It is generally considered that sumptuary law is an archaic form of governmental intervention that targeted the personal lives of people living in the early modern period in Europe, and has no modern significance. This book examines the post Federation period, between 1901 and 1927, to reveal that the sumptuary impulse was not only alive and well in the emergent modern Australia, but was transmuted by a new patrician elite into a form of social and legal regulation.