Liz Charlton doesn’t ask mothers any more why they want their baby’s shoes covered in copper so they will never rot away.
‘I’ve shed too many tears with the mums.’
Liz operates her Copper Workshop in a 100-year-old South Yarra, Melbourne building that shows its dingy age. But the memories she is able to perpetuate will long outlive her as she covers tiny first shoes, baby bonnets and huge size-13 football boots with copper and even gold.
Liz’s mother had lived in the US as a child and she told her daughter that the custom of covering babies’ shoes in metal was well-known. So when Liz decided she wanted a business in Melbourne she remembered the story. ‘I thought of doing an apprenticeship, but in those days it meant four years working in a factory and they wouldn’t teach a woman because there was no toilet for them. I was reading a Popular Mechanics magazine one day and I saw an advertisement offering a tank, equipment and directions to cover shoes. I rushed to the bank and arranged for a thousand pounds to be sent to Chicago.’
When the equipment arrived - 27 years ago - Liz took over the shop she is still in today and waited for business. ‘I had given myself two years and if it didn’t work, I’d give up. I advertised and then stood behind the counter for six weeks. Nothing happened. Nobody came in. It hadn’t even occurred to me that no-one would come.
‘One evening I went to a cocktail party and stood near a nice man, telling him my story of misery. I said: "Life in business for a woman is too difficult. I can’t survive. Nobody even knows what I’m doing!"
The ‘nice man’ was Keith Dunstan, columnist for the Melbourne Sun News-Pictorial and he said: "What are you doing?" When Liz told him he said: "I’ll ring you; I think I might be able to help you."
‘I had covered a champion footballer’s boots in copper,’ remembers Liz, ‘and Keith was fascinated with football, though he later founded the Anti-Football League. He wrote a paragraph about me in his column A Place In The Sun.’
The phone in the shop rang and it was the long-established department store Foy & Gibson. Would Liz like to come in and explain what she could do? She did. And she spoke to clubs and dinners. Business started to come in. Dunstan mentioned Liz again - twice. ‘I got calls from football clubs who wanted to put goal-kicker’s boots in their archives, copper plated so they would last. Champion Hawthorn forward Peter Hudson’s battered boots were covered. One boot - preserved by Liz in copper - was raffled and raised $1,600.
Liz did one of the famous Pavlova ballet shoes - and a single rose; it had been clutched by two little children who climbed into a refrigerator and perished.
‘Because Australians aren’t so sentimental as Americans, it took a long time to catch the imagination,’ says Liz. ‘I wrote to new mothers who had inserted birth notices in the paper, advertised in the papers and put notices in photo-shops and dry cleaners. So many mothers who wanted their children’s’ shoes done were told by their husbands that it was a silly idea. Not so in America, where, since it started, they have done 240 million shoes.’
When mothers come in with the tiny first shoes of a baby who has died, "we both end up in tears," says Liz. ‘I hear some harrowing stories on the phone, so that’s why I don’t ask the background any more.’
It costs $37 to cover a single shoe in copper at the Copper Workshop; $87 if it is to be done in 24-carat gold. The shoes - cloth or leather - are put into a tank, given an electrostatic charge and the copper or gold moves on to coat them
‘I believe there is one other factory trying to do it somewhere else in Australia,’ she said. ‘But it’s a narrow profit-margin business and a lot who have tried have fallen by the wayside.’
