Life reconstructed as memoir…
Adventure, innovation and decline: my time in the adventure equipment industry
THE ADVENTURE EQUIPMENT industry rescued me from a life of humdrum sameness and routine tedium in the Commonwealth public service. When the manager of a new adventure equipment shop offered me a job I grabbed it and replaced security and mediocrity with variety and innovation. Even after all these decades I still thank him for that.
Sure, the days were largely predictable but they were less-so than life in an office where career public servants shuffled papers. That might sound like a cliche, shuffling papers, however every cliche contains an element of truth and that one holds a very big element of it. In this new job my days were saved by the interesting people who came in and by being able to use my knowledge and experience in the mountains, things that bore no relevance to my dead-end job in an air conditioned public service office. When I walked out of the glass doors of the office for the last time I was about to step into a markedly different life.
The new store was on Hobart’s Elizabeth Street on the edge of the central business district in a late Nineteenth Century, red brick building resplendent with elaborate signage revealing its origin as a produce store. It was a criteria in hiring staff for Outdoor Equipment that they participated in one or more rucksack sports, so it was fortunate that my partner of the time and I had joined the Hobart Walking Club after arriving in Tasmania. As well as bushwalking, which included some long treks into the state’s remote wilderness areas and activity with the search and rescue team, I was introduced to rock climbing in Launceston’s Cataract Gorge and, later, to caving by the late Peter Cover.
I liked the varied work, the talking with customers and inspecting the new equipment brought in by importers who dropped by in hope of the store becoming one of their stockists. There was a buzz in working in an industry characterised by innovation in design and that served the growing number of people participating in adventure pursuits spanning bushwalking, climbing, canoeing, ski touring, river rafting and caving.
It was the mid-1970s or just after. I don’t know how long Outdoor Equipment existed as a business. It was still going when I left the state around five years later but was gone by the time I next visited Tasmania quite some time after that.
As well as Outdoor Equipment in Hobart I worked in the small Launceston store the business later established and, after that, in similar stores in Sydney in roles spanning education, sales and advising on equipment. That day I said farewell to the public service I stepped into an industry in which I worked off and on, full and parttime for the next 20 years.
A creation of the times
The seventies in Australia was the time when adventure activities underwent a boom in popularity. A growing economy, the ready availability of jobs, an incipient environment movement, a new generation moving into working life and a socially liberal mindset underpinned the boom. People had incomes with discretionary spending power, some of which went into adventure equipment businesses.
Bushwalking was already an established activity both on the Australian mainland and in Tasmania when the decade opened. The adventurously minded had for decades trekked the mountains and wild country of the Great Dividing Range that included popular hiking trails and routes in the Blue Mountains, the Snowy Mountains and the Victorian Alps. Tasmania’s Overland Track was already popular among those prepared to rough it, and adventurous parties were already making long and arduous expeditions into Tasmania’s Southwest wilderness where they were often resupplied by airdrop from light aircraft.
With the coming of the seventies a new generation was propelled into the bush by the Tasmanian government’s policy of hydro-industrialisation. The policy gave birth to an environment movement that rapidly grew in numbers. The movement deserves credit as one of the main drivers of the uptake of rucksack sports in Tasmania. It quickly took on a political dimension. Lake Pedder was flooded in 1972, triggering the formation of the United Tasmania Group, the country’s first foray into environmental politics and the world’s first green party. It grew into a substantive social movement around environmental preservation that would culminate in the successful campaign to prevent the flooding and hydroelectric development of the Franklin River, and in the formation of the Greens party at the national level. The Lake Pedder campaign focused public attention on Tasmania’s wild places. People wanted to get out and see them. To do that they needed equipment like packs, sleeping bags, tents and the rest of the stuff that travellers of the wild places require. An incipient outdoor equipment industry was happy to provide.
Come midday Saturday retailers closed for the weekend and most people had the weekends off in those days. This made available time for bushwalking, climbing, camping or whatever else with friends. For those of us in the adventure equipment industry it meant a growing market.
Origins way-back
While the industry underwent a spurt of growth in the seventies, its origin in Australia lay 40 years before that. That was when Paddy Pallin started to make packs, tents and down-filled sleeping bags at his home in Sydney. The Paddymade brand grew with the market and would dominate it until equipment from New Zealand and new Australian manufacturers came onto the market in the seventies, however that supplemented Paddymade rather than displacing it.
The seventies brought newcomers such as the South Australian canvas H-frame pack maker, Flinders Ranges, and similar packs by Mountain Mule in New Zealand. These competed with Paddymade, however a growing market meant that there was enough business for all. The new equipment included sleeping bags by Fairydown, also from across the Tasman. The packs they offered were variations on the steel-framed, canvas H-frame pack and followed the conventional design of the day. They carried the weight entirely on the shoulders. Along with japara cotton-covered sleeping bags and tents of the same material, this was not lightweight or compact equipment. That would come, but not yet.
Paddymade remained a popular and trusted brand but by the late seventies innovative equipment coming in from the US and the UK would start to challenge its market dominance. Karrimor packs became available around this time but despite their reliability, lightweight aluminium frames and functional design they did not displace the established brands, hinting at an innate conservatism in Tasmanian and perhaps Australian bushwalking circles at the time. Some of the Karrimor range were rejected by Tasmanian bushwalkers for the same reason that the high-riding framed packs popular among US hikers never became popular here — they got caught-up in the scrub.
Market demand stimulates competition and innovation. Until the seventies, bushwalkers had made do with the traditional steel framed, A-frame canvas packs. Now, in the early seventies, the canvas H-frame packs had replaced those earlier types which had accompanied Tasmania’s pioneering bushwalkers into the wilderness. Changes were starting to appear in other equipment too. The use of lightweight nylon for sleeping bags and tents was another innovation of the decade. Bushwalkers welcomed these developments for the lower weight the equipment offered.
In an article in 2014 I wrote that old equipment doesn’t die, it goes to the museum. What triggered that was a display of traditional Tasmanian bushwalking equipment at Launceston’s Queen Victoria Museum. Standing there looking at it, I reflected on how the 1970s had been the decade of innovation in bushwalking equipment. The display consisted of:
- a Paddymade pack of thick canvas with the usual three pockets these packs featured; although later design moved towards the alpine pack with only a pocket on the lid, the multiple pockets on these old packs were a necessity simply to carry everything because the packs were not all that large
- a pair of long, thick, oily-wool socks made by Waverly Woollen Mills in Launceston; we sold these at Outdoor Equipment because they were favoured by bushwalkers; Tasmanian walking tracks would become waterways after even a little rain and there was not much you could do to keep the water from flowing in through the top of your Blundstone boots; cold feet were an accepted part of mountain walking and a pair of those thick, oily and sooner rather than later soggy wool socks went a long way to retaining a semblance of warmth for your cold wet feet; bushwalkers of the time will remember the smell of wet socks hung to dry in front of fireplaces in mountain huts
- a pair of ankle-height, leather walking boots of indeterminate make; Blundstone was the popular, almost the only brand available although a model of South Australia’s Rossi leather boot gained limited popularity; it wasn’t until Karrimor introduced the lighter weight nylon and leather boot in the 1980s that bushwalkers could look forward to less weight on the feet
- a DIY wire billy hook attested to skills in bushcraft needed by mountain walkers before such devices could be bought in shops; it spoke of a time when you could actually light a campfire in national parks in Tasmania’s mountains.
I met the founder of Mountain Designs, Australian climber and mountaineer Rick White, when he was starting out as a manufacturer of adventure equipment. That was when he came into the Hobart store to try to interest us in his sleeping bags. With their nylon covering and high quality down fill, his bags were lighter weight for the same warmth than the heavier, japara-covered Paddymade bags.
Like Paddymade, Rick’s Mountain Designs products were Australian-made. They were the harbinger of change about to sweep through the industry. Nylon started to displace canvas and cotton not only for sleeping bags but for packs. Later, a new waterproof material for parkas came onto the market, sometimes marketed as ‘dry japara’. Unlike the earlier japara parka these came with a colour choice and didn’t require regular reapplications of linseed oil to maintain their waterproofing. Then a new waterproof material appeared that transpired out the inside condensation built up through physical effort, while also keeping the rain out. It was called Goretex. Outdoor Equipment stocked the first models of Goretex parka made by Mountain Designs and the first imported Berghaus Goretex parkas from the UK.
This was the start of the transformation in materials and design in adventure equipment for bushwalking and mountaineering. My lightweight titanium ice axe was another materials innovation as was the appearance of cams marketed to rock climbers as ‘Friends’, devices inserted into cracks in the rockface to which to attach carabiners and ropes.
Anyone who spent time in Tasmania’s mountains knew that rainy, sometimes snowy weather could come in with little warning. Firewood got wet and starting a campfire was difficult. A compact stove got around this and was especially useful in snowy winter conditions. At the time when I started bushwalking that would be the kerosene-fueled Optimus cooker in its steel clamshell case. A bit of a hassel to get going, for sure, but soon the purr of the cooker would be assurance that a steaming cup of tea or a hot dinner reconstituted from the dried, powdery contents of the paper package, brand long forgotten, that was commonly eaten by bushwalkers would be on its way. I recall that it masqueraded as stew.
But change was coming here, too. The lighter weight, brass, Swedish Svea 123 shellite-fueled stove that fitted inside a billy came onto the market and became popular. It was easier to get going than the older kerosene-fueled Optimus. More concerning when one of our group started it up was a compact, Swiss, shellite-powered cooker alarmingly called the Borde Bombe. We looked at the new device as he started it, taking a step or two back, but soon it was purring along with his billy on top. I recall it was both the cylindrical appearance as well as the name that made us wary. The device never attained the popularity of the Svea or the Bluet propane cartridge stove that became available at the time.
The conservatism within Tasmanian bushwalking circles when it came to acceptance of the new equipment was not resistance, it was more caution by bushwalkers who had for years used traditional equipment design and materials. It was the pull of the tried and proven, but slowly at first they came around to using the new equipment and materials, something I partly put down to the influence of friends who were early adopters of the new stuff. I saw this opening to the new happening in the shop. People new to adventure activities and buying their first set of equipment had not known what had preceded them and so were willing to try newer designs and materials.
The limited scale of the outdoor equipment market and the range of equipment available as the seventies reached their mid point had inadvertently led to a more-or-less standard set of kit used by bushwalkers, particularly those in Tasmania: H-framed pack, black waterproof japara parka and overtrousers, military surplus (from Tradewear) khaki or dark blue woollen trousers or cotton work trousers, checked wool shirt from Waverley Woollen Mills in Launceston (if I remember correctly) and leather walking boots by Tasmania shoemaker, Blundstone. Add a Svea or Optimus stove and a tin-plated or aluminium billy.
Innovation in materials and design was accelerating as the seventies progressed. The early A-frame pack had disappeared from the market before I joined the industry and now the dominant H-frame pack was under threat from something new being brought into the country by Melbourne importer of adventure equipment, Molonys, which had a retail shop in that city’s CBD. This was something different and like the Goretex parka it was received with critical caution by established bushwalkers. Most of them would eventually come around as the internal frame pack started to make inroads into bushwalking circles. My first was a canvas model by Berghaus, called the Roc. With a padded hipbelt to move much of the weight from the shoulders to the hips, the packs were more efficient and comfortable to carry than the H-frame types, however with their padded back resting against the wearers’ back they would become sweaty in hot weather. You would take one off after a climb and feel the chilliness of sweat evaporating from your back.
Outdoor Equipment stocked the Karrimor line as well as Paddymade. I still had my Paddymade pack which I bought in Paddy Pallin’s Sydney store before coming to Tasmania. Some years later I borrowed a friends external-framed Karrimor — I think it was called a Totem 60 to denote its 60 litre carrying capacity — for a solo, off-season walk along the Overland Track. I wanted to compare it to the new internal frame packs. Apart from seeing no one other than a couple day walkers on my first and last days on the track, I found the Karrimor with its padded hip belt to make for a more-efficient and comfortable carry for the multi-day trek than the H-frame packs I had used. Still, it was not as comfortable as my Berghaus internal frame pack.
Tasmanian bushwalkers need warm clothing in the mountains, summer as well as winter. There was not much of a choice. Wool pullovers from the closet, Tasmanian made wool shirts, and cotton thermal base layers marketed as ‘aircell’ were what we wore. Then, one day, a salesman from one of the mainland importers came into the store. What he had to show us was intriguing and would go on to challenge wool as the preferred warmware for bushwalkers. At the time, synthetic clothing did not have a good reputation among bushwalkers. They preferred wool—the tried and proven, again. What he showed us was a synthetic jacket, fluffy inside but that was claimed, like wool, to retain its insulating quality when wet. Unlike wool, it was said to dry quickly. The material was what we today call fleece and it is now a staple of the outdoor clothing scene. Outdoor Equipment became the first in Tasmania to stock the new material. The jackets were made by a Norwegian company called Helly Hansen.
Around the same time, the store introduced another synthetic by the same company. It was a form-fitting base layer that went by the name of Liffa and was made from polypropylene. With the same thermal properties when wet as wool, and, like fleece, capable of drying quickly, polypropylene base layers started their voyage to widespread acceptance. After a few days of constant wear on the trail, though, you started to notice the body odour they retained.
By mid-decade, rucksack sports had moved beyond the generation of post-World War Two participants and was attracting people of the baby boom generation. Powered by disposable income in a growing economy in which work was plentiful, adventure equipment was becoming a sizeable and growing industry.
On Liverpool Street
The store was owned by John Oldmeadow, a local businessman without any connection to adventure sports. A suave character with a family in Sandy Bay, what passes for an upmarket, middle class suburb on the banks of the Derwent, John was unflustered and easy to get on with. According to one of the staff, however, he was a bit of a stockmarket player who was willing to take risks in his business dealings. That was confirmed in the years after I joined the business.
Before opening Outdoor Equipment where I started my time in the industry, John bought the long-established Tradewear, a store catering to tradespeople which, in the absence of any specialist adventure equipment supplier other than the limited offerings of the Scout Shop, supplied bushwalkers with clothing and footwear. I believe this influenced John in recognising that adventure equipment was becoming a growth market and stimulated him to open Outdoor Equipment.
Soon after opening, John launched a military surplus store at 71 Murray Street. He hired a manager, who did what all managers do — he had a business card printed. When John discovered the card described the manager as an arms dealer he had him get another card printed, promptly. This one described him as what he was, a store manager. The store did not sell arms. The manager hired a young guy to do sales, someone I and the manager of Outdoor Equipment, Ian Wright, knew through the Hobart Walking Club. That arrangement would soon end in an unfortunate incident.
Outdoor Equipment sold bushwalking and car camping equipment, importing Andre Jamet car camping and hiking tents from France. The bushwalkers and climbers who were the staff knew little of the car camping market but we soon acquired a rudimentary knowledge. The Andre Jamet hiking tents were another sign of change in the outdoor equipment world in that they came with a floor and an inner to separate the occupant from the condensation that could accumulate on the inside of the waterproof tent fly. It was made of a white silk. The single-skin, japara-cotton Paddymade tents in common use lacked floors. Their waterproofing relied on the cotton fabric absorbing moisture and swelling so that it excluded further water penetration. It worked, but after a rainy night in the mountains you had to pack a wet tent with its added weight of water. Paddymade manufactured several models including the popular-in-Tasmania (and floorless) Southwester, named after Tasmania’s South West wilderness area and its sometimes ferocious weather. It was a made from a heavier, more durable japara cloth.
Outdoor Equipment was a good place to work. There was a buzz in learning about the new equipment and materials coming onto the market, in talking with people who were unsure about what they needed to get out into the mountains and in assessing the new equipment to stock. The store became the main source of bushwalking equipment in the city. There was little by way of competition other than the Scout Shop with its limited range. We did not push people into buying, knowing that honest advice about equipment was important not only to the store’s reputation but to the comfort and safety of people out in the wild. That was something shared with the Sydney stores I later worked in.
That incident I hinted at with the young guy hired to work in the surplus store… it was on a bushwalking trip that the weather did what it often does in Tasmania. It started to rain. So it was on with the waterproof parkas. In those days, parkas were made of fine weave japara cotton and were waterproofed with linseed oil. The only colour available? Black. As the oilskin parkas aged they took on a more-tatty patina with crease lines and discolouration as the oil dried out of the cloth. This made it easy to see who was wearing a new parka because it stood out with its uncreased evenness of colour.
It was a new parka that the young guy put on. Where could he have bought it? The Scout Shop? Unlikely. Tradewear? Maybe. But the most likely? The store where he worked. Staff purchases attracted a discount, however how much less he paid for the parka was now the question pondered by the manager of Outdoor Equipment who was on the same walk. I don’t know how the conversation went that day as the rain came down, but it was soon deducted that the parka found its way to the young guy without money passing through the till. A new staff position became available. This must have been awkward for both as they were in the same bushwalking club and it was more or less inevitable that they would be on the same walks in future.
New city, new store
The market was growing and John Oldmeadow had his eyes on expansion. Where else to expand to than Launceston, a city then of around 60,000 in the north of Tasmania? A partnership between John Oldmeadow and Ian Wright, the new business was named the Outdoor Shop. It was much smaller than its Hobart sibling. Although it meant a move from Hobart I accepted the offer to become its manager. The purchasing and financial side stayed with the Hobart business.
Allgoods was a long-established Launceston business and it soon got wind of our intentions and hastily set up its own small bushwalking store attached to its larger clothing shop in the CBD. They called it, quaintly, the Bush Hut. Allgoods also operated the only car camping store in the city in a large showroom adjacent to Princes Park. That closed in 2019 or 2020.
My intention was to develop the Outdoor Shop as a specialist adventure equipment supplier. Over time, I built a stock of bushwalking equipment, kayaks, canoes, cross-country skiing equipment, climbing gear, books and river rafting equipment—the yellow inflatable boats known as ‘rubber duckies’ then used for river running, itself a new activity in the wild. The store started to attract business and continued to do so because it stocked the innovative new equipment then coming onto the market.
I knew that adventure equipment was the businesses’ stong point. The Hobart management, however, only partially shared my view of the market we should go after. They decided to stock car camping equipment. It was not our prime market and our range of stock was far less that of the competitor, Allgoods. There was no way the Outdoor Shop could compete with Allgoods’ established position in the market. Car camping equipment was a distraction from our main adventure equipment market where we had the edge.
What I learned from this was that in the outdoor equipment business specialisation was the way to go. Either you specialised in car camping or in rucksack sports equipment. For a small business, trying to cater for both spread our stock and investment too thinly. With today’s larger market it can be done, as the Anaconda chain and Mountain Creek store in Hobart demonstrate, however they operate in what is now a mature market for both types of outdoor activity and Anaconda is a national-scale businesses. In the times I write about the industry was in its infancy.
My expertise was in adventure equipment, not car camping. So was Jeff’s, the surfer and bushwalker who managed the store when I was on holidays. People would come from the cities along the Bass Strait coast, there being only a small store in Devonport catering to the north-west of the state.
In pursuit of becoming a specialist retailer, the Outdoor Shop stocked adventure equipment for niche markets other than bushwalking. This gave the store a competitive edge over Allgoods which stayed with the bushwalking market in their Bush Hut store. Later, the emerging adventure travel industry offered new opportunities as affordable air fares created a market in catering to backpacker travellers. Both the Hobart and Launceston stores started to sucessfully cater to it. Specialist adventure equipment was our strength and adventure travel was then an adventure activity because many travellers were independent travellers.
What the Outdoor Shop did that Allgoods did not do well was to stock the new equipment coming into the country from the UK and USA. We introduced local bushwalkers to the internal frame packs of Lowe Alpine Equipment and those of Berghaus. John Oldmeadow managed to convince the Berghaus importer in Melbourne not to supply Allgoods for as long as they could get away with it. This made the Outdoor Shop the sole supplier of Berghaus packs in the city, as well as those coming in from Lowe Alpine Equipment in the USA.
Soon, however, one of our niches in the adventure equipment market would close. The manufacturer who made the fibreglass kayaks and Canadian canoes the Outdoor Shop sold told us that he would not supply us in future. Although the watercraft were not big sellers, he figured that having his own retail shop in Launceston would open a new market for him. I don’t know how long his store existed but I think he underestimated the volume of sales he would need to economically sustain a store.
The importance of specialisation
In the years after I left Tasmania I would occasionally think about why the Outdoor Shop started successfully and then went into decline. I didn’t have the full information because financial management was done in the Hobart store. All I had were my own observations and what Hobart told me.
Bushwalking and other rusksack sports were warm-season activities in Tasmania. December and January were our peak sales times, both for local custom and for mainland bushwalkers coming over for the long walks. Winters were a slow time for sales. All we had to tie the business over the season was outdoor clothing and a small stream of touring ski sales, which I fitted with bindings in-store, in addition to sales of smaller items and consumables like dried food. By this time the American Mountain House brand of freeze-dried food had arrived in Tasmania.
Another contributing factor was the limited market size of a small city of around 60,000. Selling durable goods into a small market sooner or later leads to regular customers having all of the equipment they need. There are only so many packs, sleeping bags, tents, waterproof and warm clothes and other expensive equipment that people need for adventure activities. They might shop for consumables such as freeze dried food, bushwalking stoves and billies, however those were lower-priced goods insufficient to sustain a business by themselves. I think market saturation had much to do with our declining sales.
Then there was competition. When Allgoods learned that the Outdoor Shop was to open they responded by hurriedly opening the Bush Hut store just before the Outdoor Shop opened its doors. Allgoods was an established retailer. The manager they hired was known to local bushwalkers through his membership of the Launceston Walking Club. There surely would have been an element of loyalty towards the local when it came to purchasing equipment.
Purchasing was another trigger to the store’s decline. John Oldmeadow misread the potential of the market for car camping equipment. The limited range of equipment he put into the Outdoor Shop could in no way compete with Allgoods’ well-known and well-stocked car camping store just around the corner. Allgoods stocked in-depth, so customers could obtain all of their car camping needs in the one store. The lesson was that to challenge an established and well-stocked retailer necessitates a similarly-scaled enterprise.
Investing in car camping equipment consumed funds that could have been better spent on what the Outdoor Shop was known as — a specialist retailer of innovative adventure equipment for rucksack sports. It was there that its potential lay. Combined with our travelling educational service we could have developed that market further and built on the store’s reputation.
Two stores catering for much the same clientele in a small city limited the market for both. Being essentially a department of a large clothing store, Allgoods’ bushwalking shop was more financially secure than the Outdoor Shop.
At times through the year Reg Marron, the big wall climber employed in the Hobart store, would drive the businesses’ Kombi to Launceston and we would set off along the north coast, at excessive speed if Reg was driving, to do talks and equipment demonstrations for bushwalking clubs and schools with outdoor education programs. The Outdoor Shop’s education program was an asset, a strategy for spreading the store’s presence to cities within an easy day’s travel. Like stocking the innovative equipment coming in from overseas, the education program was a point of difference to Allgoods which was run as a conventional business. How much business did the program bring? Data was not collected, however the program did make the store known well beyond Launceston.
Reg was a tall, imposing and strongly-built man with an afro-style mop of dark hair. Based at Outdoor Equipment in Hobart, he shared a rented house in South Hobart with his brother and a woman known as Catwoman. Reg was at home on Victoria’s big wall climbs of Mt Buffalo and the vertical world of Arapiles. Initially skeptical of the environment movement then gaining strength in Tasmania, somehow, somewhere, he had an epiphany and become a supporter. In later decades Reg went into law and became a Launceston magistrate.
Managing the day to day running of the store was a repetitive but easy job. There were the usual tasks like cleaning, banking the daily takings and organising the shelves and window display. I suppose the downside was the Saturday morning shopping that was part of the retail week. That cut down on the time available to get out and use the equipment I sold. That is how it went over the closing years of the decade.
It was a day in 1979 when Ian drove up from Hobart. He told me that John and he had made the decision to close the shop. You must have seen it coming, he said. I had. I was aware that accounts for stock purchases sometimes went unpaid for months and I suspect it might have been much the same for the Hobart store. I had wondered about the future of the Launceston store on those days when customers were few and suspected that although the shop attracted regulars and continued to make sales, business might not be brisk enough to sustain it.
It is decades later that I am in Launceston. Curious to see how it has changed, if at all, I wander into Allgoods Bush Hut. What had looked like a small, folksy backwoods shop when it opened now looked cramped, overcrowded with stock and tired. It was essentially unchanged since the day it opened and I thought that apart from new equipment on display the store gave the impression that it was still the 1970s. I suppose it persisted so long because it was the only store in town after the Outdoor Shop closed. The big shiny Paddy Pallin, Macpac, Aspire and Find Your Feet stores a short walk away were far-more inviting places to walk into. I walked out of the Bush Hut with the impression that being the lone-supplier for too long leads to management complacency. Periodic renovation of a store to adopt modern product display is a necessity in a competitive market.
Cheap air travel opens a new market
The adventure travel industry that got underway during the 1970s grew from travellers setting out along the Hippy Trial, London to India, and for some continuing on through Southeast Asia to Australia. This was essentially solo travel by people equipped with Tony Wheeler’s Across Asia on the Cheap, the title that gave birth to the Lonely Planet publishing company.
At the start of the 1970s overlanding across Asia was the province of the hardy few but, as usually happens with new trends, businesses started up to cater for those who heard the call of distant places but wanted someone to pave their way to them. Specialist guiding businesses later turned adventure travel into another form of tourism riding on the back of cheap international airfairs. Outdoor equipment manufacturers started to make a range of equipment specifically for this emerging market.
Both the Hobart and Launceston stores became first-movers in stocking equipment for this new market. Packs, sleeping bags and clothing were the main items in demand. Overseas manufacturers designed front-opening packs that were more convenient to live out of than top-opening bushwalking packs and these flowed into the Australian market. The buyers were not the hardy overlanders of the Hippy Trail of the seventies. These were middle class people needing someone to do most of the work for them. The emerging adventure travel guiding businesses were all too happy to assist them in that.
The adventure travel industry was still small then, however within a decade it would develop into a major new niche for the tourism and the outdoor equipment industry. My first encounter with adventure travel was while living in Hobart when I was invited by local bushwalker and member of the Hobart Waking Club, Adrian Jarret, to watch a slide show about his trek in Nepal.
Adventure travel became a growth sector for equipment manufacturers, with businesses like Sydney’s Trek & Travel catering to it with talks by adventure travel guiding business.
New stores in new cities
I left Tasmania after the Outdoor Shop closed. Moving to Sydney, I started looking around for a job and wrote to a Sydney-based business, Mountain Equipment, then with its only store in the North Shore suburb of Crows Nest. The owner said to come in for a meeting.
Jurgen Zingler offered me a job. He was a tall, fit man, calmly and quietly spoken and easy to get along with. His equally tall, blonde and athletic-looking wife would sometimes work in the store, mainly in peak business periods of the year.
Mountain Equipment was a large store serving the adventure equipment market. Its stock was mainly bushwalking equipment with a sideline in ski touring. The shop occupied two levels with tents on the upper. Downstairs was a workshop where Allen spent much of his time. I’m unsure what his job actually entailed. In winter he mounted bindings to touring skis. In later years he joined the company that owns Trek & Travel and that bought Mountain Equipment.
Mountain Equipment was a good place to work. There were only a couple niggles taking the gloss off the experience. One was the store manager who if you arrived a few minutes late would point that out to you. He came across as a person perhaps too serious of demeanour for the type of customers who came into the shop and for the type of people hired to work in it. His attitude was not of the freewheeling type of some of the staff. He seldom smiled and was something of a heavy presence. His nagging was despite staff being expected to hang around for ten or more minutes after closing time while the money in the till was counted. That was really a management job for which there was no valid rationale for detaining staff after closing.
The other niggle was working hours. Sydney had late-night shopping. Stores stayed open until 9pm on Thursdays. There was no all-weekend trading when I worked at Mountain Equipment, however retailers opened on Saturdays from 8.30 or 9am and closed at 12.00 or 12.30pm. With late night shopping, Thursdays were a 12-hour day with lunch, morning and afternoon tea break and a brief break before the evening shopping hours. Working Saturday mornings prevented staff getting out into the bush on weekends even though the store catered to a market for rucksack sports. Long Thursday hours plus Saturday mornings plus Monday to Fridays with the ten to fifteen minutes a day for till-counting after closing made for a long working week. Was I right in thinking it exploitative?
I don’t know how Mark came to work at Mountain Equipment. From what I knew he wasn’t a bushwalker in any serious sense. He was exuberant and extraverted and surprised the staff when he bought a sporty convertable car. He lived with others in a flat not all that far from Crows Nest. After work one Saturday afternoon some of the staff were invited over, and over drinks we were treated to the music of Kraftwork. After we left, the store manager confided to me that he couldn’t stand the music.
The main location of the adventure equipment retail industry was in the CBD. I moved to Mountain Equipment’s tiny city store when it opened and stayed there until it closed. It was on York Street in the Wynyard area, some distance from the cluster of adventure equipment retailers on Kent Street. Like other industries, the clustering of businesses catering to the same market was a characteristic of the adventure equipment industry in Sydney. In later years, Mountain Equipment, Mountain Designs, Paddy Pallin, Trek & Travel, Macpac, Kathmandu and Patagonia would cluster within a few minutes walk of each other. At Mountain Equipment’s York Street store I worked with store manager Jamie. He later left the industry to manage a CBD bottle shop. Small it might have been, the store attracted a good flow-through of customers.
Later, Mountain Equipment moved to their present store in the CBD and I worked there for a time before starting a media course at the University of Technology. Jurgen and his wife eventually left the industry. Mountain Equipment is now owned by the company that owns Trek & Travel, just down the road. One store has more of a travel equipment focus, the other rucksack sports.
Catering for the bushwalkers of the time, in the 1930s Paddy Pallin manufactured packs and other equipment from his home before opening a store in Liverpool Street in the city. The business continues to this day with stores in state capitals and a few regional cities. I started working at the Sydney city store in the 1980s when I needed a part-time job to sustain myself while studying journalism at the University of Technology. Initially, that was in the Liverpool Street store and after that in the store’s present CBD location. As with the other places I worked I liked my time there.
It was at Paddy Pallins that I first learned that age discrimination was a reality. Just as I did with Mountain Equipment I wrote to the manager, this time asking about part-time work. He invited me in for an interview. That seemed to go well. Shortly after, I received a letter inviting me to work there.
Most of those working in the store were young, however there was a middle-aged man who had a lot of experience in the industry, including skiing retail. I was working with him one evening when we got to talking. That was when I learned that the manager had decided not to hire me because, in my thirties, he thought me too old to work at Paddys. My co-worker told him that older staff make good staff, and convinced him to hire me. The manager was somewhere in his twenties. I found his age discrimination disappointing despite my years of experience in the industry and because it came from Australia’s oldest manufacturer and retailer of bushwalking equipment, a business with a positive reputation. It didn’t seem to fit the ethos of the business or the industry. There were many bushwalkers my age and many older, making the hiring of older and experienced staff a wise move for any store.
It was during the nineties when the story was told to me by someone I had worked with and who was still working at Paddy’s. I might have some of the details wrong, however as I remember it the story went like this. Paddy’s son was now running the business, however with increased competition and the state of the economy Paddy’s once unassailable dominance of the market had been successfully assailed and business had contracted to such an extent that the management had to return the Porsche they leased for Paddy’s son. The story was not related out of vindictiveness, more as a comment on how the business was managing its finances. Whatever the facts, it was a minor incident reflective of the state of the industry at the time. Paddys survived.
I met Paddy at a social event at his home one day. He was aged then, still clear of mind and he came across as a kindly man. It was a privilege to meet someone who had done so much for bushwalking and adventure sports in Australia.
Industry changes
It was the 1990s and changes were again afoot in the industry. The manufacture of rucksack sports equipment had never been a large industry in Australia. Paddy Pallin, Flinders Ranges and Mountain Designs, destined to go out of business in 2017 before rebirthing as a supplier to the Anaconda chain, are the few that come to mind. Now, manufacturers are fewer. A small number are cottage industries turning out a limited range of equipment at small volumes. Still manufacturing locally is One Planet with their Melbourne store and their products distributed through retailers in other cities. I think they are the only pack and tent maker still producing in Australia.
Others like Kathmandu have their own brand, however their products are manufactured overseas. Paddys went from manufacturing its own packs, tents, sleeping bags and the other equipment that had supplied generations of bushwalkers to become a seller of imported goods. The move paralleled the outsourcing going on in Australian industry at the time. Osprey replaced Paddymade packs in their stores and a variety of sleeping bags brands replaced the house brand. Most of the clothing that Paddy Pallin sells comes from overseas. Offshoring largely ended the Australian rucksack sports manufacturing industry. As Western Australian manufacturer, Wilderness Equipment, explains on their website:
In 2000 we took the decision to wind up our North Fremantle factory operation and join forces with our friends at Sea To Summit in a distribution and business partnership. Like it or not, a number of changes in the Australian business environment forced us to eventually make a move. Not least of these was government policy on tariffs, the most damaging effect of which was to open the market up to a flood of imported brands all made in low-labour-cost countries. It was difficult to maintain critical size and market share while operating a very labour-intensive manufacturing business in a high cost environment in such circumstances.
Australian manufacture of adventure equipment became a victim of economic globalisation.
The loss of Mountain Designs
Bargains. There were bargains. Lots of bargains. People flooded into the stores to snap them up. I walked away with a merino base-layer hoodie for a mere AU$25, a AU$60 pair of European walking boots and two pair of AU$20 board shorts. It was adventure equipment at extreme discount, a windfall for shoppers. Within a week shoppers had almost emptied the store. It was bargain shopping tinged with a sense of loss, however, a final milestone in the story of one of Australia’s adventure equipment businesses.
Like the long-running Paddy Pallin and Kathmandu stores, Mountain Designs expanded as adventure sports boomed in the 1980s and 1990s. It was a boom that got underway a decade before the big name brands set up in most of Australia’s capital cities. In those early days the adventure equipment market was dominated by small, independent retailers rather than national brands.
Fast forward 35 years and I’m standing surrounded by bargains in Mountain Designs’ Sydney store. Nearby, a couple women are trying on walking boots. Others shuffle through the clothing racks. Staff ask shoppers if they need help finding anything. A customer asks one of the staff whether the business would continue. He is not allowed to say, he explains. It’s a disrespectful response and makes staff and management look silly.
In 2018, a spokesperson for Mountain Designs said the demise of the company was due to saturation of the adventure equipment market. That made sense because the viability of the market for adventure equipment in Australia is limited by our overall population size and the portion of the population attracted to rucksack sports and who have disposable incomes. Market saturation occurs when the equipment needs of a market are fulfilled. It is exacerbated by the durability of quality bushwalking equipment. People buying a sleeping bag, pack or tent will not be on the lookout for a replacement for years. The stores are prevented from offering shorter-lived, lower-quality products because they exist within a reputation economy, their reputation resting on being suppliers of durable and reliable equipment.
Allegations about the quality of particular businesses’ equipment have been made over the years. Kathmandu was singled out in online conversations. At the same time, others said their Kathmandu equipment worked well. Allegations like this can often be put down to how people use the equipment and whether they use it for its intended purpose. My understanding is that Kathmandu, with its nationwide chain of stores, caters less for the serious bushwalker and more for the occasional, as well as for the general outdoor and travel market.
As market saturation is reached business starts to plateau and competition for the remaining business increases. Too many stores compete for a share of a limited market. Market growth is insufficient to support them all. At some point, poorly-managed or lesser-resourced stores find they can no longer compete. Mountian Designs’ story was a reprise of the experience of the Outdoor Shop in Launceston.
During the closure of Mountain Designs there was a lack of communication with customers and this naturally led to speculation. There was a story doing the rounds that Mountain Designs would become an online store, which it did become. Mountain Designs now distributes its products through the Anaconda chain in whose stores it has its own branded display area.
A time of growth and change
In my time in the industry I watched it grow and morph. I saw businesses rise and fall, materials change, designs improve, competition between stores increase, Australian equipment manufacturing disappear and the number of people out in our wild places grow.
I witnessed the changes brought by innovation: H-frame packs replaced by internal frame; Goretex and other waterproof materials replacing japara cotton for wet weather clothing; new synthetic sleeping bag fills competing with down; double-wall tents replacing the single-wall cotton japara types; synthetic thermal clothing replacing wool only to see wool reborn as ‘merino’; the brief appearance of the Alp Sport label from New Zealand; the rise of New Zealand’s Macpac equipment; the rise and end of Mountain Designs; the arrival of new brands like Sea To Summit, Patagonia, Osprey, Arcterix and others; the rise to dominance of the established retailers who set up in the capital and some regional cities.
Is innovation still continuing? Ever since we started selling Low Alpine Systems packs in the Launceston store decades ago, packs and other equipment have been more or less variations on a theme. Innovation came in materials rather than in basic design concepts. Equipment has become lighter in weight, thanks to new lightweight synthetic fabrics. It is a noticeably different experience carrying a comfortable, modern pack adjusted to your back length and packed with a lightweight sleeping bag and tent than tossing a heavier and bulkier japara-covered sleeping bag and japara tent into a thick canvas pack with a steel H-frame that lacked a padded hip belt to take most of the weight, and that was one-size-fits-all.
One innovation over recent years has been the appearance of ultralight equipment. Specialised ultralight packs, tents and sleeping bags and eating and cooking utensils made of titanium allow the ultralight walker to travel faster and further. This is the specialist end of the equipment market. Just recently, I was in a Hobart bushwalking store where a man was looking at buying a new pack. What are you using now, the salesperson asked? One of Osprey’s ultralight packs, the man replied. Did it break on its first use, the salesperson enquired? It was a serious question and says something about the new ultralight equipment: with the packs’ limited weight-carrying capacity, the rest of the equipment needs to be in the same ultralight catagory.
Aside from the ultralight, what is also a major innovation in load carrying comes from New Zealand in the form of Aarn packs. With their balancing pockets attached to the front harness and loaded with heavier equipment, the packs distribute weight more-equally between front and back to allow a more-upright walking posture that is less fatiguing. This, for me, represents the most significant improvement in load carrying since the appearance of Lowe Alpine Sytems and Berghaus internal frame packs in the 1970s.
Walk the couple blocks in which Sydney’s rucksack sports retailers cluster, the Little Bourke Street precinct in downtown Melbourne, the strip in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley and that in Hobart’s Elizabeth Street and see how both competition and symbiosis maintain the market. Competition is self-evident where stores cluster in close proximity. It makes comparison shopping easy. Symbiosis comes when staff recommend another store for something they cannot provide.
Stores went into online sales when the potential was realised by management. This now forms a substantial part of their business with some retailers operating only in the online space. Just as bookstores see people came in to peruse the titles then go online to buy, so do adventure equipment stores. There are reasons for this other that finding the cheapest price. Online stores, and here Patagonia is an example, often offer greater product and colour choice than is available in their shops. People can do comparison shopping and try sizes in-store before ordering online. That is how retail works now.
The Australian industry seems settled now, or as settled as any industry can be in these economically uncertain times. Shops have their loyal customers and there continues a trickle of innovative products from overseas. This seeming stability is broken only when, as happened in 2017 with the long-established Mountain Designs, the industry is shaken by a closure.
What we have seen over the past few decades is market consolidation into the hands of a few businesses with shops in state capitals and regional centres. They include Kathmandu, Paddy Pallin and Macpac. Smaller retailers like Bogong, Trek & Travel, Mountain Equipment, One Planet and others have been around for years and have established markets and clientelle. Manufacturers like Mont and Wilderness Equipment rely on the stores to distribute their product. Others, like BacpackingLight, Patagonia, Launceston’s Aspire and Tasmania’s Find Your Feet are more recent arrivals and focus on specialist market segments. BackpackingLight in Melbourne claimed first-mover advantage in catering for the ultralight equipment market when it opened. Likewise, Find Your Feet in Tasmania became the state’s first mover in trail running equipment. It comes back to my own observations made in Launceston years ago about the need to specialise in a competitive market.
The shift to environmentally sustainable materials and fair trade production is a newer phenomenon influencing the purchases of environmentally-aware buyers. Patagonia became the undoubted leader in this when it started to reform its supply chain and it is one of their main selling points. So too is their free repair service and use of recycled materials. Unlike other adventure equipment manufacturers, Patagonia caters for surfers and fly fishers.
As in other industries, in the adventure equipment industry it is the intangibles that sell tangibles. Equipment design and performance, reputation based on quality and reliability, sound advice from knowledgable staff active in rucksack sports and good customer service are the intangibles that sustain specialist outdoor equipment businesses today. A shopper’s experience in a store is a determinant of whether they return. The industry is still a reputation economy. Beyond those things, the adventure equipment industry depends on people having incomes sufficient to provide discretionary spending. It is like the restaurant business in that respect—its reliance on discretionary spending power subjects the industry to economic fluctuation.
A fortunate start
It was August 30, 2018, and it was crowded. People stood talking in groups, balloons floating above them. A hubbub of conversation filled the shop. I was in Mountain Equipment in Sydney. The business was celebrating its fiftieth year.
Fifty years. Unlike Paddy Pallin, Mountain Designs and Macpac, Mountain Equipment didn’t seek new markets in distant cities. It resisted the temptation of expansion and remained a Sydney-based business. That it has persisted for so long says something about the durability of Australia’s adventure sports scene. But, what was missing? The original owner, Jurgen Zingler. He was not there, but what was there were the same types of products I had sold when I worked for the business and for other businesses before that, only now they were in their newest evolution, the same made new again.
As I stood among the crowd I thought of my time with Mountain Equipment and the people with whom I had worked. Where were they now? Did they still maintain some connection with the industry? And what of all those others I have worked with? It was the opportunity not only to acknowledge Mountain Equipment’s role in the adventure equipment industry but to reflect on those early years when I made my start in it, when it was entering its first boom years in the 1970s. It was also an opportunity to silently thank Ian Wright and John Oldmeadow for the opportunity to do that. Those years gave me a sense of its history and the trends within it over its continuing evolution.
As I walked out the door that night I felt that the celebration acknowledged the maturation of what had been a new growth industry in Australia, an industry originally driven by innovation that has now settled into its own comfort zone.
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