Unfinished sampler, made by Deletha Dowling while attending Mount Gahan School on the Pambula

goldfields, C. 1890s.

 

Young girls had been producing samplers as evidence of their needlework skills since long before Europeans settled in Australia. However, over the years the range of stitches & complexity of patterns gradually declined until cross stitch became the norm. Nonetheless, samplers retained their importance & production was seen as the ideal occupation for young girls training to become good wives & mothers.

 

In colonial Australia, sewing & needlework defined the very essence of femininity & images of domesticity frequently focused on a woman quietly stitching away. Mrs. Warren & Mrs. Pullan declared in Treasures of Needlework (1855) that it “…brings daily blessings to every home, unnoticed, perhaps, because of its hourly silent application; for in a household, each stitch is one for comfort to some person or other & without its ever watchful care home would be a scene of discomfort indeed.”

 

From at least the mid-19th century, needlework skills & techniques of decorative & plain sewing were both encouraged & expected of women – it was even a subject that girls were taught at school from the 1800s.

 

The Mount Gahan School (also known as Yowaka) was established in a “church building” (probably the Yowaka Hall) in 1891 with Sidney Fuller as teacher. He was followed in 1894 by Mr. Cahill.

 

This sampler is in a private collection.

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