Hats with heart

It took Melbourne milliner Waltraud Reiner many years to find her calling as maker of
fine hats. Now she wants to share her passion with the world. Kieren Charteris reports.

Waltraud Reiner‘s studio is the type of place you could spend hours fossicking around in. Housed on the first floor of her A-frame home in the Melbourne suburb of Murrumbeena, it is filled with the gorgeous raw materials and fascinating paraphernalia of hat making. Arcane-looking tools lie on a wooden bench next to sewing machines, steamers and contraptions that would not look out of place in a medieval torture chamber. Bolts of bright-coloured fabric are piled on the floor like rainbows in solid form. The walls are lined with shelves of wooden hat blocks and stacks of hat boxes, prettily patterned as well as sensible brown leather. Drawers open to reveal a treasure-trove of gold, silver and copper buttons and buckles, sparkling costume jewellery, time-yellowed cotton reels and tape measures, and cards of delicate brocade and lace. Then of course there are the hats – piled, perched and pegged wherever there’s space; everything from simple sun hats, to bold avant garde creations and frivolous confections of ribbon and feathers.

What you don’t expect to see though, is a swing. Suspended on long ropes from the lofty central beam is a wooden swing of the type often pictured in children’s books. Waltraud answers the inevitable question with a throaty laugh. “My life is very busy, very organised,” the 48-year-old explains in the precise accent of her native Austria. “I'm always making hats, teaching workshops, travelling, as well as being wife to my darling husband Warrick and mother to my dear son Torby and daughter Orlanda. Sometimes I just need a break from all that. So I go for a swing. It makes me forget about everything for a while. I am a girl again.”

It was when Waltraud was a teenager in Austria that she took her first tentative steps on the path that was eventually to lead her to running her successful millinery business, Torb and Reiner, today. Enrolled in fashion school in the city of Graz, she bought her very first hat. “It was red, very simple – just a crown and a brim – but beautifully made. I loved wearing it but hats were not very fashionable in the dreaded 1970s so everybody laughed at me. I had to stop wearing it.”

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