R.M. Williams

Reginald Murray Williams was born in South Australia in 1908 and learned his leather-working skills in the Flinders Ranges, where he met Michael George Smith, an Aboriginal stockman known as "Dollar Mick", who taught him to make bridles, pack saddles and riding boots. Together they developed a variation on the elastic-sided Chelsea boot, cut from a single piece of leather with only one seam at the back, so that it was strong, comfortable and kind to a rider's leg. Williams began selling the boots in 1932, the year the company dates its founding.

The business grew into a mail-order company serving stockmen, drovers and station hands across outback Australia. The catalogue, the boots and Williams's own legend as a bushman made the brand part of Australian identity. Williams also founded the Australian Stockman's Hall of Fame in Longreach, which opened in 1988, and became one of the country's best-known figures. In later years descendants of the Adnyamathanha people who worked with him have said that the contribution of Dollar Mick and other Aboriginal workers was not properly acknowledged.

Williams sold the company in the late 1980s and died in 2003. Over the following decades R.M. Williams added moleskins, shirts, belts and outerwear, opened stores in Australian cities and overseas, and moved from the bush into the city wardrobe. Its Craftsman boot was chosen as the Australian Army's standard parade boot in 2013. That year L Capital Asia, the private equity arm affiliated with LVMH and later L Catterton, bought a major stake, and in time took majority control, with the actor Hugh Jackman among the minority holders.

In the early months of the Covid pandemic in 2020 the company temporarily closed its Adelaide factory and stood down staff. In October 2020 Andrew Forrest's private investment group Tattarang bought the company, returning it to Australian ownership, in a deal welcomed as bringing an Australian icon home.

The boots are still made at the company's workshop and headquarters in Salisbury, north of Adelaide. Nearly a century after a bushman and a stockman worked out how to make a better riding boot, the design has hardly changed.