Peak Oilskin Company: A return to the wild

Mount Dandenong’s Leigh Blackall has created a line of oilskin anoraks, harking back to Australia’s heritage of bush culture. SEE THE PICTURES.

Picture: Zoe Phillips

Many brilliant ideas start with a spark of creativity, a thought striking like a bolt of lightning.

For Leigh Blackall, it was a fire – a tent fire specifically – that proved the catalyst for thinking differently about bushcraft, a life spent outdoors, and authenticity.

The son of a weaver and a potter, Leigh has an in-built proclivity for the handmade, and was taught to sew by his mother.

“Sewing used to be a way of soothing my second daughter,” Leigh says. “At four in the morning, she’d wake up, I put her on my back. And the sound of the sewing machine just put her to sleep.”

Following a 15-year academic career, Leigh is creating a line of Australian-made oilskin waxed canvas anoraks (waterproof jackets) under his label Peak Oil Company, designed from his small home studio at Mt Dandenong.

Peak Oilskin Company was founded by Leigh Blackall after a close encounter with a tent fire while hiking in the Tasmanian Wilderness. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Leigh’s Peak Oil anoraks have been designed after years of hiking, bushwalking and canoeing through Australian bushland and national parks, in myriad conditions.

While the roan red of Leigh’s jackets may not yet be as recognisable as their Driza-Bone counterparts, they are born of the same environment and the same desire not to be protected from nature, but to connect more deeply to it.

Peak Oil Company explores meaning and integrity in our relationship with the outdoors, through the tools and equipment we use to be in it. Leigh Blackall makes everything by hand himself, and has a passion for the slow art of creating oilskin jackets. Picture: Zoe Phillips

When caught in a blizzard in Tasmania some years ago, Leigh was forced inside his tent to shelter from the weather.

A fuel spill caught fire and he was surrounded by flames and melting plastic as his modern, plastic tent swiftly went up in smoke.

It was this moment, with burnt hands and no shelter, that proved catalytic for Leigh, and made him think deeply about creating products for nature, and from nature itself.

“Bushcraft has a long heritage, and with heritage comes connection and a depth of authentic experience. In the last few years, hipsters found camping and some went ahead and called it glamping. Others connected with bushcraft,” Leigh says.

“The outdoor recreation industry had long forgotten bushcraft while they marketed plastic technical performance fashions.

“I’m pleased that reconnection is occurring, and with it values of self-sufficiency, reliability, durability, simplicity, heritage and sustainability.

“With this, I think comes a wider desire for authenticity. A sense of knowing who made it, that it was made with modest ambitions, that it was localised and unique,” Leigh says.

Leigh designed the original Peak Oilskin anorak from his home studio in Mount Dandenong. Picture: Zoe Phillips

The anoraks were designed after much trial and refining by Leigh, and following a round of crowd-funding earlier this year.

A run of them will be produced from a factory in Melbourne.

Covid-19 lockdowns did put a tailspin in production, with buttons lost in the post, but production is back up and running.

And while the anoraks will be produced locally in Victoria in a factory, their heritage remains entrenched in that small home studio in the verdant shelter of Mt Dandenong’s bushland.