Video transcript for Clothes and maypole

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Kathryn Watkins:Children in the old days wore handmade clothes. All the girls were taught to sew and so your mother and grandmother, everyone sewed your clothes. You wore hand me down clothes from your other siblings. The girls usually had one dress for school and one dress for best for Sunday school. And they wore an apron or a pinafore over that dress to keep it clean. The boys usually wore their fathers’ pants cut down and they were called breeches and they often wore braces and things to keep the pants up because they were often ill fitting or they were handed down from their brothers or fathers. They wore a lot of hand knitted jumpers and things like that. And the boys would often have a sailor collar or a separate collar that could be washed. And they wore the same shirt all week. The girls wore pinafores to keep that dress clean so that mum could actually just rinse it out at night and dry it in front of the fire because as you could imagine washing it was very difficult in the old days without electricity. To dance around the maypole, children had to be able to skip or polka or do a type of folk dance. The maypole originated in the northern hemisphere and it was a celebration of May, of spring of coming out of a heavy winter and so it was often celebrated on Empire Day or May Day. And they had to be able to polka and be able to hold a ribbon in their left or right hand and be able to plait it and do quite intricate designs down the actual pole that often had spring flowers on the top of it. They performed for special combined schools’ displays, Federation Day, they might have had a big, combined schools’ display that day, Empire Day which was the 24th of May, which was Queen Victoria’s birthday. It could be Wattle Day. It could be the coronation of a King or Queen. Any sort of special day or festival and also community days they also did displays of maypole. It was like having a school band or a school choir, you had a school maypole group and they were trained quite specifically to do quite intricate dances around the maypole. Today children we’re going to do a maypole dance and it was to celebrate spring coming in May in the northern hemisphere. And that’s why the spring flowers are at the top of the maypole and we’re going to dance around the maypole with ribbons and form a lovely pattern down the pole. Lift those feet. Beautiful. Further out.

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Kathryn: Keep going.