In 1916, the bulk of government-issued Koori men’s and women’s apparel was being made at Pentridge.[2] A Penal Price List for 1910-11, a copy of which is included in the BPA archive, lists all the articles which could be made to order at Penal Establishments at that time. The item descriptors give clues to whom they supplied.

Pentridge goods were difficult to sell; they carried the stigma of prison, and some opposed the competition they posed to products made by free workers.[3] However, an 1870 Royal Commission urged government departments to purchase Pentridge products.[4] The 1910-11 Penal Price List stated, ‘[b]y direction of the government, a preference is to be given to these supplies by all Government Departments where the prices are not in excess of current rates for goods of like quality’. In the 1910s the articles manufactured in Penal Establishments were supplied to inmates of various institutions, as well as to police.

The BPA did not use government suppliers exclusively; there are receipts and order forms from various manufacturers and importers in the file accompanying the objects. For example, Hicks, Atkinson & Sons Pty Ltd supplied many of the blankets to the Board. Local storekeepers tendered to supply food rations to Kooris. The BPA shopped around, comparing fabric and labour costs from various suppliers with those quoted by the Penal Department. For example, one set of supplies of clothes, boots and fabric bound for Lake Tyers Aboriginal reserve was ordered from the Penal Dept, Hicks, Atkinson & Sons Pty Ltd, The Stockport Hat Co and Youl & Co.

Three marginal social groups, lunatics, prisoners and Kooris, were linked by the shared material culture of government clothing produced at Pentridge. They also share an equally marginal slice of history writing. Prisoners’ labour is ignored in economic histories, to the extent that the existence at Pentridge of the first woollen mill in Melbourne has been largely written out. The tangible link between the three types of inmates points to their shared status in the political economy: labour exploitation, lack of autonomy and modes of resistance.

The Melbourne Museum holds a significant collection of asylum clothing (the Psychiatric Services collection), from the 1950s. Some of the garments were sewn by the inmates themselves; the work provided rare relief from idleness and for some inmates functioned as a type of occupational therapy.[5]

For asylum inmates, clothes sometimes functioned as restrictive objects: limiting movement and subduing physical resistance. In prisons uniforms, alongside masks, numbers and prison haircuts, played were used to strip inmates of individuality.[6] However, like Koori women who traded their mission-issued boots for cheaper shoes, prison and asylum inmates also resisted. In an imposed regime of clothing intended to mark difference and regulate the social order, inmates could subvert the system by individuating themselves overtly or covertly.[7] They might modify issued clothes, wear them unconventionally, or mark their bodies.[8]