After we moved back to Ambler Ave, Heather’s handcrafts developed into a thriving business. It became our main source of income for the next few years, and even more significant in the long term.
I’d quit teaching in 1974, which meant that replacing my income was critical. Heather worked for a while as a dental nurse, having qualified at AIT — this was subsequent to her general nursing training, before we got married — but really, it was handcrafts that she wanted to do.
She’d been given a sewing machine by her parents when she was twelve. It was a good machine, she enjoyed using it and she was keen to buy a collection of sewing patterns from the Women’s Weekly. I was reluctant on the grounds of expense. $5 was a lot of money back then.
Not that I was trying to deny her ability! In one of my favourite photos of Stephen, his entire outfit was made by Heather, including his suede leather jerkin, and his sandals made from leather and recycled tyres.
§
Heather’s next proposal was to invest in a set of handcraft leather tools. I honestly thought that for the use she’d get out of them they, too, were very expensive, but how wrong can one be. I yielded to her sense of enterprise, and it was those tools that became a business.
There were two tanneries in Auckland. The first, Astley & Son, was one of three substantial manufacturers in New Lynn, along with Crown Lynn potteries and Cambridge Clothing. All three are long gone. The other tannery was Lea and Arlington in Otahuhu, which is where we bought our leather. They were an excellent source of full-grain, vegetable-tanned cow hide “butts”, the choicest leather, from the back and sides of the animal, with the belly and shoulders trimmed away. These are what Heather bought, soft and buttery, easily moulded into footballs — their main application — but also ideal for hand tooling, embossing and staining by craftspeople like Heather.
Lea and Arlington went into liquidation in the early 1990s. Astleys, which was established earlier, closed about the same time. Like so many New Zealand manufacturers they were unable to compete when New Zealand’s import restrictions were lifted. Queensberry now buys its leather from European suppliers.
In those days Heather was making bags, belts, book covers and place mats — and anything else she could sell. Small items like key tags, purses and drink coasters were a great way to use up the expensive leather scrap. Personalised leather patches (made using a set of letter stamps) were very popular with young mums, who’d sew them on their kids’ jeans. For decades, when we visited family we’d be served dinner on Heather’s place mats, and drinks on leather coasters.
To begin with, the leather pieces for these products were all cut by hand using Stanley cutting knives — the type with retractable snap-off blades. The first piece of equipment she bought was a bandsaw to cut out the car tyre soles for those sandals. The second was a “clicking press” of the sort used by shoe manufacturers to stamp out small leather components. However that wasn’t until we moved house in 1981. 40-50 years later it’s still going strong.
Heather’s tools, and the hardware she needed, like key rings, rivets, domes and belt buckles, came from a shop on Albert Street in the city, and later from another on Upper Queen Street.
§
Early on her focus was mainly on bags and belts, but over time most of the products she sold commercially, to retailers and in Earthworks, were hand tooled — decorated with patterns pressed into the leather using a hammer and little stamps. Lacking a slab of marble to hammer on to, we cast a heavy slab of smooth concrete and sealed it with epoxy.
In the Solomons a few years later Stephen and Adrienne were attending the local school in Tulagi when, on their way home one day, they discovered a slab of marble. Knowing their Mum had nothing to hammer on up there, they dragged it home, very pleased with themselves. But Heather was appalled and made them drag it back where they found it — it was an old graveyard headstone.
The only example we still have from those hand tooled times is a photograph album that we gave Cliff and Dorothy — 45 pages that they filled with family photos over a decade or more, all carefully annotated. It’s a treasure.
§
Heather’s first sales were private, on the “friends tell two friends” principle she’s always believed in. There were occasional markets, like the Titirangi Annual Spring Market, and she was a guest exhibitor at Browns Mill, the premier craft outlet of the time.
But what she needed was a regular outlet. And that raised another issue affecting most serious crafts people — how to do both — make stuff and sell it. There were two possibilities. One was to sell through retailers. The other was to collaborate. The latter was more in the spirit of the time — not far up town from Browns Mill was the Cook Street Market — and selling direct meant more money might stay with the craftsperson. What to do?
At the time, young mothers had two self-help networks, Play Centre and babysitting clubs. People in our babysitting club built up credits by babysitting for each other, and cashed them in when others babysat for them. With no family nearby they made it easier to enjoy a social life. Play Centre was an alternative to kindergarten — less structured and more decentralised — with the mums in charge.
Heather met Margaret Gaul, her first collaborator, through a Play Centre that was opening just down the street from us. Margaret was making jewellery and tie-dyed clothing and, like Heather, looking to make sales.
About then they heard about a place called the Downtown Market opening on a Customs Street site that was to become the Downtown Car Park and Mall and, later, Commercial Bay. Heather and Margaret got the chance to participate, and took turns manning each other’s stalls. It worked well enough in the short term but it was a rather gloomy environment, and everyone knew the building would be demolished to make way for the car park. Its main benefit turned out to be bringing together a number of serious craftspeople who went on to found the Earthworks craft cooperative in Parnell.
It also sparked a friendship between Heather and Brian Keene, a young lawyer involved legally with one of the markets. When the decision was made to set up the Earthworks cooperative Heather asked him to do the paperwork. He invited us to dinner at their place in Remuera, and we reciprocated at Glen Eden. The four of us and our children soon became fast friends.
So it was that some time in 1975 we rented the basement of one of the grand old houses on Parnell Road that Les Harvey was renovating and reinvigorating as elegant retail establishments. I built a rather sculptural timber display for Heather’s stall, and we held an opening afternoon with the traditional drinks and nibbles. Brian and Jan came along with their two children. I can still picture Jamie crawling round beneath our stall in a striped bumble bee outfit, inspecting a couple of cigarette butts.
§
Somehow I seemed to inherit the book keeping function at Earthworks. The flash electronic till cost a fortune and was a trial to set up, but at the end of each day it made calculating each stall-holder’s sales very simple.
For most of us Earthworks was very successful through the 1970s. We could share duties managing the shop, and sales were brisk.
We were offshoots of the 60s, in synch with the time and its buzzwords. Handmade. Crafted. Natural. Organic. As well as Heather’s leatherwork Earthworks had three potters — couples, more accurately — Noel and Wilma White, Dennis and Joyce Fox, and Una and Frank Sharples. It also featured Graham Laurent’s stained glass, Peter and Wendy Braniff’s furniture, Melanie Johnson’s tie dying, John Crossley’s woodturning, Barbara Maddren’s weaving, Michael Ayling’s silver — and a dress maker whose name we can’t recall. We were all either dropouts from the rat race or people who didn’t want to join it.
Our landlord Les was another dropout of sorts. He owned several city properties that had made him wealthy. An “eccentric dreamer”, he bought an area of dilapidated Victorian era houses and shops in Parnell, one of Auckland’s first suburbs, and converted them into restaurants, cafes, craft shops and boutiques. He was determined not to see them levelled.
Les was a regular visitor. He’d wander into the shop with a friendly “Hello darlings”, always clad in a flat cap, baggy pants and an old, navy roll-neck sweater, He told us he’d taken his suit to the cliff edge at his Campbell Bay home and thrown it over.
We’d see him outside supervising his staff, talking to kids or working himself on the gardens and informal paving that they were making out of old recycled bricks.
§
Parnell Village hummed. It became a destination for families and tourists. It was one of the first places in New Zealand able to trade on Sundays, so on the “day or rest” it would be standing room only in Earthworks. That electronic till was kept busy, and Heather’s personalised jean patches walked out the door. People queued, looking for their kids’ names. Every now and then we’d take a barbecue into Parnell and sell sausages outside on the pavement.
§
Heather could sell as much as she was able to make. She was alert to what sold and what didn’t, and the 70s and early 80s were perhaps the high tide of handcrafts in New Zealand, aligned with popular taste and protected besides by import controls and those prohibitions on weekend trading.
We started to feel rather prosperous. Heather bought a new car, a VW beetle. It was a smart grey and had our first car radio. I was shocked by how disconnected the radio made me feel from the road around me.
Jeff Carthew was her first employee, an American boy who worked for her after school and during the holidays. Later he was full time. Jeff was very bright, hard working, passionate about the arts and craft, reliable and good company. Others followed. A girl from my high school history class was there for a while.
§
People left Earthworks over the years. Graham, who made stained glass objects like terrariums, was first to go. Peter and Wendy, the furniture makers, left for Australia. Michael left for a jewellery collective called Fingers, downtown. We didn’t replace them, and eventually the last ones standing were Heather, Noel and Wilma. Wilma in particular was famous for her whimsical ceramic dragons and seashell-like bowls.
There was a retail component to Earthworks from the beginning — we’d called a side area at the back of the shop “Bananas”, where we sold high quality New Zealand-made cane ware. As people left we filled their space with retail goods, and the shop began to focus more on souvenirs.
And over the years the crowds began to thin out. We no longer had Sunday trading to ourselves, New Zealand was becoming less insular and the trade barriers we were sheltering behind were about to come down.
A few things showed how the world was turning, and for me the first signs of the paradigm shift were very specific.
The first were about food. Even before we went to the Solomons in 1978 we were beginning to explore food more widely. Heather had impressed French guests with food from the New Larousse Gastronomique, and Green Chartreuse as an after dinner tipple. I’d cooked my first “planned meal” for her 30th birthday — a Sicilian lamb roast studded with rosemary, garlic and prosciutto. We had no real idea how Spaghetti Bolognaise should taste but we’d tried. And we’d discovered Lebanese food at Abdul’s in Melbourne with Graeme. But it was our 1980 Round the World in 80 Days trip that really opened our eyes, most memorably an Indian meal in London, where we told the waiter that we knew nothing — you choose.
Kiwis were coming home and opening expensive restaurants featuring European and “ethnic” cuisine. It was only later that we had migrants offering their own food and making it affordable.
A standout was a wonderful French restaurant called Orleans, which Jenny Maidment, Robyn Taylor and Ray McVinnie opened on Symonds St, with Ray as Chef. Heather helped in the kitchen on Saturday nights for a few months while she and the kids waited to join me in the Solomons; and she, Ray and Jenny still reminisce about the dishes they served back in the day.
But for me, the sign of change that was closest to home came on a trip to Sydney where we visited an upmarket gift shop, in Double Bay I think, and saw beautiful work from Bali, Micronesia and Papua New Guinea. I remember talking to the proprietor and thinking, I’m glad it’s here, not back home — there’s no way we could compete as craftspeople with the intricate work in such impressive pieces from low wage economies. In due course we imported goods ourselves from Bali and sold it in Earthworks, mainly batik, silver and gold, but for the time being it couldn’t be brought into the country.
Heather’s own work was also changing, as she experimented with new techniques like carving and moulding. What she sold in Earthworks remained much the same, but she enjoyed working on other less commercial items. Beautiful leather boxes and chess sets. Sculptural objects. Leather covered bottles. A beautiful rocking chair made of bamboo and burnt sienna suede leather.
§
The original Earthworks people leaving meant that there were less people to man the shop. I was still doing the accounts, and pulled the occasional shift myself, but we employed two women part time to cover most of the hours.
One year, towards the end of the 1980s, while I was getting our end of year books ready for the accountants, I discovered a discrepancy in the cost of sales — given the mark ups on the goods we were buying for resale, our stock levels were lower than I’d expect. Either our stock take was wrong or we had a shoplifting problem. We asked our two ladies to come in, and the four of us showed up, we put up the Closed sign, explained the problem and said we needed to do another stocktake. The response from the two women was interesting. One of them immediately grabbed her coat and bag and left without a word. The other, just as promptly, said that she wanted to stay and demonstrate her honesty.
She did stay, but it was becoming clear nevertheless that Earthworks’ time was coming to an end. The business was no longer profitable, and we surprised the bank manager by telling him we were closing the doors. Have a big sale, he said, and turn as much stock as you can into cash, which we did. There was a little remaining debt, which we paid off personally.
§
In the meantime, however, Heather’s business had been thriving in other areas. She was now selling mainly through retailers.
One significant moment came when a photographer from Palmerston North met Heather in Earthworks and asked her to make photograph albums. Book covers — for items like commercial diaries, journals and albums — were by that time one of her biggest lines. We still have the photo album that we gave to Cliff and Dorothy, but our photographer wanted something a bit different. He was using old style albums with white vinyl covers and cling-mount pages, and he wanted Heather to make leather covers to slip over them.
it turned out there was a whole new market out there. A local company was supplying photographers with heavy brown “overlay” pages — typical of the ’70s — where images were displayed rather like framed prints behind gold foiled card. The pages were high quality, but the covers cheap and nasty welded vinyl, and Heather began to make leather covers to replace them. Professional photo albums became a mainstay of our business.
§
And then there were the Carthews. When we went to the Solomon Islands in 1978, Jeff — the boy who’d first started working for Heather after school — began running the business for her.
Jeff was enterprising, and he had family. As sales and production grew, his mother, Milly, a generous-minded woman of Native American descent, began working in the business. So too did his father, Gary, a quiet product designer making craft items of his own, who began acting as a sales rep, working on commission for us around the souvenir and craft shops. Gary began doing the same for Dianne, who was by then making baskets and tie-dye scarves for sale. Heather came back to New Zealand every six months to keep an eye on things, but all this was largely hands-off for her, and the business grew.
And so it went until we came back to New Zealand in October 1981. We almost immediately sold Ambler Avenue and bought a bigger property on Glengarry Road. This was a “Lockwood” home that had been raised and a basement built underneath. Half the lower level became the business workshop.
The Carthews had their highs and their tragic lows. They’d left the States in disgust after the election of Richard Nixon in 1968. But around the time we returned to New Zealand, Jeff married and headed back to California. There he went to College, graduated in fine arts and trained as an art teacher in Los Angeles. His younger brother Greg came to work for Heather. He was talkative, cheerful, a fantastically fast hand tooler and a lover of macabre movies. He too eventually returned to the States. And Milly, not long after winning a serious amount of money on Lotto — and gifting it to her family — died very suddenly of meningococcal meningitis. Gary, deeply saddened, stayed in New Zealand with Jeff and Greg’s two sisters.
§
At Glengarry Road the business continued to thrive and grow, but Heather was determined that the children shouldn’t come home to an empty house. The basement became a bustling workshop, from which everyone trooped upstairs for lunch and tea breaks around our dining room — a cheerful, familial atmosphere.
And so it went until 1984, when we rented a newly built factory unit in Waikaukau Road. But that’s another story.
MORE TO COME
I am really enjoying your great story.
Thank you Bob. Great to hear from you. Do you remember Drayton Woods? Palmerston North? The people involved? Heather’s first prof. customer but memory fails us.