James B Young - According to Custom 

Essay by Richard Cooke

Richard Cooke is an author and two-time Walkley winning reporter. He has written about Robyn Davidson, Bruce Chatwin, and other impressions of the red center.

According to rumour, James B. Young studied shoe-making in Florence, at the heel of an Italian master cordwainer. The reality—that he’d studied boot-making in Adelaide—at first seemed less romantic, unless you understood the impulse which had taken him there. It was an instinct which had taken root decades before. Something he’d felt as a boy, when he would walk into his father’s shed, and notice that his hands wanted to make something, without knowing what or how.

By then James was already drawing pictures of shoes, and, more unusually, drawing shoes as they aged, anticipating the cracks and wear-lines. Not many boys are fascinated by that particular beauty, the kind that comes with use and change, and it has since set the course of his working life. This mastery of materials over time is where his concept of “deep providence” comes from. James understands not only what leather, thread, wood and hardware are when he selects them, but also what they will become in time.

That beauty is in every piece of leatherwork he makes, not only his shoes but his belts and bags, bridles and watch-straps. Objects which are sidelines for many shoemakers are for him their own objects of obsession. No assistants or apprentices touch these pieces, and when James talks about the shape of a kangaroo hide, the information is stored in his hands, absorbed across thousands of hours he has spent learning and relearning his craft, slowly perfecting the tiny, subtle It understandings of an artisan.

“Revival” is the word used whenever craftspeople take up old art forms. And it’s true that Jame’s Alice Springs workshop brims with old books, and old tools, many of them inherited from the estates of shoemakers and saddlers long gone. Some rarities come from obscure collectors: his McKay stitching machine came from an ex-hypnotherapist who imported it from Wales, and when it was first built, it would have been driven by a steam engine. Some of his leathers, and the foot-shaped lasts which hang on his wall came from the tail-end of the great Adelaide shoemaking industry which birthed RM Williams. When it came time to move on, these history-charged items made their way to him for safekeeping, being care-taken through use. 

Through one of these deep sourcing trips, James was gifted a tranche of beautiful antique tools, from Nowra, and when he recounted the story to  an older family member, they told him something he’d never heard before: that his great-great-grandfather William Westbrook had a boot workshop on the main street of that same town, and that the tools may well have once belonged to him. That instinct might be something in his genes. The chain of craftsmen, broken, has been restored.

”The Westbrook shoemaking lineage started centuries ago in the UK and only stopped the year before I was born in 1978 so the break, although total, has been agonisingly short,” James says. “I have met some old-time Sydney shoemakers who remember the Westbrook factory on Kippax Street in Surrey Hills. So the Westbrooks followed that same arc from artisan through mass industry back to artisan.”

Today in his workshop as many as twenty of these tools might be used to make a single belt: different hammers, gauges, gouges, punches and planes for each part of the process. Watch James work with these vintage instruments, and their worn wooden handles and patinated metal feel like a direct expression of his patience and care. 

Yet these reclaimed tools of the trade are being used in a fresh way, for different purposes. Heritage as a living thing, not a museum piece. They also operate in the orbit of a distinct influence, never far away in Alice: Country. “The luxury houses just go and get their hardware cast in a foundry,” James has said, “whereas I have to go out and scour the desert.” The desert provides.

A single acacia tree felled by fire yields wooden handles for bags (a cabinetmaker in Sydney shapes them first). Select kangaroo leathers must come from large animals who have lived long lives without incurring too many scars (this is rare). James draws inspiration from the colour of the landscape as well - the ochres and sands of the red desert - and even its feel. The natural waxes he uses to seal and burnish everything (he also makes camel dubbin to his own recipe) complete an organic finish which weathers into distinction.

“My shoemaking style is an interface between West End and Outback traditions,” James says “Classic European boot styles like the monk or jodhpur which were conceived to repel mud and water  — have a new interpretation for our dry, sandy interior.”

 The craft of stockmen, cameleers and saddle makers, many of them indigenous, who worked the land around Alice and the Northern Territory left its mark on James’s leatherwork. Their style is ingenious and lasting, and recognised world over for the use of twist braid instead of rivets or stitching. James B Young first saw a twist braid on a saddle back when he was a cameleer, and was impressed enough to teach himself the technique, which he says is “deceptively simple and complicated at the same time”, borne of the need for speed and simplicity. He applied it to a pair of camel saddlebags, the first real leatherwork he ever did. 

This handiwork, the bags, saddles and bridles that make up the rigging of these ships of the desert, was field tested across his own camel treks. The longest of which, undertaken when he was twenty-one, crossed the wilderness of New South Wales for 11 months. It was an arduous test, and the equipment was mission critical. He finished the trip appreciating the durability of his gear, but also the folk heritage which had produced it. The camels took James and his family to Alice Springs, a city which can still foster craft on an artisanal scale, and a one-man outfitter hand-making slow wares. 

The classic application of the twist braid would be with a heavy bovine leather to attach reins to a bridle or a girth to a camel saddle. James uses these on several of his signature pieces: on his wallets, twist-braided kangaroo leather affixes a solid polished brass money clip. On his cameleers belt, they hold a solid brass stirrup buckle. 

Alice Springs is also in tune with different cultural currents, outside Europe or America’s radius of imitation. Sometimes the imitation flows the other way. In the early 1960s, a visiting metallurgist named David Morgan became fascinated by the living artform of Australian whip-making. He returned several times to study fine braiding under different masters, and in time became a whip-maker to Hollywood. When Indiana Jones cracks a whip, it is kangaroo leather braided in the Australian style. 

No other practitioner in Australia (and probably the world) makes European-style dress belts from kangaroo leather. James is also the first bespoke shoemaker to operate in Alice Springs for 50 years. He ships leather from the last oak bark tannery operating in the United Kingdom, and owns hides from a 160 year-old kangaroo leather tannery that closed down years ago. Even that Adelaide shoe making apprenticeship was the last of its kind, and now it’s gone. 

If he can’t find, source, or buy a piece of sufficient quality, he will make it by hand. James rolls and waxes his own thread, a painstaking, half-ancient process that took hundreds of hours of self-teaching, but which looks deceptively simple when he rolls the strands taut across his knee. He can, when stitching with it, customise the length and taper and strand-width of each thread as the task demands of every single loop, and make them lock seamlessly, with a strength and finesse no machine stitch can match. It is, he says, an “invisible difference”. “There's very few people doing what I would do that would bother to hand roll and wax their own thread, just for the satisfaction of knowing that it's going to last better.”

 James harnesses a compulsive part of himself to craft each item. It’s why he doesn’t use a template when making belts, so he can let the shape and thickness of the material guide his process. “I love making belts,” he says. “Every time I make a belt, I'm fixating on all of these nuances, and then seeing how they come together as a whole.”  Sections under strain will be firmer, where the leather turns to accommodate the buckle must be supple; if too thick it may split, too thin it will fail. Hundreds of tiny decisions are made, as much about what to leave out as put in. “It's kind of like the leather will tell you to some degree where and how to do that”.

This level of attention makes every sale personal, every order the commencement of hours of custom work. Each one displays the knowledge and care that is carried in his eyes and hands. An expression of place, family, and quality. According to custom.