In this blog, Paula Jane Byrne explores the relationship between women’s sewing and resistance through the work of Rose Selwyn.
When I was a graduate student my supervisor, the feminist historian Beverley Kingston used to bring her sewing or knitting to staff meetings and school seminars. Some of the younger up-and-coming male cohort found this immensely upsetting. ‘She knows what she is doing,’ one of them hissed at me. To my regret I never asked him exactly what he thought that was, but it had something to do with mockery and disrespecting power, a power they all wanted to eagerly obtain. Bev, a senior academic, was unaware of the fury she had provoked.
Beverley Kingston has done a great deal for we feminist historians, and one of the lessons she taught in her very presence and in her activity was to not take a great deal of notice of male power, to refuse to see it. Her sewing in staff meetings expressed this. Heather Pristash, Inez Schaechterle and Sue Carter Wood write of sewing as resistance, creating new discourses – this is what Beverley was doing.
Rose Selwyn’s Altar Cloth
Sewing has long interested me, coming from a family of women who like Bev sewed their own clothes. I rarely succeeded in such creations myself. When I found an altar cloth pattern in the papers of Rose Selwyn I noted the shear physicality and violence of sewing; the slitting, the wrenching, the sharp stitching.
Rose Selwyn (1824 –1905) was the youngest daughter of Ann and the Reverend George Keylock Rusden of St Peter’s Church, East Maitland. The family had arrived in Australia in 1834 when Rose was 10. Rose married Arthur Selwyn in 1853. Arthur had originally wanted to be a squatter but did not have the capital, so he became an Anglican Minister. Rose was active in the Anglican Girls’ Friendly Society where she began her public appearances. She became a first wave Australian feminist and argued for women jurors (not granted until the 1940s), the suffrage and the separate status of women. Rose had a circle of women who discussed religious thought. The altar cloth pattern is to be found in Rose Selwyns’s surviving papers.
Though the subject of the altar cloth was religious, not one word relating to religion is to be found in the pattern – the altar cloth had to be struggled into being. But then I noted the kind of symbol meant to be sewn onto the cloth and I realized the challenge and the temerity of the object.
The pattern originated in Armidale, a centre of Tractarian activity in the late nineteenth century. Tractarianism was a variant of the Anglican faith which valued mysticism, the decorative arts and ritual. For other Anglicans it was dangerously close to the Catholic faith and intense controversy raged from the 1840s. Women from the households of wealthy landowners had a particular passion for Tractarian beliefs.
The pattern was sent from one such household to Rose Selwyn in the early 1870s, before Rose was to take up the role of being a major feminist speaker in Newcastle, before the struggle for the suffrage began. Each single image on the altar cloth conducted an argument with mainstream Anglicanism and each would shock the congregations who faced the altar. The fleur de lis and the daisy referred to Mary the mother of God – whose dangerous activity threatened the very basis of the protestant faith. The passionflower was a Jesuit symbol, referring to the passion and consequently the transformation of the host into the body of Christ, anxious territory for an Anglican, further, the seven-pointed star was a spiritualist symbol, a religion where women were priests!
Sewing in context
The cloth pattern was sent to Rose Selwyn from Saumarez station near Armidale on Kamilaroi/Gumeroi and Anaiwon country, though it was very difficult to find A. E. Colville who wrote out the pattern, and I have several guesses to who she may have been. Saumarez was in female hands when the cloth was sent and squatting runs, far from being isolated places were always full of visitors and the centre of busy social lives.
Hunter squatters and those at Armidale were in the 1870s expanding their interests into Queensland and the Northern Territory. These were violent men with a particular aesthetic of violence deriving from romanticism. I have long been interested in the way women on squatting runs related to the violence they were exposed to. In work on Rose’s mother, Ann Rusden, I discussed the humorous relationships to violence and also the bald statements of a brutal nature.
In Rose herself I detected very complex relationships to First Nations Aboriginal people where one could see a critique of squatter violence, which her brothers were engaged in. Frank, Tom and George William were managers of stations in western New South Wales and Queensland and her sisters Saranna and Emily had married into squatting families who colonized the Namoi River and the Peel River in New South Wales.
Rose could contemplate an Aboriginal Parliament, something impossible for present day non-Aboriginal people to even imagine, as we have seen with the 2023 Voice referendum results.
This left me with the problem of locating the altar cloth in the culture of violence which surrounded it. Firstly, I saw the cloth as an aggressive statement, and this mirrored the culture of aggression expressed by men. Secondly, I saw that at the same time, the cloth with its controversial symbolism was part of what Jan Melissa Schramm describes as an alternate materialism which threatened capitalism in the late-nineteenth century. The cloth then becomes a statement of resistance to the male squatter whose greed and violence epitomized capitalism.
There is, these women were saying, another way of being. I also have described involvement in these ideas as a kind of dissociation from violence which I find reflected in the dress and discussion among the women of the Hunter Valley. Women, and we now include trans women, have always had circles where we discuss things apart from men. This may have been in the drawing room while visiting, or around the kitchen table while the men congregate on the back stairs. I do not see any ideas that emerge from such discussion as clear or necessarily consistent, but they place us.
Sewing and Resistance
I do think this culture is one thread of being female in Australia and it may have well been a component in Beverley Kingston’s use of sewing as resistance. Beverley grew up in the rarefied climate of rural Queensland and has written beautifully of the culture of women of which her mother was a part. I have yet to ask her about female discussion. She attended an elite boarding school for girls in Warwick where the girls slept on the verandah to harden and strengthen them. In winter the icicles would form under the verandah roof. These girls came from squatting families. I hope to make the understanding of women like them far more complex than it has been.
The altar cloth would have made an aggressive statement in the church. One could not sit quietly looking at it. Quiet resistance, no words said, something to make people think and question; that is the power of women sewing.
Dr Paula Jane Byrne is author of Criminal Law and Colonial Subject, Cambridge University Press, 1993 and the Ellis Bent, Letters and Diaries, Desert Pea, 2012. Her forthcoming book is Law in the New Democracy, ANU Press, 2025. She has lectured at a number of Australian Universities and held research positions at Sydney University, the ANU, and the National Library of Australia. At present she is adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University.
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