‘Happier in My Lonely Cell’: Convict Women’s Textiles

Abstract

This article concerns the near total lack of artworks by Australia’s convict women that have come to light. First, I examine the reasons why convict women’s art was either not produced or not preserved, and then I offer a preliminary analysis of three textile artworks made by convict women in the mid-nineteenth century: the exceedingly well known Rajah Quilt (1841) and two less well known embroidery samplers from around the same time. In comparing these textiles, this article articulates the complex status of so much convict art regardless of its maker’s gender: its oscillation between a form of creative self-expression and an exercise in strict disciplinary reform and social conditioning from above. Yet, this article also shows how sexual difference inflected the life-worlds of female convicts and the textile art they produced, focusing on the gendered productive and reproductive forms of labour that were demanded of convict women in the penal colonies of Australia.

Keywords:

• convict art
• textiles
• quilts
• embroidery samplers
• convict women
• colonial art

Notes

1 Thank you to Zoë de Luca for reading a draft of this essay and providing valuable feedback, and Julia Lomas for her always appreciated research assistance. Jocelyn Hackforth-Jones, The Convict Artists (Melbourne: Macmillan, 1977), 10.

2 Rozsika Parker, The Subversive Stitch: Embroidery and the Making of the Feminine [1984] (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2010); Sue Prichard, Quilts 1700–2010: Hidden Histories, Untold Stories (London: V&A, 2010), 21.

3 Kay Daniels, Convict Women (St Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1998). See chapter 10, ‘Heritage’.

4 Susan Best, ‘Shame and the Convict Stain—Anne Ferran’s Lost to Worlds’, Reparative Aesthetics: Witnessing in Contemporary Art Photography (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), 53–75.

5 Griselda Pollock, ‘Excerpts from “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”’, in Gender, Space, Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Reader, ed. Iain Borden, Barbara Penner, and Jane Rendell (London: Routledge, 1999), 157; and Parker, The Subversive Stitch.

6 Ashley Barnwell, ‘Convict Shame to Convict Chic: Intergenerational Memory and Family Histories’, Memory Studies 12, no. 4 (2019): 398–411.

7 Nicole R. Fleetwood, Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2020).

8 See The Nightingale, dir. Jennifer Kent (Australia: Causeway Films, 2018).

9 Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49.

10 Ibid., 54.

11 Ibid., 122.

12 Ibid., 14, 60, 124.

13 Ibid., 111.

14 Anne Summers, Damned Whores and Gods Police: The Colonisation of Women in Australia (Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1994), 408.

15 Babette Smith, A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal (Kensington, NSW: New South Wales University Press, 1988), 60. See also Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality, and Gender in Colonial Australia (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Kirsty Reid, Gender, Crime, and Empire: Convicts, Settlers, and the State in Early Colonial Australia (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).

16 Ibid., 61; Kirsty Reid concurs, writing that ‘marriage was a means of moralising the settlements’. See Reid, Gender, Crime, and Empire, 94. For her part, Oxley suggests that ‘placating [men] and keeping them happy and heterosexual and working, was the main economic function of female convicts, even the reason that officials chose to transport women’. Oxley, Convict Maids, 124.

17 Annette Gerro, The Fabric of Society: Australia’s Quilt Heritage from Convict Times to 1960 (Sydney: Beagle Press, 2008), 10.

18 Summers, Damned Whores and Gods Police, 408.

19 Oxley, Convict Maids, 10, 53, 155.

20 Joan Kerr, The Dictionary of Australian Artists: Painters, Sketchers, Photographers and Engravers to 1870 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1992).

21 Caroline Jordan, Picturesque Pursuits: Colonial Women Artists and the Amateur Tradition (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005), 6–9.

22 Daniels, Convict Women, chapter 10. Emphasis added.

23 See Kylie Fitzpatrick, The Silver Thread (London: Head of Zeus, 2012); Claire Saxby and Elizabeth Newcomb, My Name is Lizzie Flynn: A Story of the Rajah Quilt (London: Walker Books, 2015); and ‘The Rajah Quilt—The Truths, and the Myths, Misconceptions and Exceptions’, 9 August 2014, Rajah’s Granddaughter, http://rajahsgranddaughter.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-rajah-quilt-truth-and-myths.html.

24 ‘Currency’ as opposed to ‘sterling’, the latter of which was colonial slang for British-born settlers.

25 Debbie Ward, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears: A Close Look at the Rajah Quilt’, The World of Antiques and Art (December 1998 – June 1999): 105.

26 Lucy Frost, foreword to Trudy Cowley and Dianne Snowden, Patchwork Prisoners: The Rajah Quilt and the Women Who Made It (Hobart: Research Tasmania, 2013), 6.

27 Janet Rae, The Quilts of the British Isles (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1987), 110–12.

28 Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore (London: Vintage Books, 2003), 154.

29 Ward, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’: 108.

30 Cowley and Snowden, Patchwork Prisoners, 50–51.

31 Margaret Rolfe, Australian Quilt Heritage (Rushcutters Bay, NSW: J.B. Fairfax, 1998), 22.

32 Carolyn Ferguson, ‘A Study of Quakers, Convicts, and Quilts’, Quilt Studies: The Journal of the British Quilt Study Group 8 (2007): 56; Cowley and Snowden, Patchwork Prisoners, 48.

33 Julia Bryan-Wilson, Fray: Art & Textile Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 35.

34 Ferguson, ‘A Study of Quakers, Convicts, and Quilts’: 56; Cowley and Snowden, Patchwork Prisoners, 36.

35 Patchwork quilt, bedcover made under the direction of Elizabeth Fry by women prisoners in Newgate; centre panel, Elizabeth Baker, Elizabeth Fry, and John Fry 1817, in fine cross-stitch; border of striped calico; all quilted in chevrons on white linen, c. 1817, Norfolk Museums, Norwich. And Patchwork quilt, bedcover made under the direction of Elizabeth Fry by women prisoners in Newgate; patched and embroidered quilt; centre panel, Elizabeth Baker, Elizabeth Fry, and John Fry 1817, in fine cross-stitch; border of striped calico; all quilted in chevrons on white linen, c. 1817, Norfolk Museums, Norwich.

36 As Rolfe has noted, ‘many quilts must have been made as 106 ships and 12,000 convicts passed through Mrs Fry’s hands’. See Rolfe, Australian Quilt Heritage, 87; Gerro, The Fabric of Society, 22.

37 Ward, ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’: 106.

38 Prichard, Quilts 1700–2010, 93.

39 As Gerro recounts, ‘an 1838 report to the Select Committee on Transportation in the British Parliament on the conduct of female convicts during the voyage answers some of [Fry’s] questions’: ‘They have some occupation during the voyage: they are allowed certain patchwork which keeps them in some degree occupied … giving them this employment has had the effect of occupying their minds … but it does not last to the end, they get over their work by the time they have gone two thirds of the voyage’. Gerro, The Fabric of Society, 14.

40 Clare Hunter, Threads of Life: A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle (London: Sceptre Books, 2019), 63.

41 Claire Smith, ‘Doing Time: Patchwork as a Tool of Social Rehabilitation in British Prisons,’ V&A Online Journal 1 (autumn 2008), http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/journals/research-journal/issue-01/doing-time-patchwork-as-a-tool-of-social-rehabilitiation-in-british-prisons.

42 Ferguson, ‘A Study of Quakers, Convicts, and Quilts’, 40.

43 Rolfe points out that ‘Women on board the Wellington are reported as having sold quilts for a guinea each when their ship docked in Rio de Janeiro’. Rolfe, Australian Quilt Heritage, 20.

44 Against Rolfe’s hunch that most women got rid of their quilts as fast they could, she discovered a letter from a convict woman, transported on the Brothers in 1823, to Fry, which noted that ‘the patchwork quilt which now covers her bed, was made of the pieces given her by the ladies when she embarked’. Ibid., 21.

45 Ferguson, ‘A Study of Quakers, Convicts, and Quilts’, 45.

46 Oxley, Convict Maids, 209; Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, 11, 59, 61, 68.

47 Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly, 22.

48 See, for instance, the Harriet Pullen christening gown of 1828, made by unknown inmates of the Cascades Female Factory in South Hobart and presented to Harriet Pullen on the birth of her daughter. There is also a christening gown (1846–47) made by female convicts at the Parramatta Female Factory for Thomas Pedlar Maclearie, son of Captain John Maclearie, and held in the Parramatta City Council’s History and Heritage Collection.

49 Rebecca Quinton, Patterns of Childhood: Samplers from Glasgow Museums (New York: Herbert Press, 2005), 6.

50 Ibid., 43.

51 Ibid., 6.

52 See ‘Sampler’, Tasmanian Colonial Decorative Arts 1803–1930, Tasmania Museum and Art Gallery http://static.tmag.tas.gov.au/decorativeart/objects/textiles/P2012.66/index.html.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Pollock, ‘Excerpts from “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity”’, 158.

56 Reid, Gender, Crime, and Empire, 125.

57 Ibid., 135.

58 See object file, Glasgow Museums, Glasgow.

59 Quinton, Patterns of Childhood, 77.

60 Lucy Frost, email to the author, 11 March 2020.

61 Ibid.