About the process

Girls needlework class © Swinburne University of Technology

Needlework has always been a part of life in Australia. Like Indigenous Australians, European settlers sewed to make and mend clothing and other textile objects. More affluent women also created decorative embroidery, or 'fancywork', to embellish the home and church and occupy idle hours.

In the nineteenth century, needlework was seen as essential to a girl's education and embroidery designs often carried religious and moral messages or depicted national symbols.

Clara Pitts sitting near the orchard embroidering a cloth held in an embroidery frame Museum Victoria

During the twentieth century, women increasingly used embroidery to commemorate significant family and community events. The Country Women's Association and embroiderers' guilds around Australia facilitated collaborative projects and encouraged creative individual work. In the 1980s, for example, each state guild contributed to a 16-metre embroidery for the new federal Parliament House in Canberra.

Needlework has become less important as an everyday skill but embroidery continues to be a means of creative expression and a way to record significant events. Embroiderers sustain a tradition of meeting to talk, tell stories and 'paint with a needle'.

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