Can these last master craftsmen find successors?
These plaster moulders, curtain and carpet-makers came together to work on an extraordinary project for Melbourne’s NGV. They could be the last of their kind.
A sprawling industrial estate on the outskirts of Melbourne, its roads congested by heavy trucks, is perhaps the last place you’d expect to find a team of fine artisans hard at work. But behind the steel roller door of an otherwise unremarkable factory in this concrete labyrinth near Dandenong, two master casters are gently moving back and forth, swaying in unison, as they pour litres of creamy white plaster into ornate cornice moulds, plaster drips forming stalagmites at their feet.
Proudly watching this hypnotic pas de deux is Lyndon Hopkins, the fifth generation of his family to hand-produce the intricate plaster pieces – architraves, cornices, corbels, ceiling roses and even towering columns – that adorn some of Melbourne’s grandest homes and buildings.
“My father, who ran the business before me, was well ahead of his time. He patented a cornice machine to try to keep up with demand. It was very clever – you’d fill it up with plaster and it would pump out cornices – but the machine had one big problem: it didn’t have hands and it couldn’t think,” Hopkins says with a laugh. “It didn’t have the vital human touch to know when a cornice was set correctly, so half the plaster ended up in the bin. Our guys literally feel the plaster in their fingers; it’s the only way to know if it’s ready.”
The handiwork of his forbears, who established their plastering and masonry business in 1857 during Victoria’s gold rush, still adorns iconic Melbourne buildings such as the Regent Theatre, the Athenaeum and the Manchester Unity Building – but Hopkins could never have dreamt that one day the family firm’s work would feature in the National Gallery of Victoria. Yet when the NGV wanted to capture the rich ambience of 19th-century Boston to frame the paintings on loan for its current major exhibition, French Impressionism From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, it was Hopkins Plaster Studio they came to.
“There’s only about three of us [firms] left now that do this,” he says. “It’s a buzz to think that our work is alongside Monet and Renoir, and I think my ancestors would be very pleased to know that we largely used the same techniques as they did.”
When the pandemic lockdowns forced the NGVto closeits highly anticipated French Impressionists exhibition just two weeks after opening in June 2021, the gallery’s director, Tony Ellwood, vowed that not only would he bring the works back from Boston as soon as he could, he would show them bigger, bolder and better than before.
And Ellwood is a man of his word.
Fast-forward to 2025, and in contrast to the airy, minimalist feel of the previous exhibition, Ellwood’s vision was to capture the intimate mood and decadence of the 19th-century Bostonian residences where these works were originally displayed – homes like Sunset Rock, the magnificent estate of the Spaulding brothers on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, which was the envy of Boston high society.
One of Sunset Rock’s owners, John T Spaulding, was a prolific art collector – on one wall alone at Sunset Rock he had an arrangement of works by Chardin, Manet and Cezanne – and he bequeathed 43 French Impressionist masterpieces to the city’s Museum of Fine Arts.
“A lot of the artworks were famously owned by the Boston collectors for many years; they had them up in their houses, so we thought it would be fitting to acknowledge how they were displayed,” says the NGV’s senior designer, Thom McCarthy. “The owners put them in these opulent frames that would be befitting of the Hermitage – they scream ostentatious wealth – and we wanted to capture that atmosphere that would’ve been around Boston when these people were acquiring these works.”
For McCarthy and his team, that meant sourcing local artists and craftspeople who could replicate elegant wainscot panelling, rich carpets and drapes, and rooms dripping with chandeliers and gilded antiquities.
“We went out to the Hopkins studio and saw how manual their work was, and how much skill went into each piece. It was incredibly impressive – that level of craftsmanship is a bit of a lost art,” says McCarthy.
“We also collaborated with Godfrey Hirst in Geelong, because we needed to create bespoke carpets. The designs were carefully researched to make them unique, but also to reflect the living room of a Bostonian home. Each room [at the gallery] is enormous, so everything had to be scaled up massively, and Godfrey Hirst were very hands-on with the design process, and responded to the challenge very quickly.”
In the NGV’s exhibition, Renoir’s famed masterpiece Dance at Bougival, which is worth hundreds of millions of dollars, sits perfectly within a detailed panel created by Hopkins Plaster, framed with a lavish velvet drape made by curtain-maker Charles Boubis in Box Hill, and a vast, and intricately patterned floral carpet crafted by Godfrey Hirst in Geelong.
“This carpet is very special,” says Jodi Beare, senior architectural design consultant at Godfrey Hirst. “It had to be custom-made to fill a ballroom size, it’s very heavy and very detailed. Hundreds of hands went into making it. That there’s priceless paintings next to our carpet is wonderful; the entire space is a work of art.”
The greatest challenge for Thom McCarthy was sourcing the skills and trades to fulfil such specific works. A good deal of attention is paid to Australia’s skills shortages in contemporary sectors, such as healthcare and IT, but the situation for ancient and rare crafts is dire. According to the latest figures from Jobs and Skills Australia, the number of occupations suffering skills shortages has almost doubled, jumping from 153 to 280, while rare crafts such as coopering (barrel making), luthiering (string instrument making) and smithing are all but extinct, relegated to exhibitions or lost trades fairs.
“When Notre Dame in Paris was being reconstructed there was a call-out across Europe to get artisans to come and work on the rebuild – and it was a huge struggle to get people with the right skills to rebuild that iconic, deeply significant structure,” says Deborah Klein, manager of the Australian Centre for Rare Arts and Forgotten Trades.
The Rare Trades Centre, as it is known, was established in Ballarat in 2022 as a means of preserving those crafts and creative skills that have been honed over thousands of years but are now rapidly diminishing.
“Australia is a very resourceful country but we have a generation of people focused on becoming academics or executives, not working with their hands,” says Klein, “and our TAFE sector is very limited in terms of the sorts of tool-skills and knowledge people can learn.
“Machines can’t do everything, and most of the people we work with have skills that a machine will never be able to replace. You can make a very good living from these skills, because there’s so few people performing these trades they are actually in great demand.”
The Rare Trades Centre runs workshops in everything from sewing to upholstery, weaving, forging, furniture making, bookbinding, pottery, knife-making, locksmithing and blacksmithing, but Klein relies on the availability of tradespeople to run them and share their skills. She has around 60 artisans from all over Australia who conduct workshops across a variety of disciplines.
Says Klein: “About a year ago I was speaking with a man who did marquetry, beautiful fine wood designs, to see if he would run some workshops and teach others, but sadly he passed away and took all of that knowledge with him. It broke my heart.
“Many of our skilled artisan workers haven’t made a retirement plan to transition their skills and don’t necessarily have someone to take over their business, so as they retire, or die, they’re taking these important skills with them.”
It’s an issue Lyndon Hopkins knows only too well. A large wooden honour board hangs in the office of Hopkins Plaster Studio, commissioned by Lyndon’s grandfather to recognise employees who served or lost their lives during the Second World War. On another wall, a portrait of the firm’s founding father Picton Hopkins looms large, along with a precious plaster cameo of him, lovingly handed down through generations. Black and white photographs show the early casters dressed for work in fine woollen suits, with waistcoats and fob watches, using virtually the same casting methods as the team do today.
Hopkins says that honouring the company’s history, preserving the provenance of its skills and looking after its people have been key to the business’s survival over generations. Yet its future is far from guaranteed.
The company – noted by the University of Melbourne as Victoria’s longest running family-held business – employed 500 people in its heyday, but today Lyndon Hopkins struggles to find enough workers to meet demand.
The firm currently employs 14 staff, including two from Nepal, one from France and another from Bosnia and Herzegovina, to work with long-time staff member John who has 25 years’ service. A permanent advertisement on its website, seeking people interested in apprenticeships, is yet to yield a single staff member.
“We’ve survived two world wars, recessions, depression, Covid and the onslaught of overseas copies which almost sent us to the wall a few years ago,” Hopkins says. “We’ve seen them all off and survived, but the single biggest threat to our business is getting staff. We have plenty of work, and in fact our bespoke work is increasing, but we can’t get the people to do it. We desperately need the next generation to take on a trade.”
Hopkins recently got a call from a homeowner in Armadale who needed to fix water damaged plaster – the owner wanted the work to match the home’s original plaster ceilings. When they arrived at the job, Hopkins noted the house was built in 1857. “There was only one family that could have done that original work, and that was us,” he says proudly. “I think our ancestors would be surprised and delighted that we are still going. Our challenge is to keep going for the next generation.
“There used to be a TAFE course related to architectural modelling, which is what we do. That was where we got our apprentices. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore.
“This is very much a hands-on trade. It’s so important to preserve the craftsmanship, and very few people can do it. Demand is increasing and we are trying to get our older guys to pass on the skills to the next generation because we are very concerned that once they retire, we won’t be able to do the work we do.”
Tony Ellwood says the National Gallery of Victoria is delighted to have played its part in preserving these rare local crafts, and supporting local creative businesses and industry, noting that in total, nine Melbourne-based building and labour businesses and 21 décor businesses have contributed to creating the exhibition’s magnificent interiors.
“The NGV is proud to have worked with the expert craftspeople and specialist businesses across Victoria to bring to life the vision for this elaborate exhibition design,” he says. “To create the opportunity to collaborate with local makers and be a part of the preservation of these specialist skills is an integral part of the NGV’s core role.”
French Impressionism From the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston runs at the NGV until October 5.
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