GO BACK 100 years and you’ll find a world where many Australians worked on horseback, activities that generated business for specialised leather artisans.
Whip making was a trade and many men made a living weaving leather into different tools used for the business of mustering, riding and stock control.
While modern technology and automation have replaced the need for many tools to be handmade, whip making remains something graziers and equine industry workers look to artisans in order to source.
Bill Glasgow makes whips from his home in Highfields, a town in Toowoomba region.It’s an art he is proud to perform and does so regularly for crowds at agricultural shows.
He learned how to create whips from Maurice Doohan of Casino in NSW.
Mr Doohan has been making whips since the mid 1960s, is one of Australia’s few full time whip makers and in a busy year makes up to a thousand whips.
Mr Glasgow’s foray into the world of whip making started with belt making in the early 1990s.
“I’d been plaiting belts for a couple of years and the Australian Whipmaking and Leather Plaiting organisation had a convention at the Jondaryan Woolshed and [Maurice Doohan] was the bloke giving the talk, he said.
“I mistakenly thought they were also teaching whip making ... but they weren’t.
“I asked Maurice to show me how to make them, he agreed and told me to visit him at his home.”
The story goes that Mr Glasgow, eager not to let the opportunity pass by, organised a week’s holiday from work and turned up on his mentor’s doorstep the Monday morning.
“I didn’t know he was regarded as the best whip maker in Australia at that time,” he said.
“I was lucky to have learned from someone with that experience and standing.
“When plaiting the belts, well no one showed me how to do that, I had a book and the more I did it the better I got.
“And a belt really just needs to hold your pants up.
“A whip on the other hand ... well that has to actually do work.
“You’ve got to know where to put the weight in and where to take it out, so if you’re going to make whips you really need to go find someone who knows what they’re doing.”
Mr Doohan taught him how to make whips using kangaroo hide, how to cut the material correctly and how plaits were braided to ensure strength and endurance.
“He said to me ‘when you go home, don’t leave it for a week or a month because then you’ll battle to do it’,” he recalled.
“I went home and I started one straight away, it took me three weeks to make, I took my time and all the skiving, well that’s something you’ve really got to learn.
“Maurice knew how to get a good product out in the shortest time.
“He said to me, ‘if you’re going to make kangaroo hide whips you’ve got to learn how to cut out with your thumb nail’, so I hang onto the hide with the point of my thumbnail, hold a knife with three of my fingers and move in and out to the widths I want.”
Watching as he deftly moves the leather through his fingers, allowing the knife to cut long perfectly even strips from the leather, it’s apparent there is real art in this craft.                  Judging by eye and being able to keep the strip width even all the way through is not something easily picked up.
It’s a skill learned through time with lots of trial and error.
“You won’t be able to do this the first time you try,” he said.
“I practised with a piece of lace and cut about two feet out until I could do it.
“Now I just sit down and cut them out, it’s second nature.”
Not all whips are made using kangaroo hide.
Different hides have different weight distribution properties.
He said kangaroo is the strongest leather in the world when it comes to weight.
“I make what people want in a whip,” he said.
“Whether it’s stock work, whip cracking competitions, feedlots or on a quad ... people need whips.
“When it comes to learning the craft ... well, it’s really only practice, but you’d want to get with someone who really knows what they’re doing.
“Whips take a lot of time to make and if you do it wrong you’d may as well throw it in the bin.”