Australia in 1813.
66. Eliza Marsden to Mrs Stokes, May 1, 1796, George Mackaness, ed. Some Private
Correspondence of the Rev. Samuel Marsden and Family, 1744
1824, (Australian
Historical Monographs, vol. XII (N.S.)), Heney, Dear Fanny, 10
13. Letter from Eliza
Marsden to Mrs Stokes, September 6, 1799, transcript 1755049 and 50, Digital Marsden
correspondence, SLNSW and from Ann Marsden to Mary Stokes, June 18, 1813,
transcript of a1755165. Letter from Samuel Marsden to Mary Stokes, June 25, 1813,
transcript of a1755168. Mary was delighted with the dolls, ribbons and pincushions Mrs
Stokes sent in 1816 see Anns letter to Mrs. Stokes, March 25 1817, transcript of a1755226.
Samuel Marsden to Mary Stokes, December 16, 1817, transcript of a1755237 and
a1755249.
67. Letter from Samuel Marsden to Mrs Stokes, transcript of a1755098, SLNSW.
68. Letter from Ann to Mrs Stokes, August 20, 1820, transcript of a1755267.
69. Curatorial expertise on the dress has been provided by Michelle Brown, Powerhouse
Museum. The 1830s characteristics are the bishop sleeves and flat mancherons off the
shoulders, as well as the pleated skirt. The family hoarded written documents, as well as
clothes and furniture. Thomas Hassall went to England between 1817 and 1822. Ann
asked the Stokes to look out for Thomas while he was in London letter from Ann to Mrs
Stokes, March 25, 1817, transcript of a1755225. Many pieces of their furniture remain in
family hands.
70. Glynis Jones, curator of dress and textiles at the Powerhouse Museum and the acquisition
folders on the objects in the PHM.
71. Mary McManus, Reminiscences of the Maranoa District (Howard: Brisbane, 1913) and
manuscripts by Mary McManus (Marys daughter), History of the Bisett and Smith
Families, 14 and Reminiscences of the Early Settlement of the Maranoa district. OM
91-65, John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland.
72. McManus, History, passim. A portrait of John and Mary can be found here:http://
bishop.slq.qld.gov.au/view/action/singleViewer.do?dvs1329445143421 394&locale 
en_US&metadata_object_ratio7&show_metadatatrue&VIEWER_URL/view/
action/singleViewer.do?&DELIVERY_RULE_ID10&frameId1&usePid1true&
usePid2true. John and Mary McManus, c.1905, Image no 35614, John Oxley Library,
State Library of Queensland.
73. Object SH 880534 and its acquisition folder, Museum Victoria
History and Technology
collections. Many thanks to Deborah Smith Tout, Senior curator at the MV, for passing
228 T. Evans

on much of this information. Marys niece later copied her diary to preserve it. George
was an invalid and made the children toys and furniture I have now a wooden flower
scoop he made at Comeloy from a piece of native apple tree for my mother also a needle
for making nets both of which I treasure for the sake of our devoted cousin who was so
willing to please us and to follow all our childish whims and fancies. They were both
buried at Mt Abundance. See also details on the family written by Mary Ann in her
History
she praises many of the women of the family as clever. There is also a chapter
on this family in Susanna De Vries, Females on the Fatal Shore: Australias Brave Pioneers
(Brisbane: Pirgos Press, 2009) ch. 11. De Vries work draws on her research of the family
papers transcribed by Peter Keegan, Ironbark Papers held by the University of New
England.
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