After 31 Years on Sydney Road, Glenys Is Finishing Her Last Christmas Run by Hand

She couldn't keep the whole trade in Brunswick. She kept the part she could — and this December is the last of it.

The buffing room at Hocking Plate & Polish sounds a little like weather. Two wheels turning, a low hum off the motors, and the soft slap of a spoon laid against the cloth and turned, and turned again, until the steel throws the ceiling light straight back at you. There is rouge dust on the windowsills, on the radio, on the backs of Glenys Hocking's hands. The smell of it has been in this brick since 1952.

It is late October and already too warm for the fans she has. The roller door is up a foot for the draught, the blinds are down against the afternoon glare, and the light will still be going at half past seven. At the long bench she sits with her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, sixty-eight years old, holding a brush thinner than a pencil. She has run this shop for thirty-one years. Her father ran it for forty-three before that. In front of her, six small figures dry in a row, waiting to be set — a Santa, a tree, a reindeer, a red hat, a snowman, a stocking. Behind her, stacked to the ceiling, the green boxes.

Glenys has a rule about Christmas presents. If it's eaten, drunk, or spent by the second week of January, it wasn't really a gift. It was a receipt with a ribbon on it.

"A box of shortbread, a candle, a gift card in a little envelope," she says. "I've given all three. I've been given all three. Nobody remembers who handed them over, including me."

So a few years ago she set herself a problem, the way she's set herself problems for three decades: make something a person would be glad to unwrap, actually use, and then put away in a drawer and pull back out next December. Not an ornament. Not something to admire on a shelf. Something that goes on the table while the pavlova is still in one piece.

What she came up with is a set of six — three coffee spoons and three cake forks, mirror-polished in her shop, each one topped with a different hand-painted figure. A Santa. A tree. A reindeer. A red hat. A snowman. A stocking.

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6-piece set in the green gift box

What Sydney Road Used to Be

For most of a century this end of Brunswick made things. Not famous things — fittings, pressings, plated ware, the unglamorous middle of other people's products. If there was plated cutlery on an Australian table in 1965, there was a fair chance it had passed through a shed within a few streets of this one on its way to being finished.

Hocking Plate & Polish was one of those sheds. Glenys's father opened it in 1952, doing plating, polishing and final inspection on contract. By the time the eighties were over, the firms he worked for had closed or moved production offshore, and most of the shops along the strip had gone with them. The buildings are cafés and apartments now, which Glenys says she doesn't mind. "Somebody has to be in them."

She took the business over from her father in 1995. Thirty-one years ago. She kept it alive on the work that couldn't be sent anywhere else: re-plating a grandmother's wedding canteen, refinishing service for pubs and hotels, and — for a little over twenty years now — her own small runs, sold at antique fairs and craft markets around Victoria and online.

Where Each Part of It Happens

Glenys is precise about this, because she's spent thirty years around people who exaggerate it. She does not make steel. Nobody in Australia rolls cutlery stock any more, and she isn't going to pretend otherwise.

The blanks come in from overseas. Everything after that happens on her benches: the mirror polish, the hand-painting of all six figures, setting each figure on its stem, the inspection, and the packing. Two women come back every winter to work the season with her. They've been doing it long enough that Glenys says she can tell whose brush did which reindeer.

Why Gold and Not Silver

This is the part that surprises people, given what the shop spent fifty years doing. Glenys chose a gold-tone finish on stainless steel, and she chose it on purpose.

"Silver plate tarnishes. That means a cloth, and a cabinet, and someone deciding it's too good to put on the table," she says. "I've watched beautiful canteens spend forty years in a drawer liner. I wasn't going to make another one of those."

The finish on these doesn't tarnish, doesn't need polishing, and goes in the dishwasher. Each piece is about 16.5 centimetres long and a little over a centimetre and a half wide — a proper coffee spoon and a proper cake fork, not a novelty too small to eat with. They have weight in the hand. That part is not an accident either; it's the first thing anyone who has spent a life polishing cutlery notices.

Six Figures, Six People at the Table

The six different figures are the whole idea, and Glenys will tell you she stole it from her own kitchen. Put the set out and within about ninety seconds everyone has claimed one. The reindeer belongs to the grandson who always sits at the end. The snowman belongs to whoever got there first and is not giving it up.

Next year, the same people reach for the same ones. That's what she was after when she started: not a thing that gets opened, admired, and quietly put somewhere. A thing that turns into a small, daft, permanent family argument about who gets the Santa.

It also solves the problem most people are actually facing in the second week of December: a daughter-in-law, a host, a neighbour, a teacher — somebody you like, who already owns everything, and who does not need another candle. It arrives in a green box with a window lid, so it's wrapped before you touch it.

Why This Is the Last One

Glenys sold the building in September. There was no one to take it over — her son is a physiotherapist in Geelong and has never once pretended otherwise, which Glenys says she respects enormously.

The sets were prepared across the winter, the way they are every year: polish through June and July, paint and set through August, pack in September. Fourteen hundred of them. When they're gone, that's the end of it, because there's no bench left to make more on and nobody left standing at it.

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