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John Karandonis on reviving the lost art of shoemaking

John Karandonis survived the fascist occupation of Crete before emigrating to Australia, where he made his name as a shoemaker to the stars. And while our once-thriving footwear industry has all but disappeared, he remains hopeful that, with his knowledge, he can give it a kick along.

John Karandonis, once Australia's most famous shoemaker, grew up without shoes in Nazi-occupied Crete. Karandonis is now a silver-haired old man, but his eyes shine – his pupils seem literally to glow – when he speaks of the lost craft of the cordwainer. The struggling Australian footwear industry, which once employed more than 20,000 workers, all but disappeared when import tariffs were lifted in the 1980s. TAFE colleges closed their courses, factories bolted their gates. The machinery of shoemaking – all the deliciously named skivers, insolers and welters – was auctioned off, melted down or shipped to Asia. All that remained were the makers themselves, and they, too, are vanishing into memory.

Glynis Jones, fashion and dress curator at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, says Karandonis's shoemaking was close to art. "An artist has to really know his or her colours, to know his materials, to know his techniques," she says. "A handmade shoe takes a lot of skill and a really good eye: you're looking at the grain of the leather and the stretch of it, and how it will work across the top. [Karandonis] was very interested to hide seams, so he was thinking of how to make that really smooth line, and you have to work and work and work the leather to remove all the wrinkles."

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The art of the shoe

John Karandonis at the School of Footwear in Leichhardt reflects on his years as a shoemaker.

Like an artist, Karandonis laboured to make objects that were beautiful in themselves, but his shoes were also known for their comfort. Three Australian PMs wore Karandonis shoes, and Karandonis received a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for services to the footwear industry. Now he fears his skills and knowledge might be lost so, once a week, he travels from his home in Sydney's Fairlight across town to inner-west Leichhardt to the small, privately run School of Footwear, where he answers questions from students – most of them hobbyists – keen to learn the 200-odd processes that go into the creation of a handmade shoe.

There is no air-conditioning in the School of Footwear, a shopfront on the furiously busy Parramatta Road. It feels a little like factory heat in the workshop room where Karandonis sits at a bench, facing a row of old shoemaking machines. I go to sit down, but it turns out I have chosen an antique polishers' chair, with a centrally hinged seat that opens into a compartment to store brushes and polish. The chair rolls on timber castors, which apparently means it could be more than 100 years old. I move to an ordinary seat instead.

Flanked on two sides by faintly eerie-looking lasts, foot-shaped casts piled like disembodied appendages in wall-mounted cases, Karandonis tells his story in a tired voice belied by those dark, twinkling eyes. He was born in Iraklion near Knossos, Crete, in 1933, the son of refugees from Turkey. His father had a small farm growing grapes and roses, but there was not enough land to support a family with seven children, so his father also worked as a labourer on other properties. 

When John was seven years old, the Italians invaded Greece from the west. They were beaten back by the Greek army, but then Germany and Bulgaria invaded from the east. Crete was the last part of Greece to fall to the Axis powers, in June 1941.

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Karandonis grew up in a nation under fascist occupation. It was a terrifying time to be young and powerless. "You start seeing dead bodies," he says. "Every step you make, you think – even as a child – that somebody will shoot you. Then we had accidents with hand grenades. Sometimes the Germans put all their spare clothes in a pile and set them on fire and – so we wouldn't take them – they'd put in bullets. In the heat, they'd just bang."

The Cretans faced starvation. Karandonis recalls "trying to exchange things – like, we'd have some chickens and eggs – we'd take them and try to give eggs to the Germans and the Germans would give me bread, sardines. Many times I went without shoes in the war. In the very cold or sometimes snow, I didn't have shoes. My mother used to make sandals from motor car tyres."

His parents became friendly with two leaders of the Communist Party who were fighting with the resistance. "We used to live in a very, very small village," he says, "and partisans used to come from the mountains and meet the families, and it was nice."

The Cretan tragedy continued in the 1946-49 Greek Civil War that followed the defeat of the Axis powers. Karandonis's family friends were hunted by right-wing forces. "As they were communists and they were not from Crete, the local people killed them," he says. "That was frightening, because I saw one of them killed. The Cretans had him in a truck and they were taking him around to show off to other people that they'd caught him and killed him. And I was coming from Iraklion, walking home – to see that." 

For a moment, Karandonis is subdued. He remembers a lot, but he would prefer to think about shoemaking. The shoemakers of Crete were the best in Greece, and Karandonis began a seven-year apprenticeship at the age of 13, in 1946. Back then, he says, it used to take four people on a square table one whole day to make two pairs of shoes.

He won a gold medal for his women's shoes at the International Footwear Show in Salonika in 1950. "When I was a boy," he says, "I always had dreams to go further and further. So from Crete I moved to Athens. I brought over my family. Then I left them there to come to Australia."

The footwear industry is a past industry. It’s lost. When I die, all my knowledge will go with me.

He smiles. His sentences often seem blunt and his syntax suggests he is still translating from Greek, but there is always a warmth to his words. He arrived in Australia in 1960, and his brother eventually followed him. In the new country, Karandonis found a thriving shoemaking industry which, by the late 1960s, involved 21,183 workers, two-thirds of them women, in 212 factories and workshops.

"I thought there were not many shoemakers," he says. "They were machine operators. There was a lot of machinery, machines which I'd never seen. In Greece, everything was by hand. I knew everything about shoemaking, from A to omega."

Karandonis joined the Packard Shoe Company as a designer in 1961. He was quickly successful. "I had the willingness to teach," he says, "and for me it was very easy to help people adopt what I liked."

Today Karandonis walks uncertainly, but he was an accomplished dancer in his youth. He used to follow a Filipino dance troupe who performed every week at a Chinese restaurant in Manly. It was here that he met Kaye, a dress designer who was teaching at East Sydney Technical College and moonlighting at the restaurant to save money to go to Greece and study the history of costume. Karandonis left the Packard company in 1966 and married Kaye in 1968.

When he first went out on his own, Karandonis sold his shoes door to door from a suitcase. He describes himself as an "inventor" of shoes. His first patent applied to an upper-cast moccasin with minimal layers, minimal stitching and no rigid insole. He is wearing a pair of Karandonis moccasins today. To demonstrate their flexibility, he takes off a shoe and bends it so that the toe touches the vamp.

It was the moccasins that made the Karandonis name. Sale of the Century host Tony Barber did the most to popularise them: at the end of every show the credits rolled with the legend "Shoes by John Karandonis". Then came the PMs: Billy McMahon, Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. Karandonis says he knew the Whitlams "very well" and made shoes for both Gough and Margaret.

McMahon was famously shorter than his glamorous wife, Sonia. "He used to come to the factory," says Karandonis, "and one day he said, 'Make me shoes and build up the heels to match bloody Sonia.' I could make it a little higher [than Sonia] but at least as tall."

Among celebrities, as Karandonis remembers it, "There was nobody not wearing Karandonis shoes." Customers tended to be loyal. Advertorial pioneer Bernard King bought 15 pairs. Karandonis's slogan was, "You buy your first pair for what you believe they are … and your second, third and fourth pair etc … for what you know they are."

Glynis Jones at the Powerhouse says Karandonis was "creating a beautiful-quality product for a person who expected their shoes to last a long time, and wanted a stylish shoe that wasn't too 'fashion forward'." 

Karandonis had a factory in inner-Sydney Marrickville which made about 100,000 shoes per year, but the industry was already disappearing around him. By 1977, there were only 12,221 workers in 126 factories. Australian footwear manufacturers had seen their profits fall for many reasons – not least the advent of equal pay for women – but their businesses remained ferociously protected. The cost to consumers was estimated at $125 million per annum, which easily exceeded the total of all wages and salaries paid to footwear workers.

When tariffs were peeled away, Karandonis was not badly hit, as his products were not in the same market as cheaper imported shoes. "One of his great concerns was that the shoes be comfortable and have a very elegant line about them," says Jones, "So he always had a clientele who were looking for that kind of shoe, and there were not that many people in the Australian industry who would be producing that quality."

Karandonis watched fashions come and go, sometimes quizzically. In the 1970s, he worried that platform soles were dangerous as men could fall off them. In the early 1980s, Karandonis became an offshoring pioneer. "I thought it was about time to retire," he says, "and I had an offer from a Chinese company to go to China to make Karandonis shoes. We went with a state government partner, we had a good factory. I selected workers. 

"The idea was that having cheap labour you could make even better shoes, because you can spend time to do all the little things. But the Chinese man had different ideas. He thought the shoes should last one to two years, then they had to throw them away and buy a new pair."

The Chinese wanted to use synthetic insoles instead of leather. "It was a stupid thing to do," says Karandonis. He spent more than a year living in the city of Shantou in Guangdong province, but came home disillusioned in 1983, and started making shoes in Australia again, this time under the El Greco brand.

Darren Bischoff, the owner of the School of Footwear, remembers studying Karandonis shoes in college. Bischoff was one of the last footwear apprentices to take his trade qualifications at Ultimo TAFE in Sydney. "I started there in 1988, the year [then federal Labor industry minister John] Button lifted tariff duties and taxes on footwear in Australia," he says. "So the year I started was the year it started closing up." As Bischoff completed his TAFE classes, they were deleted from the curriculum.

Karandonis began his shoemaking apprenticeship at age 13 in Crete. When he arrived in Australia decades later, 'I had the willingness to teach,' he says.

Karandonis began his shoemaking apprenticeship at age 13 in Crete. When he arrived in Australia decades later, 'I had the willingness to teach,' he says. Photo: Louie Douvis

Karandonis began his shoemaking apprenticeship at age 13 in Crete. When he arrived in Australia decades later, "I had the willingness to teach," he says. Photo: Louie Douvis

There was little scope for Bischoff to find work in the industry. He makes bespoke shoes for private clients, art shoes, and footwear for stage shows including Opera Australia's current production of Madama Butterfly, and he teaches at his school. He says craft shoemaking is a growing hobby in Europe, and it is gradually becoming more popular here.

This afternoon, Karandonis is going to demonstrate to students how to use Bischoff's superannuated welting machine. Bischoff shares Karandonis's love for the arcane of the trade. He calls his appliances "beautiful machines". It can take all day to hand-welt a shoe, but a welting machine can do the job in seconds. 

"It's taken me years even to find somebody to maintain and repair this machine," says Bischoff. "I bought it from an old shoe man in King Street, Newtown. I bought several of the machines because he said all of them worked. And none of them worked. It's taken me six years and we're still fixing."

It is not easy trying to maintain any kind of footwear business in Australia. A shoemaker needs a knife-maker. Bischoff says there is only one knife-maker left in Sydney, and he is planning retirement. Every shoe requires its own last. There is only one last maker left in Australia, and he owns the last last-making machine (his pun, probably intended). Small parts are difficult to come by. Overseas companies will happily supply 1000 buckles, for example, but Bischoff only needs 10 at a time.

Bischoff sources his heavy equipment at auctions, and he met Karandonis when Karandonis was selling off the contents of the El Greco factory. There are a couple of machines from El Greco in the School of Footwear, including an eyelet press. Karandonis looks upon them all with great affection.

Does he miss the shoemaking industry?

"Very much so," he says.

But he is happy to help out at the School of Footwear.

"I love to teach people," says Karandonis.

"The footwear industry is a past industry. It's lost. When I die, all my knowledge will go with me.

So what's the point? "Here, I answer anything I can. I'm going to pass on anything I know."