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Forty-two luxury apartments are going in where he has sewn since 1983. There is a reason he is not setting up somewhere new, and it is the reason his remaining stock is now 60% off.

7-min read · by Kate Brennan

Warren Tuckwell found out from a stranger on his stairs with a laser measure.

The building had sold six weeks earlier. Nobody had thought to mention it. The formal notice turned up eleven days after the bloke with the measure, and by then there were orange survey marks on the footpath out front.

The buyer is turning the old wool mill on Ballantyne Lane into forty-two warehouse apartments. Five floors of red brick, a bluestone loading yard, and a run of tall arched windows down the full length of the building. Tuckwell has the top floor, which holds the light from first thing in the morning until the sun drops behind the Upfield line. In the sales plans, the top floor is the expensive one.

“Let’s get one thing straight — I’m not retiring,” he says, flatly, no drama in it. “Nobody asked me a thing. The building changed hands, and I found out from a bloke measuring my stairwell for a concierge desk.”

Five floors, and only one of them still working

The room smells of machine oil, cut nylon and stewed tea. A radio in the corner is playing the Shield cricket, quietly, and nobody is listening to it. Rolls of fabric stand on end against the wall, a different colour on each one. By the door hangs a calendar with the last day of the month circled in red, and on a nail beside it a yellow tape measure that has been round Tuckwell’s neck for four decades.

Half the machines are already under dust sheets. He sits at the one nearest the window — the same one he started on — with a half-finished shoulder strap under the foot.

“There were five firms in here when I took over,” he says, without looking up. “A sign-writer on the ground floor, a printer on the first, a woman doing upholstery on the second, a toolmaker on the third. They went one at a time and I never thought much about it. You don’t. Not until you’re the last one left and somebody’s measuring your stairs.”

Ask him whether it’s unfair and he shrugs. “It’s a good building. Sooner or later somebody was going to want it for something better than backpacks. I’d rather spend my last few weeks up here working than arguing.”

It started with kit bags

To understand what gets emptied out at the end of the month, you have to go back a good way before Tuckwell.

“My grandad came home from New Guinea and sewed canvas kit bags for the Army,” he says. “That was it, that was the whole business — kit bags, and wool packs for the shearing sheds when the Army went quiet. He took this floor in 1954 because the rent was nothing and the windows were big. My dad ran it after him. I took it over in 1983. I was twenty-three and I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.”

What the shop now sells as The Brunswick Pack started with a complaint. A chippie from the building site round the corner kept ripping the bottom out of the packs he bought, twice a year, every year. Tuckwell cut him a new one out of heavy nylon with a doubled base and bar-tacked every seam that carried weight. The bloke came back a year later — not to replace it, but to order one for every man on his crew.

In the 43 years since, Tuckwell has sewn a little over 75,000 of them on this floor. The pattern has been refined maybe six times. It has never been redesigned.

That is not a large number, and it isn’t meant to be. There is no assembly line up here and nothing is automated. Over the years there have been as few as three people on the floor and never more than eight — a handful of locals who come in to run panels and set zips, most of them part-time, most of them for a very long time.

And then there is Tuckwell, at the machine by the window, every working day since 1983.

He cuts the pattern himself. He sews the shoulder straps himself, and puts the bar-tacks in himself, because that is the joint the whole bag hangs off and he has never been willing to hand it to anybody else. And nothing goes into a box until it has been across his bench and he has given it a good yank.

The part nobody bothers to copy

Pick one up and you feel it immediately. It has weight — not heavy, but solid. The shell doesn’t crackle. The straps don’t fold over on themselves when you load it. The zips run without you having to steady the bag with your other hand.

“Anybody can copy the shape,” Tuckwell says. “Nobody copies the bits you don’t see, because the bits you don’t see are the ones a person has to sit and do. There are fourteen points on this pack where the weight actually goes. Every one of them gets bar-tacked. That’s real time on every single bag, and across a container load it’s the entire margin. So it doesn’t get done. And then the thing fails at the strap, right at the top of the shoulder, about eight months in.”

• Tuckwell’s hands, on every single one. He cuts the pattern, sews the shoulder straps, sets the bar-tacks, and checks every finished pack himself before it is boxed. No exceptions in 43 years.
• The 43-year pattern. Refined six times since 1983, never redesigned. Nothing on this pack is there because it looked good in a rendering.
• 1000D nylon shell, doubled at the base. The panel that fails first on a cheap pack is two layers here.
• 14 bar-tacked stress points. Every place the weight actually pulls, fed through the machine by hand, one at a time. This is the work that gets cut first when a bag is built down to a price.
• 45 litres. A full week’s worth of room — for a road trip, a week at the coast, or everything you need for a twelve-hour shift.
• Padded, ventilated shoulder straps with a chest strap and a removable waist belt — so it sits right whether you’re 157 cm or 196 cm.
• Padded laptop sleeve that takes up to a 17″ machine, plus a lined tablet pocket.
• Webbing front and sides. Hang what you want off it — or nothing at all.
• The Australian flag patch comes off. Hook-and-loop. Two seconds. It’s a backpack, not a statement.
• Hand-stamped brass plate on the zip pull, carrying the number of the final run.
• Whatever is still on the shelf. The colours left are simply the ones that haven’t gone yet. Some run out weeks before others, and when one is gone there is no dye lot coming behind it.

Fourteen years of early rounds

Ask him what he is proudest of and he will not talk about the product at all. He will talk about a letter.

“A postie wrote to me in the winter,” he says. “Australia Post, Ballarat. Bought one in 2012 and it’s done every round since — fourteen years, out the door at half five, frost, hail, forty-degree days, the lot. He only wrote to ask whether I still sold the waist belt on its own, because a blue heeler had had his. Fourteen years. Nothing torn, nothing frayed. That’s what I wanted the work to do.”

It’s one of the few things going into a box rather than a skip bin.

It isn’t the business he’s losing

Tuckwell is 66 and his hands have been getting worse for four years. Nobody would blink if he closed the business tomorrow of his own accord. That is not what is bothering him.

What is bothering him is the hour between six and seven in the morning, when the kettle has boiled and the first panels are cut and the light comes flat across the table from the east end of the window wall, and there is no one else in the building. He has had that hour roughly ten thousand times.

And the part he keeps circling back to is this: the light is exactly what the developer is selling. It is on the second page of the brochure. The thing that made forty-three years of work possible is now a bullet point in somebody else’s marketing.

Three reasons there is no next floor

Everybody who hears about this asks him the same question, and they usually ask it within about ten seconds: why not just move?

There are three answers, and any one of them on its own would be enough.

One: there is nowhere to move to. A floor that carries this much weight, with windows like these, does not go to a bloke sewing backpacks. It goes to whoever pays the most — which is exactly why he is losing this one. He has spent months looking: Brunswick, Coburg, out to Sunshine and Dandenong. There is nothing left in Melbourne he could take on and still sell a pack at a price anybody would pay.

Two: his hands are finished. The arthritis started in his right thumb about four years ago and has been working its way across both hands ever since. He can still put in a full day at the machine. He cannot put in a full day and then get up and do it again the next morning. Every pack sitting in that stockroom was sewn while his hands still worked properly. There was never going to be a forty-fourth year.

Three: there is nobody to hand it to. Bec runs the dispatch side, not the sewing. Twice over the years he took on an apprentice, and both times they left inside a year for work that paid better and hurt less. Everyone he knows who can run a walking-foot machine all day is his age or older, and they are all stopping at roughly the same time. He is not being dramatic when he says the trade goes out the door with him. He has simply looked, and there is no one.

The last thing he still gets to decide

Which brings us to the price, and to the only real choice he has left in any of this.

So he cut the whole remaining run by 60% and started shipping. “Forty-three years making a thing you carry,” he says. “I want to be able to picture them. On a train platform at Flinders Street, on a building site, walking somebody’s kid to school. Not stacked in a unit out past Tullamarine with a padlock on it.” He nods at the ceiling. “They’re getting the building. Fine. They’re not getting these.”

He is unhurried about most of it. On this one point he is not.

Three people who already own one

Who is actually packing the boxes

There is no distributor and no retail account. Everything goes out of the Ballantyne Lane loading door, and the whole shop end of it is run by Tuckwell’s daughter Bec, 39.

“I’ve never once been on that website,” Tuckwell says. “She could be selling anything. Right now she’s mostly taping boxes and I’m mostly carrying them, and we’re both behind.”

Bec has carried hers since 2016. “Mine’s been through a master’s, three share houses and a lot of airports,” she says. “People assume it’s a men’s bag because of how it looks in photos. It isn’t. Take the patch off, cinch the waist belt, and it’s just the best-built backpack most people will ever own. That’s the bit that gets me — we finally had people finding us, and now we’re closing.”

The end of the month, and then it’s a building site

Between the price and the date, the remaining stock is going considerably faster than anybody here planned for.

After that the floor becomes scaffolding and plasterboard, the machines go wherever machines go, and the number of Brunswick Packs in the world stops going up for good.

What you are actually buying

A backpack that you stop thinking about, because it stops giving you reasons to.

It takes what you put in it. It sits right whatever your back is shaped like. And on current evidence it will outlast the phone in your pocket, the car in your driveway, and two or three of the jobs you take between now and whenever you finally retire it.

For the next few weeks it is also the difference between forty-three years of work walking out through the loading door, and forty-three years of work going into a storage unit nobody ever opens again.

What people have been saying since the news got round