Australia produces some of the world’s best wine, fruit and vegetables. Agriculture remains one of our biggest exports. But imagine if instead of exporting bottles of vino, we sold off bunches of grapes to overseas wine producers? It’s an undesirable proposition – where we lose out on the value created through the production process – but it’s essentially what we’re doing with our Australian-grown yarn.

On a panel at this year’s Melbourne Fashion Festival, fashion designer Bianca Spender questioned this arrangement, which our local industries have become accustomed to.

“We don’t need to look offshore to find excellence,” she tells Broadsheet when we ask her to expand on her thoughts. “Why are we sending our beautiful cotton, wool and yarns offshore to be manufactured into garments?

Waverley Mills is of the same belief. The Launceston wool mill is the last of its kind. For 151 years, it’s been a vertical working mill, meaning almost every process needed to make its woollen products is done under its roof. While there are several other wool mills in operation in Australia (like Bendigo Woollen Mills and Nundle Woollen Mill), no other mill manufactures its products on-site from start to finish as Waverley Mills does.

“It’s a legacy brand with a tumultuous history. I think you cannot underestimate the fact that we are still on the same site that we were 151 years ago,” says Waverley Mills’ newly appointed CEO Fran Maiale.

She’s one of the many CEOs that have graced the mill even in the last decade, but the brand is used to upheaval. At its peak (during and following World War II), Waverley had 300 staff. At its most difficult times, the workforce diminished to three. It’s faced potential closure on multiple occasions. In the early 2000s, it went into receivership.

Most recently, a combination of government and private investment has helped the mill stabilise. It currently has 30 employees. In spite of all its hardships, Waverley Mills is still kicking.

Since last year, all its wool is solely sourced from five Tasmanian farms. These include Beaufront, Winton Estate and Kenilworth, all a drive away from Waverley’s headquarters.

It takes about four weeks for wool fleece to be transformed into a finished blanket. At these farms, wool classers sheer 15 to 20 kilograms of wool per sheep coat. That wool is then baled, ready to be shipped to Geelong to be washed in a process called scouring – this is the only step not completed by Waverley.

Once the wool arrives back in Launceston, the fibre is carded, processed and aligned through a combing procedure. Fibres are then mechanically rubbed together, spun into yarn and wound onto a comb. From there, it may be dyed before being warped onto a loom. Threads are arranged by hand before warp machines and weft yarn work to create woven fabric. Then there’s fringing, inspecting, fluffing, controlled shrinking, milling, spinning, drying and more.

It’s a tedious and meticulous operation. It’s why we leave it to the professionals. Head weaver and production manager Andrew Monaghan has been at Waverley for 32 years. “I’ve still got the same old 1975 machines that were here when I started. A lot of the machinery is still going, but a lot disappeared,” he says.

“Australia’s lost [so] much manufacturing over the years … We used to have three weaving mills in Launceston and a yarn dyeing plant which went offshore. They used to dye all our products but now we do; we had to take on that machinery.”

This involved method is how Waverley Mills is able to create and retain value for each supplier and employee. “For a kilo of wool, we’re adding 30 times to the value chain in that equation. All that employment, all that resource and profit are staying in Australia,” Maiale says.

Amy Grubb is an intergenerational farmer (her family’s been in the business for 138 years) and Waverley Mills’ marketing brand manager. She says her family receives the same financial compensation for wool as they did 15 years ago – despite their costs tripling.

“If we, the farmers, don’t step through the value chain and start really getting passionate about it, we’re not going to have any industry left,” she says. “We think we’re some of the best farmers in the world and we’re producing some of the best fibre in the world. But if we can, can we just take it that step further? Can we retain that value?”

Grubb questions the value placed on goods purporting they’re designed in Australia, noting that that can be as little as one person’s job onshore, whereas Australian-made products have to pass through multiple hands locally.

“If you do have a choice of affording something that’s made here in Australia, you’re buying so much more than a product. You’re actually valuing what we have decided is important in Australia, like environmental standards and workplace standards and just putting back into the community,” Grubb says. “Because every dollar between what I get as a farmer to what you buy it for actually stays locally.

“Australia used to be a country that made stuff. [Let’s make] sure that … we actually retain a bit of manufacturing capability, that we go back to being not just growers and miners [but] makers as well.”

Where to from here? Waverley Mills continues to produce its own collections (its recycled terrain throw collection is its bestseller) and partners with other local businesses, like The Sheet Society, RM Williams and Country Road.

“It is incumbent on us – the government, industry, various stakeholders – to keep this mill alive for local employment,” Maiale says. “There’s not too many [Australian brands] that have survived 150 years and it’s our responsibility to ensure that we are around for another 150.

“Supporting Waverley Mills is about more than keeping production local,” Spender says. “It’s about honouring the full journey of a garment, protecting the integrity of our fibre, and nurturing a future where Australian fashion is self-reliant, responsible and creatively sovereign.”

Grubb shares a memory from last year about a wool classer from Beaufront. She’d visited the farm to shoot Waverley’s 150-year collection’s campaign imagery, photographing the finished blankets and scarves among the native pastures the wool originated from.

“Shearing is a really physical job, these guys are shearing 400 sheep a day. This classer – best guy, I’d known him my whole life – just came out in tears, because it’s the first time in his whole life he’d actually been able to touch, feel [and] hold something that had been made from the wool he had shorn and produced,” she says.

When fibres are grown on Australian soil, spun into yarn on Australian soil and crafted into textiles on Australian soil, we get something that is quintessentially Australian. Forget if a product is just “designed in Australia”. Made in Australia, from fibre to finish, means farmers, weavers and makers have all played a part in keeping you warm this winter.

waverleymills.com

This article was updated to include additional reporting.