World-class leatherworker Doug Kite donates collection to Museum of Victoria
Updated
For more than 30 years, 92-year-old Doug Kite has practised a rare craft in his backyard workshop in Melbourne, which has become highly sought around the world — leatherwork.
After spending a childhood with little formal education and doing station work in the outback, when he moved back to the city more than 50 years ago, he rekindled his interest in plaiting.
"He's spent years perfecting, constantly perfecting never arriving at perfection, because he of course is a perfectionist," said Liza Dale-Hallett, a curator at the Museum of Victoria.
During the past year Ms Dale-Hallett has been recording Mr Kite's life story.
"Six years living on the back of a wagon," marvelled Ms Dale-Hallett.
"In an environment which is one of the most severe environments in Australia — dust storms that cover cattle if they're on the ground, temperatures in the 50s in the summer — an extreme environment which most people can't imagine."
She was thrilled when Mr Kite offered to donate the best of his plaited crafts to the museum.
Naturally, the offer was happily accepted and in recent weeks a vast array of items — from stock whips to plaited neckties, small pouches, even a plaited footstool — has been catalogued and placed for posterity in the museum's permanent collection.
The leatherwork is crafted from kangaroo hide and Mr Kite has invented and made many of the tools he uses to slice and trim the lace into delicately fine threads which he then plaits. These unique tools have also been donated.
"He's the classic modest incredibly talented man," Ms Dale-Hallett said.
"It's a rare trade. It's not just an art form and it's not just functional. It's actually a mathematical process that Doug's been undertaking.
"He's had to decipher pattern, form, function, shape and there's no manual here. There's no book that tells him how to do this.
"He's invented any number of braiding techniques that no-one else has even tried or thought about."
A childhood on top of a wagon
Mr Kite's first six years were spent in a covered wagon roaming around the South Australian outback.
"Just like a tent in a way, on top of the wagon," explained the 92-year-old.
"Mum and all of us used to sleep up there."
That was in the 1920s when his father did a range of jobs on outback stations — everything from stock work to digging wells and dams and riding fences.
The itinerant life meant Mr Kite got little formal education — two six month periods in a classroom before leaving school at 11.
He did station work, became a drover and helped move great mobs of cattle — many of them belonging to Australia's cattle king Sidney Kidman — down the Birdsville Track.
He taught himself the piano accordion and learnt to play tunes sung by Afghan camel drivers in the outback. And he learnt countless other bush skills such as plaiting leather.
In 1946 Mr Kite and his brother brought a consignment of camels from Maree to a private zoo in Melbourne. He met his future wife and though often homesick for the outback, stayed in the city.
More than 30 years ago he rekindled his interest in plaiting and soon, from his cluttered backyard workshop began to turn out intricate and beautiful leather crafts.
These days Mr Kite's braided goods, such as finely plaited leather hat bands, are sought by collectors around the world.
Mr Kite is a founding member of the Australasian Whipmakers and Plaiters' Association that began in the 1980s with the aim of preserving traditional bush skills such as leatherwork.
Over the years he has passed on his unique plaiting patterns to countless others.
"There's a beautiful layering of story that goes back to Doug's early days growing up in Farina and the Marree district and really being part of that land beyond the fence-line, that sense of being part of this larger story that relates to the pastoral history of Australia," Ms Dale-Hallett said.
Museum Victoria hopes to exhibit Mr Kite's work in the future.
The modest Mr Kite said he was surprised that the museum was so interested in his life story and his leatherwork. Still, he admits he is quietly pleased.
"Well I suppose it's better than leaving it in the shed here for someone to throw out, isn't it? That's what I think anyhow," he said.
Tim Lee's story on Doug Kite screens on Landline on ABC TV, this Sunday at noon.
First posted
Online video and transcript available at this URL: http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2016/s4514394.htm
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