Amongst its costume collection, the Royal Western Australian Historical Society (RWAHS) holds a muslin dress embroidered with fragile iridescent green beetle wings. The beetle-wing embroidery on the two-tier skirt is designed in a floral pattern with the motif repeated around the neckline.  The hand-made silk lace bodice is threaded with ribbon.

Collecting context

The beetle-wing dress was donated to the RWAHS by Mrs Walter Gale (nee Georgiana Richardson-Bunbury), who inherited it from her mother Amelia Richardson-Bunbury (nee Molloy).  It is believed to have been acquired for Amelia in the 1850s. Their families had settled in the Vasse area of Western Australia in the early years of the Swan River Colony.  Of genteel background, the women of the families displayed a keen interest in the arts of embroidery and lace making and some developed a passion for the wildflowers of the south-west, now considered a global biodiversity hot spot.

Amelia (1838-1910) was the third daughter of Captain John and Georgiana Molloy, who arrived in the Swan River Colony on the Warrior in 1830. Her mother, Georgiana, who has been the subject of several biographies, was fascinated by her new environment and is well known for her collecting of botanical specimens for Kew Gardens.  Until her mother died in 1843, Amelia helped her mother gather wildflowers in the bush. In 1857, she married William Richardson-Bunbury, then assistant to the Government Resident at Bunbury and from a titled Irish family.

It is not known how Amelia acquired her beetle-wing gown, but it is likely to have been made in England. While the beetle wings originated in India, according to the Victoria & Albert Museum the style of metal thread embroidery indicates that it was executed in Britain; it is not as elaborate as Indian beetle-wing embroidery in which the metal thread usually surrounds each wing case.

Amelia and her family maintained close links with fashionable society in England.  In July 1855, her wealthy widowed mother-in-law, Lady Margaret Richardson-Bunbury, with three adult daughters and a son, arrived from London and settled nearby. Her two sisters; first Mary, after marrying Sir Edmund De Cane, settled in England in 1855, and then Sabina, after marrying Matthew Hale (later Bishop of Perth), spent several years in England 1857-60. Family members also had relatives on the continent.

Mother of a large family of eleven children, all of whom lived to adulthood, Amelia maintained her mother’s interest in the flora of the south-west, collecting botanical specimens for Ferdinand Von Mueller, Government Botanist for Victoria. It is believed that her beetle-wing dress was passed down to her fifth child, Georgina, who is said to have worn it on many occasions. Amelia’s granddaughter Corry (Caroline) Richardson-Bunbury (later Coote) wore the beetle-wing gown in a Centenary Pageant at the Lord Mayor of Perth’s Garden Party in Queen’s Gardens Perth on 8 October 1929.

Georgina had married Walter Gale (later Clerk to the House of Representatives in Melbourne and Canberra) in 1896. After his sudden death in 1927, she regularly visited family and friends in Western Australia and began to dispose of family treasures, giving a number to the RWAHS; including in February 1933, the beetle-wing dress.  

Significance

Nineteenth century dresses embroidered with the wings of jewel beetles (buprestidae) are fragile and extremely rare.  They gained popularity amongst the British in India, who were dazzled by the wealth of the Mughal courts and the beauty of traditional Indian embroidery. Embroidered Indian textiles were introduced into Europe by traders in the late eighteenth century and British newspapers of the late 1820s report on women at court wearing dresses decorated with beetle wings. By the 1860s large volumes of beetle wings were being imported to Britain for application on textiles. They were not difficult to harvest as beetles swarm when they mate and then die on mass. The wings were cut, shaped and arranged in stylised floral patterns and glittered in candlelight with an iridescent jewel-like effect.

There are few surviving examples of these rare gowns.  These were made in Madras in 1820s and are held The National Museum of Scotland, the West Highland Museum and the Cheltenham Museum. The Victoria & Albert Museum holds a muslin dress with beetle-wing embroidery made in Britain in 1868-69. Beetle-wing embroidery was widely popularised when actress Ellen Terry, playing Lady Macbeth in an 1888 production in London, wore a magnificent gown sewn with 1000 beetle wings. The dress is now one of the most important items in the National Trust’s collection in England and was immortalised by John Singer Sergeant’s portrait now in the Tate Gallery.

The fashion was part of the Victorian obsession with natural history. The late nineteenth century witnessed unparalleled growth in the number of natural history museums in Europe and America, created to educate the growing middle class. The interest in natural history was taken to extremes in fashion. In 1882, the American magazine The Art Amateur warned women against  ‘[t]his detestable fashion of wearing the stuffed bodies of birds as ornaments to female attire now goes hand in hand with…the practise of wearing all manner of horribly gaudy and glittering beetles.'

The only Australian museum collection to hold a beetle-wing dress is the RWAHS. There is a length of fabric decorated with beetle wings made in India in about 1880 held by the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney. It may have come from the Melbourne International Exhibition of 1880 which included a dress and pieces of muslin embroidered with beetles’ wings made in Madras. The WA Museum holds six square panels of beetle-wing embroidery on muslin, but little is known of their provenance.

Press reports of beetle-wing dresses in Australia are rare. The earliest appeared in the English Bulletin in an article ‘Jottings from Melbourne’ discussing Cup Day in November 1880. The ‘lady correspondent’ noted ‘[a]t luncheon my appetite was a secondary consideration, for as I was in close proximity to Mrs. Hurtle Fisher, I lost, or rather spent, most of my time in admiring her dress, which was all silk and lace and beetles’ wings, and so exquisitely made that it belies description.’ Beetle-wing dresses were reported to have been displayed amongst a collection of Indian curios exhibited at a Grand Australian Fair in 1897 in Sydney. Even in 1903 the Ladies’ pages of some Australian newspapers, reporting on the latest fashions from London, commented on dresses covered with beetle-wings as ‘one of the latest triumphs'.

The only beetle-wing dress to be noted in the Western Australian press was worn in 1911 at State ball held by the Governor and his wife in honour of the coronation of King George V and Queen May. Elsie Drummond, visiting from England and one of the official party, wore ‘a striking frock of emerald ninon over an eau-de-nil satin underdress trimmed with Indian beetle-wing embroidery’.

Jewel beetles were also used in jewellery, set in silver or gold, worn as a hatpin, made into earrings or in a bracelet or necklace. The RWAHS holds a necklace made from eleven green beetles linked by a gold chain and set in a gold claw setting. Donated by her granddaughter, it belonged to May Battye (1873-1954), who married J.S. Battye, State Librarian, in Melbourne in 1895.

In Western Australia there are some 1200 species of Buprestidae with wings of varying colours.  They have been a protected species since 1978.

Acknowledgement
Thanks for research assistance from Val Hutch and Wendy Lugg of the Royal Western Australian Historical Society