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A portrait of two convicts, 1793.

Family History
12 October 2021
by Ancestry Team

There’s a wonderful drawing in the State Library of NSW collections that captured my imagination many years ago. The image depicts two convicts – a man and a woman – standing together in Sydney in 1793. While we don’t know the names of the convicts who posed for the portrait, the drawing does reveal a huge amount about the way convicts dressed and how this differed to the fashion of the free working-class settlers – or not, as the case may be. 

 

A portrait of two convicts, 1793.
A portrait of two convicts, 1793. State Library of NSW.

To learn more about this iconic drawing, I turned to Margot Riley, Library curator and dress historian. Margot’s research into this image is part of a website called Portrait Detective that Margot and I first launched in 2015 with the support of the Library and Create NSW. The purpose of the website is to present a carefully curated timeline of images that will, eventually, show the progress of Australian dress through portraiture from 1788 to the 20th century. 

The double portrait of convicts from April 1793 is one of the earliest works that Margot researched for the Portrait Detective. And it was from Margot that I learnt about the similarities in the clothing that both early convicts and free settlers wore. “In the first years of colonisation both convicts and free working-class people generally wore a type of clothing known as ‘slops’,” explains Margot. ”It was a commonly used term for any type of rough, ready-made clothing which was usually loose-fitting and, therefore, ‘sloppy’ looking”.

Slops certainly don’t sound like high-end fashion! The word conjures up an image of untailored, hard wearing, utilitarian clothing. But as we can see from this illustration, the convicts were still able to inject some stylistic swagger into their outfits, Margot suggests. 

“Convict men were issued with standard types of jackets, check frocks (a protective overshirt or smock), trousers, check shirts and tall crowned hats,” says Margot. “In this double portrait the male convict wears a short jacket with a stand collar and cuffed sleeves made in a dark, serviceable colour (perhaps brown or blue). He wears a light-coloured waistcoat and shirt with loose fitting trousers that are too short, revealing his bare ankles – there was a chronic shortage of socks in the colony – above buckled leather shoes. His tall crowned hat sits at a jaunty angel over his tousled hair.”

Similarly, convict women were issued with a mismatched array of jackets, petticoats (skirts), kerchiefs, caps and hats. The female convict here wears a light-coloured, loose-fitting, informal garment known as a ‘bed gown’ – typical day wear for working women in Europe at this time – with practical elbow-length sleeves and paired with a dark skirt, or petticoat. We can see she’s wearing buckled and heeled leather shoes and a tall, high-crowned hat trimmed with a ribbon rosette, worn over a muslin cap and her natural curly hair.

The Library acquired this illustration, along with a similar double portrait titled ‘English in New Holland’ in 1962. At the time of their purchase the two double portraits were lauded as ‘Australia’s first fashion pictures’. 

Cassie Gilmartin is co-host of the Portrait Detective podcast and previously, editor and founder of Inside History magazine. She is a frequent contributor and spokesperson for Ancestry.com.au.

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