RM Williams York

Camel boy, drover, well digger, bootmaker, miner, businessman, historian, author and leatherworker just to name the main ones.

He was born seven years after Federation to the optimism of the words of  Australia’s first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton –

“For the first time in history we have a continent for a nation and a nation for a continent” – and has lived to see the eyes of the world focused on Australia for the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

R.M. first went bush in his teens – lime burning and building in stone in Victoria and on the Western Australian goldfields. In the late 1920’s, he signed on as a camel boy with the missionary explorer, William Wade, in his treks across Australia’s central western deserts. He learned valuable bush lore and survival skills from the aboriginal peoples of the area, and honed his stock handling and bushcraft skills from the stockmen of the desert fringe cattle stations.

By 1932, the onset of the Great Depression (only Germany suffered greater deprivations than Australia during that terrible time) found R.M. camped out in the Gammon Ranges of South Australia with his young family, barely making a living digging wells. But it’s an ill wind… and during this time he met an itinerant saddler named Dollar Mick.

A self-taught genius in leatherworking, Dollar Mick passed on his skills to the 24 year old R.M. who made and sold his first pair of riding boots for 20 shillings to a man from Hilltaba Station whose name he can’t remember.

Having worked on some of the great pastoral runs of the interior, no one knew better than R.M. what men who were born in the saddle wanted when it came to footwear.

With boot sales to the first unknown buyer and cattle king, Sir Sidney Kidman, under his belt, R.M. set up the beginnings of his first factory in 1932 in an iron woodshed behind his father’s house at 5 Percy Street, Prospect (now known as the R.M. Williams Outback Heritage Museum).

With no capital and little help, he built up a team of dedicated craftsmen and took out advertisements in the rural press that asked customers for cash with their orders.

Over the following decades, R.M. developed his business, diversifying into bush saddlery, equipment and the company’s trademark moleskins, jeans and bush shirts.

Other landmarks of R.M.’s life include being the founder of the Australian Roughriders Association, and helping to form the Equestrian Federation of Australia in 1951 and the Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Longreach in 1988.
He was also editor of Hoofs and Horns magazine in the early 1950’s.

Reginald Murray Williams passed away on 4 November 2003 aged 95.