A career in the warm embrace of a great Australian tradition
Rita Stenta has fitted more than 22,000 pairs of RM Williams boots across 45 years, making her the company’s longest-serving female employee and a living icon of Australian craftsmanship.
It’s lucky Rita Stenta loves RM Williams boots: she estimates she has fitted more than 22,000 pairs over the 45 years she’s worked for the company.
For someone who has worked so long in such a traditional Australian business, she has a very modern Australian backstory. In 1960, with her mother and her sister, she left a small village near Italy’s Adriatic coast to take a boat to join her father who had found a job in one of Adelaide’s car plants.
She was just five years old when she arrived, and she says it was “awful” to start with, having no common language and no familiar points of reference. “I went to school here and I could have been blind, deaf and dumb: you don’t understand anything going on around you,” Stenta says.
But she says even her mother, who struggled for years to come to grips with the language, embraced the Australian dream. “She never had any regrets leaving. When she came, she said, ‘We are so lucky to be here’, and I’ve always felt that too: we are lucky.”
Stenta’s lucky break came when she was 17. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to stay at school so she put her name down at the Commonwealth Employment Services office down the street. A few days later, a near-neighbour whose children had been at the same school as her literally knocked on her front door. It was RM’s son, Dene Williams, offering her a job in the company office.
The rest is history. Stenta started managing filing, processing accounts and handling customer records and grew to manage the historic store at 5 Percy Street in Adelaide and lead the retail side of the business. Now in her 70s, and RM Williams’ longest-serving female employee, she’s a brand icon who still works in Percy Street.
The roots of RM Williams go back to the 1930s, when Reginald Murray Williams learned from “Dollar Mick” Smith, an Indigenous stockman he worked with in the Flinders Ranges, how to make a boot crafted from a single piece of leather. There were no side seams to chafe or fall apart; elastic sides with no laces to break; and they were crafted from fine, durable materials that could stand up to a day of mustering and then, after a quick polish, be worn out to dinner.
“I fell in love with the boots,” Stenta says. “I love everything about the boots we make: I love that he invented everything about them; I love that it’s all made here; I love that the way they’re made doesn’t change; and I love the fact that they last forever.”
Stenta says she’s also starting to detect a new fashion for old-fashioned values of durability and repairability. “I think we’ve had a swing away from people wanting quick, throwaway fashion: they’d rather pay the money.”
But she also embraces change. She might be cutting back a little on her work week, but she’s excited about the company’s future, especially since ownership returned to Australia in 2020, when Andrew and Nicola Forrest’s company Tattarang bought the brand and started investing in its Australian future.
“Look, once you’ve worked in a company you actually respect, it becomes a part of who you are. It’s a genuine product we’re selling, and it lasts. Why would you want to go anywhere else if you want to do something that’s honest in this world?”
Last month, RM Williams formally opened a new workshop in Adelaide, almost doubling their Australian production capacity. Stenta says customers seem happy to pay a premium for boots and clothes that are made here. “I know they are a bit dearer to buy, but they are made right here at our workshop, and people seem happy to pay the made-in-Australia price, and I think it’s wonderful.”
Stenta describes herself as a person who “doesn’t beat around the bush”, but says “tough as old boots” would also work. “I was made to last: I seem to be going and going and still get up to come to work,” she says. “My dilemma now is: how do you ever leave? So I slowly, sort of, started to cut back, like a day or two, but it’s very hard.”
