Overview
A penal colony issues clothing, and issued clothing is a record of what the issuer thought of the wearer. Australian colonial dress divides sharply along that line — convicts in government slops, free settlers in imported British fashion — and then diverges again as people who had to work outdoors in heat invented clothing for it.
Key garments and style
Convict clothing was coarse, cheap and deliberately identifying: heavy wool or canvas jacket and trousers, often stamped with broad arrows. Reoffenders could be put in parti-coloured suits of contrasting halves, the so-called magpie dress, which made escape conspicuous and humiliation continuous.
Settlers imported British fashion and wore it in a climate it was never cut for, in wool and with full skirts, sending home for what Regency and Victorian London was wearing.
Working dress is where something local appears. Moleskin trousers, the cabbage-tree hat plaited from palm leaf, and broad-brimmed felt answered the sun rather than the drawing room, and the wool industry founded on Macarthur’s merinos made cloth an export rather than only an import.
For Aboriginal people, clothing became an instrument of administration: blankets were distributed annually at official gatherings, and mission and station dress replaced possum-skin cloaks in much of the south-east.
Transition
The gold rush from 1851 brought a large, mixed and mobile population, and the digger’s practical outfit of flannel shirt, moleskins and boots became the next Australian type.