Design and Art Australia Online

designer/ 'crochet pattern designer’ (Australian Dictionary of Biography), was born on 24 September 1861 in Castlemaine. Her father, David Card, was a jeweller and watchmaker in this Victorian goldfields town until the 1870s, when he revisited his parents in Ireland then opened a jewellery business in Melbourne. Her mother and grandmother had both been successful professional actresses. The eldest of a close and lively family of twelve children, Mary Card attended the Melbourne Ladies College (the first girls’ secondary school of any note in Melbourne, according to Ballantyne, p.92) then spent a year at the National Gallery Design School before becoming a teacher of History and English. In her late thirties serious deafness forced her to seek other employment. At first she worked mending antique lace as a member of the Ladies’ Work Association, in the course of which she taught herself lace-making. In 1908 she produced her first published crochet pattern and in 1910 signed a six-month contract for crochet designs with New Idea , a new Melbourne magazine. Her designs proved so popular that New Idea 's successor, Everylady’s Journal , was soon publishing books devoted to them.

Late nineteenth-century women’s journals often had sections devoted to sewing, knitting and fancywork instructions. These, with their patterns and mail order services, were of British origin. However, at the turn of the century Australian designers promoted local motifs in embroidery designs. The rise in popularity of crochet work early in the twentieth-century attracted several designers to the medium. Ladies’ journals and the Weekly Times , a widely read newspaper serving rural areas of Victoria, helped disseminate the designs of professionals and amateurs. Although during the years of World War I women were urged to knit useful items such as socks and caps for soldiers and fancywork became less common, it was still popular to make commemorative pieces in filet crochet. Mary Card’s Anzac design was first published in Everylady’s Journal on 6 March 1916 and titled 'Your Own Soldier-Boy in Crochet. How to Make the ANZAC Cushion Cover. Special Design by MARY CARD’. The designer’s instructions began: 'So many correspondents have asked me for a “Soldier” subject in filet crochet, that at last I have arranged one, although the young man himself would probably be rather pictured in something else than lace’ -and ended:

the best suggestion I can make for the use of this pattern is to work it in fine thread, or silk of a khaki shade, mount it as a cover for a MSS or newspaper-cutting book, and fill the book with cuttings of very many fine poems, verses, stories and incidents of the war appearing in the daily press, and keep this as a memento of the times. The men at the front do not see the news day by day as we do, and many of them, when they return, will be glad to see in type what they have missed during their absence.

The name Anzac, the initials of the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, was in common use by January 1915. The gallant and tragic landing on 25 April 1915 by ANZAC troops at the cove on the Gallipoli Peninsula, Turkey, killed 8,587 Australians and wounded 19,367. The heroism of the troops involved in this campaign was internationally proclaimed and gave Australians, conscious of their relatively new nationhood, a feeling of importance in world events. The large numbers killed and wounded had a lasting effect upon the small Australian population. Anzacs and the heroism of the Aussie soldier or 'digger’ were the subjects of numerous paintings and sculptures. However, it is at a more popular level that some of the most poignant works of art were created.

The pattern was later included in Mary Card’s Crochet Book, Number 4 , published in Melbourne by Everylady’s Journal . Undated, the book was one of a series of five, the second of which was published in 1916.

Perhaps intended as a d’oyley, cushion cover or insert in a tablecloth or bedcover, this example worked by an unknown artist, includes a Victoria Cross and the letters `VC’ and the additional wording 'Our Hero/We’re Proud of Him’ as well as the original designs, 'ANZAC 1915’ and the wattle border. It is therefore possible that this particular panel was made with a specific hero of the original Gallipoli campaign in mind.

By 1917 Mary Card was a celebrity, with four comprehensive books and eight 'Giant Charts’ of popular designs to her credit. But opportunities in Australia were limited and that year she went to live in New York with her sister Harriet, where their brother Arthur was a singer and entertainer. There her work was published in Needlecraft , she self published a book, and she sent work back to continue being published in Australia. She also formed a company to produce her patterns.

In the early to mid 1920s Mary Card moved to a small village outside Wokingham in Berkshire, England, where she worked as chief designer for Weldon’s, publisher of knitting, crochet and dress patterns (anonymously). In 1930 she changed publishers when her friend and editor W.A. Somerset Shum moved from Everylady’s Journal to Australian Home Beautiful – a new, more sophisticated magazine appropriate to her later upmarket designs (notes Ballantyne, p.92). She continued designing until early 1940 when she returned to Australia in poor health. She died later that year, aged 79, in the home of her sister Harriet at Olinda in the Dandenong Ranges outside Melbourne.

In October 1979 the Women’s Domestic Needlework Group in Sydney mounted an exhibition, The D’Oyley Show: An Exhibition of Women’s Domestic Fancywork , at Watters Gallery, East Sydney, which included another example after Mary Card’s design. This exhibition and the accompanying catalogue were the first attempts in Australia to seriously document such work. Sadly, much of the Group’s collection due to go to Sydney’s Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (Powerhouse Museum) was destroyed in a warehouse fire in the late 1980s.

Writers:

McPhee, John Note: Heritage biography.

Date written:

1995

Last updated:

2011