Jane Franklin and the Rajah Quilt evaluate

THEATRE
JANE FRANKLIN AND THE RAJAH QUILT
Raffertys Theatre, December 5
Reviewed by KATE PRENDERGAST
★★½

Within the early days of the colonisation of Australia, some 12,500 girls discovered themselves removed from dwelling. Sentenced within the UK to transportation for primarily petty crimes, they made the lengthy voyage to Van Diemen’s Land, the place they had been designated home staff and “damned whores”.

Not rather a lot is thought about these girls. Few traces survive.

Nevertheless, one notable, lovely exception is the Rajah Quilt. Measuring a hefty 325cm x 337cm, this appliqued coverlet was the cooperative work of an unknown variety of convict girls aboard the HMS Rajah in 1841. Its creation was due to a British Quaker girls’ committee, who gave every girl a stitching equipment, a talent to economise and a humanising hope.

It was forgotten for a very long time however then was acquired by the Nationwide Library of Australia in 1989. Playwright Cate Whittaker believes it ought to be returned to its first dwelling, Tasmania.

Directed by Emma Whitehead, her new play Jane Franklin and the Rajah Quilt succeeds extra in awareness-raising for this trigger than in storytelling. A moralising historic fiction, weighed down by contextualising element, it curiously picks up the thread after the condemned craftswomen have disappeared into the colony.

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As a substitute, it focuses on the historic determine of Jane Franklin (Madeleine Withington), who was gifted the quilt because the governor’s spouse. A intelligent girl in a misogynistic world, her “petticoat energy” involvement in her devoted husband’s affairs caused his dismissal.

Although devoted to Christian values and reform, in Whittaker’s model, it is just after dealing with the gauntlet of public disgrace and encountering a headstrong convict maidservant referred to as Betsy, that Jane realises she had been a little bit of a patronising snob and naive crusader to these she sought to assist.