Provenance

The christening gown was originally presented to Harriet Pullen in 1828 by convict women at the Cascades Female Factory in South Hobart. Jesse and Harriet Pullen left the Female Factory in 1830, eventually moving to New South Wales in 1840. The gown passed to their daughter also named Harriet (1828–1901), who married James Lambert in Maitland, New South Wales in 1847. It then passed into the keeping of Harriet’s youngest daughter Rosa Lambert (d.1950) and from Rosa to her daughter Winifred Gietz (d.1976). When Winifred died, she passed the gown on to her daughter Margaret Goode, who donated it to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 2005.

History

Jesse and Harriet Pullen and their children, Mary Ann and George, arrived in Hobart in 1822. In England, Jesse Pullen had been a blacksmith and had also preached at his local Wesleyan church. The family was welcomed by the local Wesleyan community and Jesse became one of the seven trustees of Hobart’s first Wesleyan Chapel in Melville Street. Six years later Mr and Mrs Pullen were appointed, respectively, Assistant Superintendent and Assistant Matron at the Cascades Female Factory on the southern edge of Hobart, in the shadow of Mount Wellington.

Fro>m the mid-1820s, a large number of women had begun to arrive in Tasmania on convict transports from Britain. The Female Factories were established to accommodate these women and teach them the ‘habits of industry’ in the hope that they might become productive members of society when released. Women were trained in domestic skills and performed traditional women’s work such as laundering and repairing clothes.

Needlework was one of the lighter duties, usually undertaken by women serving lighter sentences and awaiting assignment. This christening gown was made by Female Factory inmates for Harriet Pullen, probably for the birth of her daughter, also Harriet, born in November 1828. The gown is finely decorated at the bodice and hem with broderie anglaise, drawn thread work and decorative stitching.