'There's just something about Port': Why Tanya Van Der Water is moving her Buckaroo business | Region Illawarra
Buckaroo chief executive Tanya Van Der Water. The space behind her – the former Port Kembla RSL auditorium – will become the factory floor. Photo: Jen White. When Tanya Van Der Water opened the doors of the. . .
Buckaroo chief executive Tanya Van Der Water. The space behind her – the former Port Kembla RSL auditorium – will become the factory floor. Photo: Jen White. When Tanya Van Der Water opened the doors of the old Port Kembla RSL Club for the first time, it was to utter darkness. The building had no power and few windows. Nothing had changed since last drinks were called and the club doors closed for the final time in 2013. Yet Tania could see what so many others could not – the building’s future as the new headquarters of her company, Buckaroo Leatherworks. “Up until now everyone has thought I’m insane – even my husband,” she laughs. “He said from the get-go, when we walked in with our torches and stuff, he’s like, ‘Babe, I have zero faith in this project, but I have faith in you and that’s all that matters. ’”The Buckaroo story is by now a well-known and loved story of the little guy – Tanya’s father Ken – starting a leather business out of the family home in 1971 and that business growing to achieve huge success around the world. “When my dad was alive, he was very much like a one-man show – if you wanted something made, he would make it for you,” Tanya says. “He wasn’t that good at scaling – not that he wasn’t that good, he was great at everything – but he didn’t want to do it. That’s the difference. ”Tanya has run – and significantly grown – the company since her dad passed away from cancer in 2012. Since then she has guided the growth of the company, moved premises to the old King Gee site at Bellambi, bought and revamped an old bank in Port Kembla and is now overseeing one of the biggest challenges of her corporate life in transforming an old RSL club into a leather manufacturing and teaching hub. And in between all that she’s a mum to five kids aged between five and 17. Port Kembla has always had a special appeal to Tanya. “I love it because it’s the grit. Like the grit is still here, a bit grimy, a bit gritty. Some parts are pretty, some parts aren’t. But that’s what creates that vibe. ”Her first foray into the suburb was her purchase of the former English Scottish and Australia Bank (ES&A) building on Wentworth Street. “At the time, I actually wanted to buy it and move the admin side [of the business],” she says. “I have a really natural attraction to mid-century – and the business also started in the 70s – so it’s this nice era to anchor things back to. ”In the end, Tanya decided against splitting the business and the building instead became The Bank Space, offering free artist residencies and versatile event spaces. As much as the creatives loved the free residency program, it wasn’t quite as popular with Tanya’s number crunchers, so The Bank Space now has a paying tenant in the Port Kembla Wedding Chapel. With finances freed up, Tanya turned her attention to “properly do what we need to do” – tackle the club building and move the business lock, stock and leather to Port. It hasn’t been an easy or quick job. When demolition work started in January this year, the club stood exactly as it had in 2013 – the bars, kitchens, even the indoor pool hadn’t been touched. It’s now been filled in and covered up and the space will become the staff room. The Port Kembla RSL auditorium as it was in the 1960s. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society - P39966. The same auditorium area now being converted into the Buckaroo factory floor. Photo: Jen White. The mural created in the 1960s at a cost of about $60,000. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society - P39968. Pieces of the mural in storage. Photo: Jen White. The RSL club's indoor pool, soon to be the Buckaroo staff room. From the collections of Wollongong City Libraries and the Illawarra Historical Society - P39971. Workers building the loading dock area. Photo: Jen White. Port Kembla war memorial, protected in front of the Buckaroo building. Photo: Jen White. Tanya confesses she has “no idea” where her vision for the space came from but she did know she wanted to retain some of the original character and history. “I love warehouse conversions. I love readaptions of buildings that once were, moving into the future. You know, you’ve got a lolly factory and then it becomes someone’s dwelling. I love the A to B. I just didn’t understand the A and a half. ”It’s been a steep learning curve, but Tanya has immersed herself in the project and applied her hands-on approach to life. She’s also set a tight deadline – stage one of the project, which includes getting baseline operations such as the factory up and running – is due to be completed by late August. “We did real baseline investigative work by just cutting back a little bit of the wall linings and seeing the brick; looking into the ceiling and seeing these beautiful steel beams and being like, OK that’s already in place. “The choice for the building was to get it back to the bare bones, to then rebuild back to what we need, but essentially not wanting to touch its external integrity at all and have it still be a familiar place. ”One of Tanya’s challenges was what to do with the massive carved timber mural which took up a wall in the club. It was created in the 1960s by a group of about 20 Taren Point artists and cost $60,000. “It’s amazing and we couldn’t get rid of it. So again, when you take on these sorts of buildings, you also take on that sense of – well, what should we protect and keep and what shouldn’t we?”The mural is stored on-site, a problem for another day when the storage area will become a training hub, teaching leathercraft in a space above the factory floor, as well as educating students about sustainability in the industry, something which Tanya is passionate about. Many decisions about what to keep or reuse were rendered moot when it was discovered the building was riddled with asbestos. “But what we could keep is not just something that we think is important, but it actually has been verified as being important by the RSL and they’ve been really happy that there are things that we haven’t gotten rid of. ”One thing that definitely hasn’t been “gotten rid of” is the war memorial at the front of the club. The Port Kembla RSL sub-Branch is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, RSL branches in Australia, established not long after the end of WWI. There are talks underway to move the memorial to a more suitable location, either in Port or Wollongong, but in the meantime, the existing plaque wall and two monuments have been relocated slightly to allow truck and forklift access during construction. Tanya is working closely with the City of Wollongong RSL sub-Branch to ensure the memorial is protected and she’s keen for the community to know she is fully aware of its significance. “People can feel safe knowing that we’re not here to destroy anything. We’ve made that very clear to the RSL sub-Branch board and they really understand that now,” she says. “We’re genuine about this, the history of it. We don’t want to mess with that. ”Tanya also hopes that Buckaroo relocating to Port Kembla will encourage similar sized businesses to do the same and help reinvigorate the town. “For us to come here as a particular size business and incentivise other same-size businesses to be here means you have to do what we’ve done to our building to others. “So hopefully we can encourage others to readapt and repurpose buildings in a similar way on just that little bit bigger scale. “I was determined we have to be near the main street … we have to be a part of the community. You want people to go and get a coffee on foot, go to a cafe. “A business like Buckaroo doesn’t suit just being plonked in a commercial space. A building that houses us needs to have some feeling and energy and character. ”Towards the end of our coffees, sitting outside in the sun at Arthurs Food Store, I ask Tanya what she thought her father would think about the move to Port Kembla. Pensive for a minute, she laughs and says, “This is really crazy, right?” then goes to tell a story about how, a few weeks back, she was meeting a friend near Lo Stretto cafe, at the Maritime Centre. “I was standing there and I just said to him, ‘I think this is where Dad’s ashes were scattered’. (Tanya has never known where his ashes were dispersed due to a family rift. )“Someone once told me years ago that he had said to them, ‘I want my ashes scattered in Port Kembla’. “I looked at him and I said, ‘I actually think this is the spot’. And I kid you not, this group of seagulls flew over and one brown bird – I think it was a different species – flew out of the flock and came and landed right next to me. “And so this full circleness of Port Kembla is bizarro. Why we’ve ended up here, I have no idea. But then all these little linkages … there’s just something about Port and there’s some energy here for us. ”