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

© The Costume Society. 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 midnineteenth 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.