The story of textile and clothing manufacturing in post-contact Australia is one of gradual replacement of products imported largely from Britain with locally tailored clothes and locally made cloth. In the first half of the nineteenth century Victoria depended on imports from other Australian colonies and from overseas.[1] Wool was available locally and in abundance, so the first textile mills in Australia were woollen mills capable of producing quite coarse, thick textiles. Finer woollen textiles as well as cotton and blended textiles were largely imported until the inter-war period when local manufacture became financially viable. Australian textile manufacture benefited from the introduction of highly complex weaving machinery developed over the long history of textile production in Britain. Production of woollen textiles involves a chain of processes and there were many innovations in the industry before the industrial revolution.[2] There was an industrial revolution in British textile manufacture in the thirteenth century when water-power was first applied to cloth making.[3] Steam powered machinery brought another transformation when it was applied to the woollen and worsted industries in the early nineteenth century.[4] According to economic historian G. J. R. Linge, ‘treadle and steam-driven sewing machines were in use in Melbourne clothing factories by 1859, less than a decade after the development of this equipment in the united States.’[5]

Although Linge suggests the first yard of cloth to be woven in Victoria was produced by the Victorian Woollen and Cloth Manufacturing Company Ltd in January 1868, an article in the Illustrated Australian news in August 1867 indicates it may have occurred within Pentridge Stockade several years earlier:

'There is within the prison a complete apparatus for manufacturing woollen fabrics of a coarse kind. A steam-engine drives a number of teasing and carding machines, which, in addition to the spinning jennies worked by the prisoners, furnish material for the manufacture of blankets and rugs which supply the hospitals and lunatic asylums. We may expect, before long, to have a woollen manufactory in operation in the city by a private company, but it is worthy of note that the first machine was erected in the Pentridge Stockade, and has been in operation for some years.'[6]

A sketch of the woollen mill and Pentridge tailor’s shop accompanied the article. Indeed, Richard Broome notes that in 1863 William Champ, the Inspector-General of Penal Establishments, installed a ‘steam-driven, woollen and cloth mill which employed forty men’ at Pentridge.[7]

The numbers of people employed in the textile and clothing industry is difficult to define, as the use of outworkers had already become an established practice by the 1850s.[8] The industry has always relied heavily on the low-cost labour of women and later, migrant workers.[9] In Victoria the industry expanded rapidly in the 1870s, with employment in factories numbering one thousand by 1877, then fluctuating around one thousand five hundred before taking an upward turn towards two thousand from 1895-1900.[10] Together, metal-working, the manufacture of clothing and footwear, and the preparation of food, drink and tobacco occupied over 50% of the factory workforce in the 1870s-1880s.[11]

The number of woollen-mills in nineteenth-century Victoria reached a maximum of ten briefly in 1879-80.[12] In 1864 the government had introduced financial rewards and protectionist tariffs to promote local production of ‘woollen goods, paper, sheet glass, glassware, and good quality leather’.[13] The Victorian Woollen and Cloth Manufacturing Company Ltd was registered in response to this scheme in 1865.[14]

Early Victorian mills faced many problems, including the limitations of their machinery, facilities and raw materials which could only produce all-wool tweeds. While this cloth was of a good quality, cheaper cloths (of a wool and cotton mix) became available as imports, and from some of the private mills. Importers secured many government contracts because they could offer a variety of cloths in various qualities and colours.[15] Most of the public woollen-mill companies built up large stockpiles of cloth for which there was no local market. The problems of the Victorian industry are generally blamed on the ‘over-production of a very limited range of textiles.’[16]

The textile manufacturing industry grew rapidly in the 1920s as the range of production extended to finer qualities of yarn and cloth.[17] By the end of the twenties, imports had been reduced to a minor portion of the market - import tariffs had played a role in the success of local manufacturers, while some foreign firms set up local branches to avoid this.[18] Cotton manufacturing remained an infant industry throughout the twenties, with cotton spinning beginning in Sydney in 1923, and Australian manufacturers focussing on displacing the imported cloth and producing woollen yarn for knitting mills. Foster claims that cotton spinning was non-existent before the war.[19] In the twenties the main products of cotton weaving were towels and cotton tweeds.[20] In 1913, Victoria employed 58% of the total workers in the woollen and tweed mills in the country, and remained the centre of the industry through to 1930.[21]


Images

The first woollen mill in Melbourne. The Penal Establishment at Pentridge - prisoners spinning woolen yarn. From Illustrated Australian News, 1867.

Prisoners in the tailor's shop, Penal Establishment, Pentridge. From Illustrated Australian News, 1867.

Links

History of Denim from the pint of view of Levi Strauss and Co