Women and clothing in focus for Weston Bate lecture

WOMEN and Dress in Rural Australia from the 1840s to 1860s is the topic of next month’s Weston Bate Memorial Lecture taking place at Sovereign Hill’s Australian Centre for Gold Rush Collections.

This year’s lecture is being presented by curator and historian Laura Jocic, who specialises in dress and textiles and recently completed a PhD at the University of Melbourne investigating the significance of dress in Australian colonial society.

Set for Thursday 16 October, the talk will go beyond the familiar image of the male digger on the goldfields, shining a light on women’s lives through the lens of what they were wearing at the time.

“I’ll be looking at women living in the rural and goldfields areas,” Melbourne-based Jocic said ahead of the lecture.

“This lecture is being drawn from a chapter of my PhD, so it’s about going to the garments themselves and having a close look at them, what they’re made of, how they’re made and looking closely at the life of the person who owned it.

“We also look at their letters and the gems they contain that detail how they were adapting and adjusting their dress.

“A lot of these women were working and some of them were living in tents and rudimentary dwellings, and working alongside their menfolk.

“They do talk about the mud in winter and the dust in summer.

“They wore natural fabrics.

“The choices were linen, cotton, wool and silk and a mix sometimes.”

By exploring female clothing and how women purchased, made, mended, and managed their dress in response to the Australian climate, the Weston Bate Memorial Lecture will highlight their resilience, adaptability, and the vital roles they played in shaping goldfields society.

The lecture takes place at 5.30pm on Thursday October 16 at the Australian Centre for Gold Rush Collections.

Ticketing and more details are available through the centre.