[1] According to a newspaper account of one of her court appearances, Archer formed part of a "troublesome batch of prostitutes"; the Bradford Observer wrote that she "had long been on the pavé" (a streetworker).

[2][3] Originally owned by prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, the quilt is now held at the National Gallery of Australia and is regarded as a symbol of "the redemptive power of work, and of the grace and dignity that might be fashioned from graceless, undignified circumstances".

[2] Over the next two years, Archer was sentenced to hard labour a number of times for misconduct, insolence, and refusing to work, but she nevertheless received a ticket of leave in December 1844 and married William John Read, an ex-convict who had been transported for life for theft.

[1] Not much is known about Read's life in Melbourne, but she appears to have remade herself and, like many other Vandemonian ex-convicts who moved to the free colony of Victoria, "[traded] ignominious, forgettable beginnings for gentility and down-home respectability".

According to curator Joanna Gilmour, the portrait, together with the Rajah quilt, provides a tangible link to a community of women "who would otherwise have been written out of history" and "alludes to a broader, intricate historical realm: demographics, patterns of settlement, the convict diaspora and colonial social mobility".