In the last 12 months I have started wearing an Akubra. I was not a big fan of wearing hats and in particular find Australians wearing an American baseball cap pretty strange, and a real pity. However I now wouldn't be without my hat. I wasn't going to take it overseas, for fear of losing it, but at the last moment decided I would. In Kula Lumpar as I walked through the markets vendors would yell out to me "Hey cowboy, come and look at this". In Nepal many people would comment on the hat and could easily recognise me when I returned to a place. Three or four times young men just as they passed me in the street would say "Good hat" and just keep going. My Facebook photo is one of me wearing my hat. When I play poker people from overseas often identify me as an Australian..... because of the hat. The Akubra really is an Australian icon.
In the 1870s Benjamin Dunkerley arrived in Australia from England. He set up a factory making hats in Tasmania. He was also able to make a machine which would remove the tips of the fur from rabbit skins so that the fur underneath could be used for hat making. Nearly ten years later he moved the factory to Surry Hills in Sydney. In 1902 another hat maker from England, Stephen Keir joined the business. Three years later he married Dunkerley's daughter and took over running the factory. The business has been in the family ever since.
In 1911 it was called the Dunkerley Hat Mill and employed nearly twenty workers. In 1912 it adopted the brand name 'Akubra'. The name is believed to have come from an Aboriginal word, meaning 'head covering'. The company produced Australian slouch hats for the army in both World War 1 and 11. In the 1950s it was given the licence to manufacture stetson hats in Australia. In the 1970s it finally relocated its factory to Kempsey where it remains today, still under the management of the Keir family.
The hats are made using the soft downy fur from the rabbit. This fur is removed, washed and cleaned. It is then put on a large cone and sprayed with water which causes the fibres to interlock and gives the hat its strength. Then it is shrunk several times being put through rollers to get the water out and to make the material even. It is then dyed in large vats, which contain about 200 hats for about an hour and a half. The part of the hat which is to become the brim is then soaked with shellac to keep it stiff. The hat is then soaked in boiling water to allow them to be moulded into shape. This is done using a mechanical bloc and mechanical fingers shape the hat into its final form. The hats are dried over night in large ovens before having the brims ironed flat. The hat is then sandpapered and brushed off to give it a smooth finish. Again the hat is blocked to produce a crown and then hat bands, linings and the Akubra crest are added. In the final stage the brim has a wet cloth put over it and pressure applied using bags of hot sand to give the brim its final shape. Some fifty pairs of hands may have handled the hat before it is purchased in the store.
The Akubra has become a part of Australian culture. It is worn by men and women on the land and associated with rural industries. It has been worn by Australian Olympic teams and I have also seen it many times presented to visitors from overseas who want to take a part of Australian culture back home with them.
The photographs with this blog entry come from my trip to Nepal and show many people who had a fascination with the hat..... a hat which I lost, and regained, three times while there.
very interesting history of the akubra.... i do like your hat... especially worn outside!!!
ReplyDeleteyou are a perfect match (well if you make it back together after being separated three times and look like you have always been together it just has to be)...fine photos
ReplyDeletewhat a great history - i had no idea!
ReplyDeleteI like to think of things being time path dependent. Your description of the chain of events that precede the purchase of a hat is paralleled in the production of so many things, yet we take it all for granted. I was driving behind a JCB earth mover the other day, looking at the hydraulic hoses that are connected to the rear arm, thinking about the chain of events that lead to the production of one of those… the production of the oil that goes into producing the super tough rubber based skin, and the synthesis of the woven steel mesh that is formed into a tight but flexible tube and somehow bonded onto specifically shaped knuckles, to take up a small but vital role in this arm. How many people’s thoughts have touched that? How many hours of study combined to achieve that elegance? And it’s the same with almost everything that we make – vast interleaved and complex time paths that lead to relatively inconsequential outputs. For all the complexity, they can be meaningless – like a Macdonalds toy, a ceramic ornament, a cheap offset litho print, a fuel injector, a motherboard, an anti-biotic – all supremely impressive achievements of a society that has learned to manufacture, to extract, to process, to make profit from it, and yet has lost a sense of meaning. The Akubra, somehow MEANS something else… something more than the sum of it’s parts.
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