Clay works best when worked with human hands
The heart ruled the head during the rescue bid
There's something evocative about an old pottery factory; a powerful sense of history echoing the timeless quest to harness the basic elements of earth, fire and water.
Clay dust piled around roof-supports, heavy metal machinery and blackened kilns often give a production area the appearance more of an archaeological dig than a factory.
Engineering challenge from an unpredictable material
Production potteries are old-world survivors in a modern technological world. Clay has been worked by human hands for thousands of years and it still refuses to be tamed. To make a simple pot still requires as much ‘feel’ or intuition, as machining.
So for an engineer it takes a large dose of historical and cultural sensitivity to overcome the professional expectations of precision and predictability. Engineering purism and a clay pot will always be an ambiguous marriage, which makes the venture by mechanical engineer
Peter Faulkner and his accountant mate and business partner Russ Porter all the more remarkable.
The former football teammates are the pair who have let their hearts rule their heads to rescue and revive two of
Victoria’s oldest manufacturing institutions, the Northcote and Bendigo Potteries. These nostalgia-laden companies have in their time been icons for Victorian industry. In each case the world would have passed them by, but for the dreams of the one-time ruckman and the half-forward flanker with the Dandenong Methodists who played in the
South-Eastern Suburbs Churches League in the 1960s.
“There have been days when I’ve woken up and just wanted to stay under the blanket,” says Porter about the trials and tribulations of taking on businesses that few would touch. “There’s been a lot of production blood spilled in getting new machines and processes established, and inching our way back against the imports that virtually killed the businesses in the first place.”

The gamble paid off
Subtle changes to processes
Technical constraints
Had they not backed their instincts in believing they could make the companies work, when so many others had failed, the beautiful 19 th century Northcote Pottery would today be no more than a facade for apartments; the string of potteries and brickworks that once lined the nearby
Darebin Creek not even a memory. They also bought the historic Bendigo Pottery, once famous for its Epsomware, two days before receivers planned to padlock the gates for good.
In just over 10 years, the Northcote Pottery’s turnover has climbed 600 per cent. The Bendigo Pottery, bought from receivers in 1993 has been more of a struggle, but has pulled through to be in the black and a viable component once more of Bendigo’s regional economy. Its output capacity has doubled since 1993. And the turn-around has been achieved in a marketplace “savaged” by cheap imports and by what they perceive to be an antimanufacturing sentiment in government policy-making:
“Tariffs have been cut from 14 per cent to four per cent since we started.”
Manufacturing technology made sensitive to the art
To overcome these obstacles, Faulkner says their strategy has been to try and retain the feel of the potteries’ place in
Victorian history, and to tap this ‘feel’ into the business and manufacturing structure of the late 20 th
century.
Changes to manufacturing technology have had to be subtle: “Clay is still silica and alumina dug from the ground and it can be variable and unpredictable. You are working with very basic elements, even atmospheric conditions on a given day can affect your results. So the art of manufacturing ceramics is to accommodate this variability while continuously striving to make your use of the material more effective.”
Faulkner says there hasn’t been much he could do to the basic process so he sought gains by improving the mechanics, replacing old gearbox-driven presses with hydraulic equivalents, and installing new roll-forming machines that improve the molecular uniformity of clay as it is being shaped. This reduces breakage and increases output.
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Technical grounding
Grounding with the company
The company goes on the block
“The new equipment has a higher capacity than we need for normal production, but this has given us the ability to meet sudden demand peaks and to take-on subcontracting.”
Cheap imports a disadvantage to local manufacturing
Peter Faulkner is regarded as one of Australia’s most experienced ceramics engineers and moved into the field soon after graduating in 1962 when he joined the Rola sound speaker company owned by UK-based Plessey
Electronics. His job was to make ceramic speaker magnets. (These magnets were made from a hard ferrite material). In the late 1960s he was transferred to India for several years to establish a factory there and when he returned in the early 1970s the new Whitlam Government was putting into effect its belief that cheaper imports offered more economic gain than locally-made products.
In a matter of months Australian-made sound speakers were a thing of the past and Plesseys alone retrenched more than 3000 people.
Faulkner joined Morlynn, a manufacturer of electrical insulators. “They were making high-temperature, highcost porcelain, and in 1983 they decided to diversify into the terracotta and craft supply markets by buying Northcote
Pottery.”
Faulkner was appointed manager in 1985, only to be told a year later that the company had decided to sell. Northcote had been bought as a non-performing business and although Faulkner was well into a reform program
Morlynn had grown disheartened by a market increasingly dominated by cheap terracotta pots from Italy, and plastic imitations. One potential buyer was a property developer who thought the old factory would make terrific townhouses.
A critical decision to save the company
“Well, the previous Christmas, Russ and I had been sitting on a rock, fishing, and musing about the sorts of opportunities that might be out there in the big blue yonder.
We were both into our 40s and looking for challenge. I phoned him and suggested this might be it,” says Faulkner.
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Career crossroads
Persuading the banks for funding
Expanding both the product range and market coverage
Porter, who was working in the similarly hard-hit car-parts sector, didn’t hesitate. They both knew the odds were against them and in drafting their business plan realised they would make a lot more money as distributors for imported pots. But they were also feeling angry about the way Australia was throwing away its manufacturing sector and decided someone had to make a stand.
The selling price for Northcote Pottery was $1.5 million.
A string of banks turned them down, but finally they found a National Bank branch manager who decided they were worth the risk: “ We had to mortgage everything . . . the wives, the kids, the houses, the dogs and cats. We raised a third and borrowed the rest," says Porter.
Reshaping the company’s marketing strategy
The pair immediately began expanding the product range and its distribution, aiming at every possible retail outlet for terracotta garden ware in the state. They then pushed into South Australia and New South Wales, the latter proving critical to the business's surviva1, and subsequent growth. The Sydney market has since grown from zero to
50 per cent of the company’s sales.
They also expanded the company’s craft-supplies division and packaged clay now accounts for 10 per cent of turnover.
The two partners say the highlight of the past 12 years was
Northcote Pottery achieving its 100 th anniversary in 1997, but there have been some other memorable and telling moments … like “the Bob Hawke pots”.
In 1988 they were asked to supply 1300 large terracotta pots for inside the new Parliament House in Canberra – provided they could match some alternative low-priced imports. The pair weren’t interested because it would require a large capital investment in machinery to make the pots which had to be 760 millimetres in diameter with a tolerance of just half a millimetre.
“Clearly they didn’t understand clay,” says Faulkner.
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Driving home the value of
Australian-engineered products
Fashion pots adding value to nurseries’ products
But the Parliament House Construction Authority was facing increasing public criticism over the amount of imported furnishings it was buying for “the people’s parliament”. It kept returning to Northcote Pottery with noticeably mounting desperation. Finally Faulkner and
Porter agreed, but rather than drop their price they added on an extra $25 for each pot.
“The point was, the government was demanding a highquality product engineered to very precise specifications, but they wanted it for the price of a low-quality import.
This was our chance to impress upon them the value of
Australian-made quality.”
Northcote Pottery won the $¼ million contract and because staff were already committed, Faulkner and Porter worked round-the clock for weeks, setting up the new machine they had to buy, then physically making the pots and tending the kiln to meet the tight deadline – which became ever tighter when the first batch of ‘Bob Hawke pots’ dried too quickly and cracked.
Changing market attitude towards terracotta pots
As he looks to the future, Faulkner says that part of the reason for the collapse of the terracotta market is now also part of the reason for its revival.
“Until the 1970s plant growers propagated plants in terracotta pots. Warner’s Nursery alone used to buy half a million six-inch pots a year. When the black plastic pots arrived, Northcote Pottery virtually stopped.”
“Our approach has been to turn terracotta pots into a fashion market. We take a standard 10-inch pot and give it five different shapes. Selling these direct to nurseries has been a winning feature.”
“And now the growers are coming back. Black plastic pots are an add-on cost for them because there’s no value that can be passed on. But terracotta pots offer a chance to both value-add and increase margins.”
“For the first eight years we barely sold a pot to a grower.
Now they are becoming a renewed growth market.”
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Saving the second company
Going back to country roots
Terracotta and white clay: complementary products
Throwing a lifeline to a country-based industry
The decision to buy the moth-balled Bendigo Pottery, which specialised in white-clay kitchenware, was made in
August 1993 after the pair had twice rejected approaches by the receiver. On an inspection tour they had to step through a foot of water in the main display area, so rundown had the site become.
“But we finally convinced ourselves we could make
Bendigo work by applying the same principles we had used at Northcote … although in reality it was our hearts ruling our heads,” says Faulkner.
“For both Northcote and Bendigo our belief that they still had potential was only part of the decision. We also saw both projects as a way to have an influence on the world in our own small way.”
Both men grew up in the country— Faulkner from
Shepparton and Porter from Gippsland — so they intuitively understood the importance of the pottery to the town and the consequences for many families if it closed permanently.
The Bendigo Pottery, established in 1858 by a gold prospector, George Guthrie, is one of Australia's oldest companies. In 1983 it was bought by Bamix Australia and put into receivership in 1988 after it failed to become the official supplier of bicentenary ceramics (which were imported). It passed through another short-lived ownership and then back into receivership. Sixty-nine staff, including the last master potters, joined the business on the industrial scrap heap.
When Porter and Faulkner stepped in on 25 August 1993 the receiver-manager was just two days from locking the gates forever.
The pair saw Bendigo's white clay as complementing
Northcote's terracotta. They also perceived, incorrectly, that they could extend Northcote's customer base to the
Bendigo wares.
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school
Although complementary, the two products required different marketing paths
Installing an electronically controlled kiln
Hosting a TAFE ceramics
This didn't happen and only in the past two to three years has Bendigo Pottery's future begun to look secure. “For a long while it was only the tourists, particularly from interstate, who were keeping the business alive," says
Porter.
Rationalising production
In the meantime, they slowly modernised and rationalised production; bringing under one roof a production system that had grown haphazardly under 10 roofs. The old woodfired kilns and salt-glazed Epsomware were replaced by gas kilns and more modern and decorative wares.
Since 1995 there have been two particular developments that have strengthened the pottery’s viability. The first was
Faulkner and Porter buying another Bendigo pottery about to close down, Cooper and Cooke, the maker of Hecla hotwater jugs.
That business had more modern technology, including a state-of-the art, electronically-controlled gas-fired kiln, which enabled an equipment upgrade for the new, combined operation.
The second major development has been Bendigo TAFE moving its highly-regarded ceramics school to the Bendigo
Pottery site.
The historic pottery is now re-emerging as an epicentre for clay and glaze technology, sculpture and pottery, as well as the revived and expanded range of Bendigo Pottery kitchenware.
The pottery is also a major tourist attraction, adding further to its reborn importance to the local economy.
“When we first came here we were shunned. Some presumed we were just another lot of opportunistic managers, while others saw us as having blindly associated ourselves with a failure,” says Porter.
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“But attitudes changed once people realised we were serious about re-establishing a quality business. It’s been a battle, but Bendigo is very important to the ceramics industry. It’s also important to our heritage, and it's important to us - two kids from the country who still have a sense of national pride.”
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