Akubra: rabbit felt, family ownership, and how a hat became Australia

There is a particular kind of Australian brand that stops being a product at some point and starts being a mirror. The Akubra is one of those. Put one on a stranger anywhere in the world and people know, roughly, where they're from. It's done more work for the national image than most government tourism campaigns, and it did it without a marketing department worth speaking of for most of its life.

I've spent a fair bit of time with this one. The hat turns up in almost every story about Australian identity — R.M. Williams built a similar myth from the Flinders Ranges — and yet the mechanics of how the Akubra actually got made, and how the Keir family held onto it for generations, are less well known than they deserve to be.

Origins: a Scottish immigrant and a fur-felt tradition

The story starts in the mid-nineteenth century, in the way so many Australian manufacturing stories do: a tradesman arrives from somewhere else with a skill the colony needs. Benjamin Dunkerley was a hat maker, trained in the English and Scottish felt trade, who established a small operation in Tasmania in the 1870s. The precise year of founding is subject to some variation depending on the source — the company itself has pointed to the 1870s, though formal records from that era are thin.

What is clear is that the craft Dunkerley brought with him was fur-felt hat making: a process that begins with rabbit pelts, strips the fur from the hide, and then subjects it to a felting process — moisture, heat, pressure — that binds the fibres into a dense, water-resistant material. It is not a fast process. It is not a cheap one. And the quality of the finished felt depends enormously on the quality of the raw material and the consistency of the felting.

The name itself — Akubra — is generally attributed to an Aboriginal word meaning something to the effect of "head covering". The company has used this etymology for decades, though the precise language group origin has not always been definitively pinned down in the public record. What's not disputed is that the word was in use as a product name by the early twentieth century, well before the brand achieved the national reach it would later enjoy.

The Keir family and the move to Kempsey

The business changed hands and moved through several configurations in its early decades, as small manufacturing concerns often did. The pivotal ownership change came when the Keir family acquired the operation in the early twentieth century — Stephen Keir being the name most associated with the consolidation of what became the modern Akubra company.

The factory eventually settled in Kempsey, a town on the Macleay River in northern New South Wales, and it has stayed there. This is worth pausing on. Kempsey is not a manufacturing hub. It is a mid-sized regional town, about 500 kilometres north of Sydney, known for its beef cattle and timber country. Moving a specialised manufacturing operation there and keeping it there — through the entire sweep of twentieth-century industrial change, through import competition, through synthetic alternatives — is a story of deliberate, sometimes stubborn, commitment to place.

The Keir family ran the business across multiple generations, and that continuity of ownership shaped everything about how the company behaved: the resistance to outsourcing, the retention of traditional methods, the refusal (for a very long time) to chase volume at the expense of quality. I'll admit there's something I find genuinely admirable about that model, even if it probably cost them growth opportunities along the way. Not every business needs to get bigger. Some just need to keep being good.

Rabbit fur and the craft of felt making

The raw material question is, to my mind, the most interesting technical dimension of the Akubra story — and the one least understood by the people wearing the hats.

Australia's feral rabbit population, an ecological disaster by any measure, became an unlikely input into one of the country's most beloved products. The fur from rabbit pelts has particular properties that make it well-suited to felt hat production: fine, consistent fibres that bind well under the felting process. For much of the twentieth century, Australia had rabbits in extraordinary abundance, and the Akubra factory in Kempsey drew on that supply.

The felt-making process itself involves several stages. The fur is first separated from the pelt, then coned into a rough felt shape — oversize and fragile at this point. Successive rounds of heat and moisture and mechanical working shrink and consolidate the felt, building the density and water resistance that makes a good hat last decades. Shaping, stiffening, finishing: each stage requires trained hands and time. The Kempsey factory kept these processes in-house for most of its history, which is a significant part of why the product maintained its reputation.

It also explains the price. A genuine Akubra has never been cheap relative to an imported felt hat. The manufacturing cost structure of a labour-intensive, domestically produced, traditionally crafted hat is simply higher. The company's bet — consistently, for over a century — has been that enough Australians would pay the difference. That bet has, so far, held.

From stockmen to senators: how the hat went national

For much of its early life, the Akubra was essentially workwear. Drovers, stockmen, farmers, shearers — people who needed a hat that would take real weather and keep working. The wide brim is not decorative; it keeps the sun off your neck. The felt sheds rain. The durability means you're not replacing it every season. The hat earned its following by being genuinely useful to the people who wore it.

The cultural elevation came gradually, and it came through association. Politicians adopted it. The Australian military incorporated versions of the broad-brimmed felt hat into uniform — the famous "slouch hat" of Australian military tradition shares DNA with the Akubra style, though the precise relationship between the two is more complicated than a straight line. By the mid-twentieth century the hat had acquired a symbolic weight well beyond its practical function.

The moment that probably did the most to cement the Akubra as a national symbol, at least in terms of global visibility, was its adoption as something approaching diplomatic costume. Australian prime ministers wore them. Visitors were given them. The hat became a prop in the theatre of Australian national identity, which is a curious fate for a piece of workwear that started life on the heads of people doing hard physical labour in the sun.

That symbolic journey has something in common with R.M. Williams's transformation from functional bush gear to lifestyle brand — though the Akubra, notably, never went through the same kind of corporate ownership change that R.M. Williams eventually did.

Staying Australian in a world of cheap imports

The second half of the twentieth century was not kind to Australian manufacturing generally. Tariff reductions, cheap Asian imports, changing consumer habits — the pressures that hollowed out Australian textile and clothing production hit hat making too. The Akubra's survival in this environment is not an accident; it reflects specific choices.

The company did not move production offshore. It did not switch to synthetic felt. It continued making hats in Kempsey by hand-intensive processes that kept quality high and costs relatively high. The workforce in Kempsey, at various points numbering in the dozens of skilled workers, represented a living repository of craft knowledge that would have been extremely difficult to reconstruct if it had been allowed to disperse.

There was a period — through the 1980s and 1990s particularly — when the future of Australian manufacturing looked genuinely precarious across almost every sector. The Akubra navigated that period by doubling down on the provenance story: made in Australia, by Australians, from Australian materials, using methods unchanged for generations. That story became more valuable as Australian-made products became rarer. It is, in a way, one of the few cases where deindustrialisation elsewhere actually strengthened a surviving local manufacturer's position.

The brand today: heritage without the museum rope

Akubra remains family-owned, which in Australian manufacturing terms in the twenty-first century is genuinely unusual. The Keir family's stewardship has extended into a new century without the kind of private equity adventure or offshore acquisition that ended the independence of so many comparable Australian brands. The factory in Kempsey is still there. The felt is still made the same way.

The brand has not been static — there are now fashion-oriented styles, collaborations, lighter urban versions designed for people who will never go near a cattle station. This is sensible. A company that only sold to working stockmen would be selling to an ever-smaller market. But the core product, the traditional broad-brimmed hat in natural fur felt, remains in production and remains made in Australia.

For anyone seriously interested in Australian brand heritage, Akubra sits alongside R.M. Williams and a handful of others as a case study in what it takes to maintain a manufacturing brand across a century of economic disruption. The ingredients — genuine quality, a defensible provenance story, family ownership with a long time horizon, and a product that happened to become a cultural symbol — are not easily replicated. Most attempts to manufacture that kind of heritage from scratch end up looking exactly like what they are.

There is one last thing worth saying. The Akubra's meaning as a national symbol has, at times, been contested — appropriated by political currents that not everyone who wears the hat would endorse, associated with a pastoral Australia that is more complicated in its history than the symbol suggests. The hat is not innocent of the culture that made it. But then, the most resonant national symbols rarely are. They accumulate meaning the way felt accumulates fibres: through pressure, over time, in ways that can't entirely be controlled. That's what makes them worth understanding properly.

You can find more stories like this one in our Iconic Brand Histories section.