Many of The Dressmaker’s characters are haunted by or romanticize the past throughout the novel, which is set in the small, rural town of Dungatar—a place where the townspeople dislike change and feel that social progress threatens their conservative ways of life. While some characters mourn specific things that they have lost, others more generally fear progress and are threatened by social change. However, their memories cannot always be trusted, and their beliefs about the past are often skewed in some way. Ham suggests that for progress to be possible, sometimes people need to let go of old-fashioned or romanticized beliefs about the past and embrace new ideas instead.
Although events may be in the past, the traumas caused by these events often stay with people and inform their future behaviors. For instance, Tilly—a young woman who grew up in Dungatar and who returns there as an adult—is haunted by the memory of her son, Pablo, who died when he was a baby and whom she often dreams about. This suggests that even though time moves on, memories stay with people and affect them in their day-to-day lives. The memory of painful events also causes people to be wary of future pain: Tilly is afraid to fall in love with her neighbor, Teddy, (who pursues her for a long time before she admits her feelings for him) because of her traumatic memories of loss and grief. This implies that people learn from their pasts and often allow past events to shape their futures. Sometimes, even when people try to leave the past behind, they cannot escape from their experiences. This is true of Molly, who gets pregnant with Tilly as a young woman. Tilly’s father is Evan Pettyman, a womanizer who seduces and then abandons Molly. Although Molly tries to put the affair behind her, Evan will not let her forget the past and he follows Molly to Dungatar to “keep her as his mistress.” Although their affair ends when Tilly is a child, the impact of Evan’s cruel treatment affects that whole course of Molly’s life: she is never really able to escape his influence, and the trauma from the way he treats her ultimately causes Molly’s isolation in the town, which drives her mad. This suggests that the impact of traumatic experiences can be far-reaching.
However, although past events can be powerful factors in people’s lives, memories of these events often prove unreliable. Tilly is traumatized by Stewart Pettyman’s death and does not accurately remember the details of this event (Stewart died by accident while trying to attack her). Tilly feels guilty for her part in his death, even though she did nothing wrong. This suggests that trauma affects memory and means that people do not always remember things correctly. Marigold Pettyman, Evan Pettyman’s wife and Stewart’s mother, also has a distorted view of the past and believes that Stewart was a good little boy rather than a bully. Evan, who knows the truth about Stewart’s death, lies to Marigold, which leads to Marigold’s romanticized and inaccurate memory of her son. Marigold also wants to believe Evan’s lies because of her grief over Stewart’s death, which indicates that people often remember the past as better than it really was. Other Dungatar residents also romanticize the past, such as Hamish O’Brien, who laments the fact that diesel trains are widely replacing steam engines. Diesel trains are faster, and therefore will improve things for travelers and make it easier to deliver mail—and this will generally lead to social progress, as Dungatar will become easier to reach and therefore more cosmopolitan and diverse. Regardless, Hamish’s romantic view of the past makes him feel resentful of this social change.
Despite the allure of the past, Ham suggests that sometimes old beliefs about the past must be abandoned so that progress to be made. Dungatar is portrayed as a place that is rapidly becoming old-fashioned and losing touch with the technological and social changes that were widespread in the 1950s, when the novel is set. These changes are represented by developments in farming technology, such as the replacement of grain in the freight trains with sorghum (a plant substitute for grain that is used as fodder for cattle). Teddy dies when he jumps into a tank filled with sorghum—he thinks it is grain because this is what used to be in the tanks when he was a boy, and so he suffocates. His death demonstrates that things do not stay the same, and it highlights the idea that people’s memories of the past, and their desire to keep things the same, often trips people up and can, as in Teddy’s case, lead to tragic consequences.
Ham further suggests that although change may be difficult to endure, it is inevitable. Once people have experienced change, things cannot go back to the way they were. This is supported by the arrival of Una Pleasance in Dungatar. Una is a seamstress who is hired to replace Tilly after the Dungatar residents fire her. Compared with Tilly’s modern and fashionable creations, however, Una’s clothes are old-fashioned and dowdy. Although the Dungatar women try to tolerate Una, they have had a taste of something new and exciting through Tilly’s designs and they quickly go back to secretly using Tilly. This suggests that once change has been made, it is impossible to forget and to go back to the way things were. However, the novel’s ending suggests that sometimes change must be forced upon people for progress to occur. When Tilly realizes that the Dungatar townspeople have no interest in changing or becoming more open-minded, she decides to burn Dungatar. This symbolizes Tilly’s realization that social change must be made despite people who resist it, and that sometimes acts of destruction are necessary to destroy institutions or people who hold up this progress. This reinforces Ham’s overall argument that for society to progress for the better, many old-fashioned beliefs, prejudiced notions, and romanticized ideas about the past need to be forgotten.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Memories, Progress, and the Past ThemeTracker
Memories, Progress, and the Past Quotes in The Dressmaker
Tilly Dunnage had maintained her industrious battle until the house was scrubbed and shiny and the cupboards bare, all the tinned food eaten, and now Molly sat in the dappled sunlight at the end of the veranda in her wheelchair, the wisteria behind her just beginning to bud.
She eats birdseed and fruit and other things she has sent from the city. She gets things from overseas too, from places I've never heard of. She mixes things up—potions—says they're herbs, "remedial", and she pretends to be an arty type, so why would she want to stay here?
Couples stood aside and stared at Tilly, draped in a striking green gown that was sculpted, crafted about her svelte frame. It curved with her hips, stretched over her breasts and clung to her thighs. And the material—georgette, two-and-six a yard from the sale stand at Pratts. The girls in their short frocks with pinched waists, their hair stiff in neat circles, opened their pink lips wide and tugged self-consciously at their frothy skirts.
Winyerp sits smugly to the north of Dungatar in the middle of an undulating brown blanket of acres and acres of sorghum. The farms around Dungatar are golden seas of wheat, which are stripped, the header spewing the grain into semitrailers […] The wheat will become flour or perhaps it will sail to overseas lands. The famous Winyerp sorghum will become stock fodder. The town will be quiet again and the children will go back to the creek to play. The adults will wait for football season. The cycle was familiar to Tilly, a map.
'ln this town a man can covet his neighbor's wife and not get hurt, but to speak the truth can earn a bleeding nose.'
'lt's not that—it's what I've done. Sometimes I forget about it and just when I'm…it's guilt, and the evil inside me—I carry it around with me, in me, all the time. It's like a black thing—a weight…it makes itself invisible then creeps back when I feel safest…that boy is dead. And there's more.'
He wasn't able to offer any sense of anything from his own heart to them, no comfort, and he understood perfectly how Molly Dunnage and Marigold Pettyman could go mad and drown in the grief and disgust that hung like cob-webs between the streets and buildings in Dungatar when everywhere they looked they would see what they once had. See where someone they could no longer hold had walked and always be reminded that they had empty arms. And everywhere they looked, they could see that everyone saw them, knowing.
Then Sergeant Farrat left Tilly's side to stand and deliver a sermon of sorts. He spoke of love and hate and the power of both and he reminded them how much they loved Teddy McSwiney. He said that Teddy McSwiney was, by the natural order of the town, an outcast who lived by the tip. His good mother, Mae, did what was expected of her from the people of Dungatar, she kept to herself, raised her children with truth and her husband, Edward, worked hard and fixed people's pipes and trimmed their trees and delivered their waste to the rip. The McSwineys kept at a distance but tragedy includes everyone, and anyway, wasn't everyone else in the town different, yet included?
Sergeant Farrat said love was as strong as hate and that as much as they themselves could hate someone, they could also love an outcast. Teddy was an outcast until he proved himself an asset and he'd loved an outcast—little Myrtle Dunnage.
The people of Dungatar gravitated to each other. They shook their heads, held their jaws, sighed and talked in hateful tones. Sergeant Farrat moved amongst his flock, monitoring them, listening. They had salvaged nothing of his sermon, only their continuing hatred.
Tilly feared football defeat would send the people to her, that they would spill enraged and dripping from the gateway of the oval to stream up The Hill with clenched fists for revenge blood.
'I realized I still had something here. I thought I could live back here, I thought that here I could do no more harm and so I would do good.' She looked at the flames. 'lt isn't fair.'
'Then when he couldn't have his son anymore, I couldn't have you.' Molly wiped tears from her eyes and looked directly at Tilly. 'I went mad with loneliness for you, I'd lost the only friend I had, the only thing I had, but over the years I came to hope you wouldn't come back to this awful place.' She looked at her hands in her lap. 'Sometimes things just don't seem fair.'
'Pain will no longer be our curse, Molly,' she said. 'It will be our revenge and our reason. I have made it my catalyst and my propeller. It seems only fair, don't you think?'
'Anyone can go, Beula, but only good people with respectful intentions should attend, don't you think? Without Tilly's tolerance and generosity, her patience and skills, our lives—mine especially—would not have been enriched. Since you are not sincere about her feelings or about her dear mother and only want to go to stickybeak—well it's just plain ghoulish, isn't it?'
'Molly Dunnage came to Dungatar with a babe-in-arms to start a new life. She hoped to leave behind her troubles, but hers was a life lived with trouble travelling alongside and so Molly lived as discreetly as she possibly could in the full glare of scrutiny and torment. Her heart will rest easier knowing Myrtle again before she died.
‘l used to be sick, Evan, you used to make me sick, but Tilly Dunnage has cured me.’
Then her round soft babe was still and blue and wrapped in cotton-flannel and Molly, pained and cold in her rain-soaked coffin turned stiffly to her, and Teddy, sorghum-coated and gaping, clawing, a chocolate seed-dipped cadaver. Evan and Percival Almanac stood shaking their fingers at her and behind them the citizens of Dungatar crawled up The Hill in the dark, armed with firewood and flames, stakes and chains, but she just walked out to her veranda and smiled down at them and they turned and fled.
They all started to cry, first slowly and quietly then increasing in volume. They groaned and rocked, bawled and howled, their faces red and screwed and their mouths agape, like terrified children lost in a crowd. They were homeless and heartbroken, gazing at the smouldering trail splayed like fingers on a black glove.
