Beeswax and Tall Tales: how Athol Salter's love of antiques inspired his daughter Jane Crowley to create Dirty Jane's

These are just some of the treasures Athol Salter has uncovered in his more than 60 years as a antique buyer, collector and dealer.

In a memoir written with his daughter Jane Crowley, founder of the Dirty Jane's vintage stores, Athol recalls some of the finds over his career, less for the actual object and more for the story around it - the characters who led him to it and the often much slower, adventurous way of doing business back in the 1970s and 1980s when a buying trip to England to fill containers with antiques and collectables was the goal.

But those containers didn't get filled without forming relationships, earning trust and being granted the information that could lead to a treasure.

And Athol Salter seemed made for the job, an old-school gentleman who enjoyed the journey as much as the destination of antique collecting.

Now 84, still standing ramrod-straight, Athol has a strong connection to Canberra, back in the day he owned an antiques store in the old movie theatre at Hall and won a tender to restore Ginninderra Village, the start of Gold Creek Village.

And he was the inspiration for his daughter's growing Dirty Jane's antique and vintage empire. There are Dirty Jane's outlets in Bowral and Canberra and a third planned for Orange in the central west of NSW.

Dirty Jane's - the name is a nod to an inventive convict girl called Jane Dumphrey - is a collaboration between Athol and Jane and her husband Bob, the Canberra store opening in Fyshwick in 2020 in the midst of the pandemic. The cafes in the Bowral and Canberra stores are both named Salters, in a nod to Athol and his early trailblazing.

Jane and her father shared a love of antiques from when she was a child. She would often accompany her father to local auctions and estate sales, those trips the foundation for the memoir Beeswax and Tall Tales, written by Jane, but in Athol's voice, another collaboration between father and daughter, who live in neighbouring homes in Bowral.

"[The book came] purely and simply from me talking in the van when we were doing deliveries or going to auction sales or picking up furniture," Athol says.

"Janey would make some remark and I would go, 'I remember so and so and so and so...'."

Jane says those road trips with her father were always a "a trip down memory lane" about the people he had met and the discoveries he had made across his career.

"I'd heard these stories since I was probably seven years old and it got to the point where I was like, these have to be written down because they were such fun stories," she says.

"So it was probably 10 years ago that I actually started writing the stories down and just making notes. And now when dad and I sit down and have a cup of tea, he goes, 'I remember...' and I say, 'Stop! Stop!' and I get out my tape recorder and record him so I can put it all down. There's so many stories - and they're all fabulous, they really are."

Athol's modest beginnings no doubt laid the way for Dirty Jane's mantra - Be Kind to the Planet, Buy More Vintage - when the family ethos on their dairy farm was "make do and mend".

It was hardscrabble start to life on the farm in Leongatha, Victoria.

"When I was six my parents moved to a farm," Athol says. "It was just at the end of the war. I mean, it was dairy farming, so it couldn't have been anything harder. When we started I actually had to milk some of the cows, because that was the only way you could do it. There was no electricity, no running water, virtually," he says.

"It wasn't easy but it had its purpose and it's served me well from there."

After marrying Meg, Athol and his new bride moved to Sydney so he could complete senior executive training with David Jones.

"When they sent me back to Wagga after 12 months, they sent me into boyswear and boyswear just didn't do anything for me at all, I'm afraid. And there was a shop vacant, not in the main street of Wagga, around in the side street, and it was $30 a week and I thought, 'I could do something in there'," he says.

Athol initially opened the shop as a curtain-making business, based on his background with David Jones.

"But the shop was quite big . My mother had a few antiques so I grabbed those, put them into the shop and they sold very well. But the curtains didn't take off very well, so we had a lot of fabric for sale. But we went into antiques from there," he said.

Athol opened that first shop, The Gallery, in Wagga Wagga in 1967. The antiques store in Hall and restoration of Ginninderra Village followed. Jane said Athol moved a slab hut from a farm out of Canberra, numbering the pieces with chalk so the hut could be reconstructed at Ginninderra Village and turned into the Slab Hut restaurant.

"The paddock next to the village was home to many animals including a goat who would terrorise diners of the restaurant," she remembers. "One cold Canberra night he curled up on the warm bonnet of a new BMW - much to the consternation of the owner. Another night he held a lady hostage in the toilets that were located in the back paddock."

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As the antiques business grew, Athol's buying trips overseas became more frequent - and Jane was transfixed by the business.

"Dad would fly back into the country and a container would arrive. I must have been seven or eight years old and dad would give me a box and say, 'Sit on the floor and carefully unpack it'," she says.

"And you'd be unpacking jewellery or beautiful china or clothing and it was like Christmas every time it happened. And there was never any thought, this is for me, it was just the wonderment of these beautiful things that had come half way around the world

"Dad would say, 'Now, they're asparagus tongs' or 'That's a button hook' and just explaining what it was - it opened up this whole other world."

After completing a communications degree at the University of Canberra, Jane eventually followed her father into the family business.

"I was really following a different career path and I thought, 'No'. I'd met Bob and we wanted to start a family and I didn't want to have an office job," Jane says.

"And it was just such a great opportunity that I could work from home in this industry that I love and have the babes beside me.

"But I did used to joke when we'd go off to auctions and we'd be loading the truck in the rain after a long day at auction and look at dad and say, 'I gave up a really good ... job for this!'."

Father and daughter have an easy, light-hearted relationship. When asked what it's been like to have his daughter follow his lead, Athol smiles before Jane says, "Oh, a pain in the bum!". They both laugh. His son Paul also loved antiques early on and contributed little sketches to the book.

"It's been quite amazing, really, because when you're a parent, you really don't expect your family to go on doing what you're doing," Athol says.

Both Athol and Jane say the business of buying antiques has changed over the decades.

"When I first used to go to England, I used to buy a lot of Victorian furniture, chiffoniers, balloon-back chairs and all these sort of things and it was available over there," he says.

"I had a friend in Wales and he was an auctioneer over there and he was fantastic, he'd take me all over the country.

"And now he sends emails over and says, 'I've got 10 chiffoniers in the shed, ten pound each. Would you like them?' And I go, 'No, I can't even sell them'."

It was another time; a different Australia and a different market.

"When dad started in business, it was about having the formal dining room, the formal lounge room, so things were bought for a lifetime so there was an element of show about them," Jane says.

"I think now, thankfully, antiques are regarded as far more accessible. You can have a beautiful waxed oak table or you can have a funny little pine kitchen table.

"There's not so much a fashion dictating what people buy, it's what they love. And I think that has broadened the scope of how vintage items are presented. It's not all dark furniture and here's your polishing rag, go to it. And that's really exciting and I think that's why Dirty Jane's does so well, because we bring all of those elements together."

The Dirty Jane's concept is for multiple individual traders to operate under the one roof, with a single selling point and without the owners needing to be there to run the stall. And each of them is always on the lookout for that something special.

"I think if you're in this game, you are always looking," Jane says.

"We've had five dealers in Dirty Jane's go to Europe this summer to buy antiques. That's obviously always going to be your mecca - to get to Europe to buy a container. But that's really hard so you look anywhere and the beauty of it is, it's never going to dry up.

"We get customers constantly coming in saying, 'We're moving, we're downsizing, my father's passed away, I've got things that I need to sell'. And their greatest desire is to see those items passed on to someone who appreciates them."

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