In a world of constant social media updates, online shopping and 24-hour news cycles, modern consumers have come to expect instant gratification.
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“We’ve gotten very used to just wanting something now,” says Lisa Rundell.
“You look at Facebook and Instagram and it is what it is, it’s instant, it’s Snapchat, it’s right now – ‘I want that now and I want to move into a house and have it fully-furnished and I want this car and I want this career, right now’.”
But Rundell knows good things come to those who wait, and it was partly as a reaction to 21st century throwaway culture that she founded the Kyneton Lost Trades Fair with husband and Windsor chair maker, Glen, in 2014.
After moving from Camberwell to set up a workshop for Glen’s craft and her own leather work five years ago, Rundell noticed the couple’s skills were fast becoming dying arts.
“Glen had to go to America to learn his craft, there was nowhere to learn chair making in Australia, which we thought was pretty sad, and a lot of the people we met through our move up to Kyneton were in similar circumstances,” she says.
“There was really nowhere to go to learn master and apprentice type trades anymore, even though you could still gain that learning in America and in England and in Europe, there was nowhere in Australia that a lot of these trades were being passed on.”
Now in its fourth year, Rundell says the fair has reignited an appreciation among the general public for the skilled hand and eye of the master craftsperson and the quality items they produce.
“I’d been attending things like the Working with Wood Show which was becoming more and more commercial and my husband, being a traditional chair maker, was competing against a lot of products that were literally almost flat pack, that were all made with machines,” she says.
“So the fair was founded to showcase those artisans that were practising traditional trades as a career and to give them, not even a level playing field, but an event that actually celebrated what they do, and they weren’t competing next to big machinery companies or big branded products that were pumping out massive amounts of product at a time.”
And with tens of thousands of punters through the gates since then, including 19,000 at this year’s fair over the Labour Day weekend in March, Rundell says it’s a philosophy that’s catching on.
“We could literally go to big stores and buy anything, and buy anything online, yet to actually be measured up and have a suit made for you is something of the past, but why should it be of the past?” she says.
“It’s a similar movement to the slow food movement, that took a long time to get some traction, but people are actually wanting to know where their products are coming from now.