Untold Series: What does it mean to be a master bootmaker?

Every person you walk past holds within them an untold story. It is that untold story that - once unearthed – has the power to turn something or someone from ordinary to extraordinary, you just have to be curious enough to ask the first question. In this series, we introduce you to some of those stories. We are discovering the untold and telling it now.

- 

Every hand tells a story. Calloused or clean, weathered or wrinkled.

Hands hold brushes and boots and bottles, they mould and they make and they shape. We use our hands to sense, feel, communicate, and connect. We even read the lines on our palms to predict our own future.

R.M. Williams bootmaker Glenn Dezen’s hands are weathered, smattered with fine lines stretching over a strong grip – they are hands that move with purpose and precision.

“I did wake (myself) up one day because I was doing the motions, I have only done it once, but it woke me up…I was dreaming and moving my arms,” Glenn explains.

Glenn was making boots in his sleep. Waving his hands around, reaching for leather and pivoting an imaginary boot so he could polish it.

Suppose that is bound to happen when you have practiced a craft for so long you earn the title ‘Master Craftsperson’.

It’s a title bestowed to a handful of South Australian bootmakers – some of whom are alive today to teach the next generation, as Glenn does so passionately.

But while the title is equal parts honour, equal parts bragging rights – Glenn will only reveal his esteemed status in the factory when a fellow worker stops him, passes him a black permanent marker and flips a pair of boots over to reveal their sole. “Can you scrawl on it, Glenn?” they ask.

It’s a small thing to be sure, but as the saying goes, “what’s in a name?” – and only Master Craftspeople have earned the right to sign their name next to that of the forefather - Reginald Murray Williams.  

Reginald Murray Williams AO is the namesake of the legendary South Australian brand – he was their founder and first bootmaker, and perhaps one of the most famous in the trade.

“That makes you proud…to be able to write your signature on a pair of boots that is going to go around the world…that pair (that I sign) could go to New Zealand, America, UK – it could be anywhere in Australia,” Glenn marvels.

When Glenn first stepped foot inside the R.M.Williams factory, he didn’t realise that his story was going to be shaped, like the leather he moulds, by that place.

“I probably didn’t think I was going to last two or three years, but every day I just came in, 29 years later, I am still waking up and coming in every day,” he chuckles.

After 29 years, Glenn still remembers making his first pair of boots – about 60 years after R.M. himself “shaped (the first ever pair) from one piece of leather, blocked while the hide was wet”.

“I remember the first job they got me to do, I was in the making area, they sat me at this post – the same table that had been used by R.M.Williams himself – and they said ‘attach the insole on this with a staple gun,’” Glenn explains.

Since then, Glenn has gone on to learn every process that goes into making a pair of boots millions around the world slip on each morning without any consideration for who made them – or who Glenn might be to them.

“it is a dying art (being a bootmaker),” he admits.

“Everything else is stuck on. Everything else is pre-moulded, we are unique.”

Glenn and his work mates are also unique in that they still make a product by hand. Globalisation has seen many other big names in the fashion and footwear industry push production offshore to cut costs. Human hands have become too costly a commodity for many.

“The machine is assisting you, but you – your hand – is putting it through the machine, it is not like it’s computer controlled,” Glenn says of the boot making process today.

“It’s people…the way their motion is, the way they look at the boot, you know? You get slight variations in every boot you do…but that’s because it’s done by hand.

You get to feel the textures, we used to be able to feel what type of leather it was by just picking the boot up…you wouldn’t even have to look at it. You just feel it.”

While it might be a dying art, Glenn now spends his days trying to revive it – or at the very least preserve it.

“Showing (the younger makers) how to do the skill and then they’re replicating that, it makes me immensely proud,” Glenn shares.

“There’s certain ways I was taught how to do it, from the tradesmen that taught (me)…there are still a lot of people here doing the same thing, continuing that legacy, the old school stuff.”

Glenn’s own legacy is now intertwined with that of a legend – R.M. started making boots in the Gammon Ranges, now 90 years on the makers in his Salisbury factory still honour that craft.

But for Glenn, it’s enough to be “remembered as someone who worked hard, knew what he was talking about, and instilled his knowledge into the younger people”.