“My hands kept thousands of farmers on their feet. Now they can’t hold the chisel.” — Why a seventy-one-year-old country nurse from the Riverina is letting her last 172 walking sticks go at a special price, before her shed closes for good.

Around one in three Australians over sixty-five has a fall every year. A walking stick lowers that risk. But in thirty-six years as a country nurse, Margaret Doyle found the same thing on almost every farm she visited.

The walking stick was there. It just wasn’t in anyone’s hand.

The walking stick behind the laundry door

From 1981 to 2017, Margaret was the district nurse for the farms around Lockhart, Urana and The Rock. On a Tuesday she drove up to three hundred kilometres of dirt road and made eleven house calls.

Her job after a hip or knee operation was simple. Check that people could get around their own home safely. And again and again, she found the grey aluminium stick from the hospital in the wrong place. Behind the laundry door. In the footwell of the ute. Leaning in a corner of the shed.

“Every one of those farmers had a stick,” Margaret says. “And every one of them left it behind the laundry door, because it made them look like a patient. Then they fell in the yard.”

Five things a cheap walking stick gets wrong

• “The wrist breaker” (a flat handle). A handle that sits straight across puts all the weight on the wrist. “Hold a full kettle out at arm’s length and count to thirty,” Margaret says. “That’s your wrist on every step.”
• “The announcement” (a hollow metal tube). A thin rubber tip on a metal pole clicks on every tiled floor. People turn round before they even see you.
• “The slippery grip” (foam or varnish). It feels fine in the shop. On a hot day, with a sweaty hand, it slides. That is the one moment a stick must not slip.
• “The wobble” (push-button height). Adjustable metal sticks always rattle a little at the pin. A stick should be cut once, to the person, and left alone.
• “The patient look” (grey and medical). The biggest fault of all. A stick that makes you feel old is a stick that stays at home.

The sheep farmer who wouldn’t walk into the pub

In 1994 Margaret visited Col Brennan, a seventy-eight-year-old sheep farmer, after his new hip. The hospital stick was already in the corner. Col told her straight: “I’m not walking into the pub with that thing.”

Margaret’s husband Bill was a mechanic with a shed full of tools. That weekend she took a piece of hardwood and a borrowed chisel and carved an owl onto the handle. Col used that stick every single day for the next eleven years.

He gave her the grey hospital stick back. It still hangs on two nails above her shed door.

A nurse, a tin shed and nearly four thousand walking sticks

After Col came his neighbours. Then their daughters, the bowls club and the CWA. Margaret carved around sixty sticks a year on her days off. When she retired in 2017, the shed became her full-time workshop.

She starts at half past six, before the heat. By eleven the tin roof is ticking in the sun and the galahs have gone quiet on the fence. Bill’s spanners still hang on the wall. Her chisels sit next to them in an old cutlery roll.

She runs her thumb along a rough edge without looking up. “Everyone thinks the animal is the point,” she says. “The animal comes last. The point is the hand.”

Shape first. The animal comes last.

First Margaret cuts the grip until it sits right in a closed hand. Only then does the owl or the horse come out of the wood. “Do it the other way round,” she says, “and you get something pretty that hurts to hold.”

Hundreds of small cuts for one owl

This is the part her hands can no longer do. The blade has to stay at the same angle for hours. “It was never about strength,” Margaret says. “It’s holding that angle all morning. That’s what’s gone.”

Why people actually take a Doyle stick out of the house

• “The Palm Seat.” The grip is shaped to the heel of the hand first. The animal is carved around it afterwards. The weight spreads across the whole palm, not two knuckles.
• “The Wrist-Saver Angle.” The handle sits at a slight angle, not flat across. The weight goes into the palm and forearm instead of the wrist.
• “The Hand-Rubbed Finish.” Oiled by hand, not varnished. On a hot day with a sweaty hand, it grips better, not worse.
• “The Quiet Tip.” A thick rubber tip on solid wood. It holds on wet tiles and verandah steps, and it doesn’t click down the hallway at the GP.

Four animals for four different hands

The Owl is for a weak or stiff grip. The rounded chest fills the whole palm. It was Col’s, and it is still the one people ask for first.

The Horse is for travelling. The brass ring unscrews, so the stick comes apart for the car boot, the caravan or the flight to see the grandkids.

The Elephant is for people who really lean on it. The curled trunk is a hook for the fingers when getting up out of a low chair.

The Leopard is for longer walks. “This one goes to people who still walk the dog every morning,” Margaret says. “They just want something under the hand on the way home.”

Where her walking sticks end up

Margaret still gets letters. A man in Bendigo who walks to the bowls club again. A woman in Dubbo who took the owl to her grandson’s wedding and made sure it was in the photos. “Nobody writes to tell me how nice it looks on the wall,” Margaret says. “They write to tell me where they went.”

The hands that held other people steady

It isn’t her back and it isn’t her eyes. It is the joint at the base of each thumb, the one a carver leans on with every cut. Both hands now. Since this winter, the tendon in her right wrist as well.

Her hand therapist in Wagga said it plainly: no more hours with a chisel. The sawing still goes. The oiling still goes. The fine work on the grip does not.

172 walking sticks, and then the shed is locked

Margaret doesn’t complain. She has planned the end the way she once planned a hospital discharge. Her granddaughter Jess works in an office in Sydney. There is nobody to take over.

What is left stands in a rack along the back wall: 172 walking sticks. Owls, horses, elephants and leopards, all carved, oiled and finished. Her plan is to have the rack empty before Christmas. When they are gone, they are gone.

Why she priced them the way she did

A signed, hand-carved walking stick sells to collectors for a lot of money. Margaret could have asked double, and nobody would have blamed her.

Instead she kept the price low on purpose. “A stick in a glass cabinet is a stick that failed,” she says. “I want them on footpaths. At the cricket. On the steps of the CWA hall. At the chemist on a Tuesday morning.”

The online shop was her granddaughter’s idea. Over the Christmas holidays, Jess found a school exercise book with forty names and phone numbers in it, all waiting for a stick. She spent three days at the kitchen table taking photos. Margaret still doesn’t own a smartphone.

Whoever gets one of these last sticks is carrying on thirty-six years of house calls.

What people say about Margaret’s walking sticks

• ★★★★★

  Mum had two walking sticks and used neither. She has carried the owl every day since August, including to my daughter’s wedding. She told the photographer to get it in the pictures.

  Sharon K. · Toowoomba QLD
• ★★★★★

  I bought the horse because it comes apart for the caravan. What sold me was the quiet. My old one clicked on every floor at the surgery and I hated hearing myself coming.

  Graham P. · Bendigo VIC
• ★★★★★

  The angle of the handle makes a real difference. With my old stick my wrist ached all evening after the walk to the shops. Same walk with the elephant and nothing.

  Peter M. · Albury NSW

Questions people ask before ordering

More from people who carry one

• ★★★★★

  Bought the leopard for my husband, who walks the dog along the river every morning and refused anything that looked medical. He has given it a name. That tells you how it went.

  Rosalind T. · Geelong VIC
• ★★★★★

  You can feel the grain right through the finish. It’s not slippery at all, even on a forty-degree day. It came in brown paper with the length written on the end in pencil.

  Barry W. · Mildura VIC
• ★★★★★

  I’m eighty-two and I’d stopped going to church because of the steps. The elephant got me back up them. The minister asked where I got it.

  Joan F. · Orange NSW