Robyn Gillespie's Last Kombi Weekenders
“After 41 years, my hands won’t do it any more.” — Robyn (71) is selling her last hand-quilted Kombi weekenders at a special price. When the shed’s empty, that’s the end of them.
12 September 2026
In short: “I’ve made bags about leaving for forty-one years. I’m not going to end up with seven hundred of them sitting on a shelf.” — From an old banana-packing shed in the Byron hinterland, Robyn Gillespie is letting go of the last hand-quilted Kombi weekenders she will ever make, before the contracture in her hands closes them for good.
In a corrugated-iron shed behind a weatherboard house on Tincogan Street in Mullumbimby, New South Wales, Robyn Gillespie has been quilting travel bags by hand for forty-one years — one design, one machine, one long louvre window and about fifty square metres of floor. Now the 71-year-old is stopping. And she’s going out on the piece she’s known for: the Hippie Bus Weekender, with its hand-cut split-window Kombi sewn across the front.
Mullumbimby, New South Wales
The shed smells of cotton, machine oil and, faintly, the lemon myrtle by the door. There are bolts stacked to the louvres in sun-yellow, turquoise and lavender. There’s a radio on the shelf and a tin of pins that’s been open since about 1990.
Pinned above the machine is a Polaroid from 1973: a split-window Kombi on red dirt somewhere north of Rockhampton, both doors open, someone’s bare feet up on the dashboard.
And along the back wall, four shelves of finished bags. Fewer every week.
“Everyone assumes it will be the eyes. Mine are perfect — I can thread a needle in the dark. It’s the hand that’s gone, and there’s no talking a hand out of it.”
Robyn first noticed a hard cord in her right palm in 2019 and put it down to forty years of pushing fabric. By 2022 the ring and little fingers on that hand wouldn’t lie flat on the table. A hand clinic in Lismore released it with a needle in 2023, which was wonderful for about eighteen months. Then it came back, the way it does. Then it started in the left hand as well.
It’s called Dupuytren’s contracture. The tissue under the palm thickens into cords and slowly draws the fingers in towards the hand, and it doesn’t go the other way.
She can still cut. She can still pin. She can thread the Singer faster than anyone half her age. What she can no longer do is hold a quilt flat under forty centimetres of even pressure — which is, unfortunately, the entire job.
Forty-one years, 6,800 Kombi weekenders, and one trip she has never stopped sewing
To understand why one bag design has kept a quiet following for four decades, you have to go back to May 1973.
“I was eighteen,” Robyn says. “We had a 1966 Kombi with a bad second gear and a mattress in the back. We drove it up from Preston to Nimbin for the Aquarius Festival, and then we just… kept going.”
Up the coast to Cairns. West across the Top End to Darwin. Then, because in 1973 you still could, onto a freighter with the Kombi lashed to the deck — across to Timor, down through Bali and into Java. Sixteen months in total.
She came home with a kit bag full of batik from the workshops at Yogyakarta and ikat lengths bought off a trestle table in Kupang. She didn’t sit down at a sewing machine for another twelve years. The colours never left her.
“Nobody taught me to sew. Indonesia taught me how to look at a piece of cloth. That’s a different thing, and it’s the more useful one.”
The first Hippie Bus Weekender, in 1985, was a favour. A friend was driving her two kids down the coast for the January holidays and had nothing decent to pack them into. Robyn quilted a bag over four days, cut a Kombi out of turquoise and lavender offcuts, appliquéd it on and handed it over without thinking about it.
Three of that friend’s friends rang within the month.
For the next thirty years she sold them off a trestle table — the Mullumbimby Farmers Market on a Friday, the Channon on the second Sunday, Bangalow on the fourth. She never advertised. She never had a shopfront. She sold out most weekends, drove home, and started again.
By her own ledger, which starts at #001 in 1985, she has finished 6,800 of them. Every one cut, quilted, appliquéd and finished by hand in that shed. No outsourcing, no machine quilting, no two identical.
What makes Robyn’s Hippie Bus Weekenders different
Picking one up is the moment most people work out what has been missing from the cupboard by the front door.
It has weight to it. Not heavy — substantial. The kind of weight that tells you somebody actually sat down and made it. The quilted shell is dense and soft at once, because the padding comes from the stitching rather than from a foam insert. The colours don’t read as printed. They read as layered, because they are.
And then there’s the front of it.
The best known of the five, Flower Power Caravan, carries the one everybody pictures: a split-window Kombi with peace signs for wheels, two round headlights, four square windows and a row of sunflowers along the roofline. Some have a surfboard on the roof rack. Some have a blue heeler sitting up in the passenger window.
“That’s why no two are the same,” Robyn says. “Sometimes the peace sign sits a millimetre to the left. Sometimes the sunflower is a bit bigger. That’s not a fault. That’s the proof it wasn’t printed.”
✓ The Tincogan Shed Quilt. Fourteen hours of hand-quilting per bag, stitch by stitch through cotton and polyester batting. No machine quilting anywhere in it.
✓ The Split-Window Kombi Applique. Peace-sign wheels, headlights, windows and sunflowers, each piece hand-cut from offcuts and sewn on individually.
✓ The Five Road Designs. Flower Power Caravan, Sunset Strummer, Stay Wild Forest, Coastal Surfer Camper and Cherry Blossom Glamping — each one appliquéd from a different stretch of the 1973 trip.
✓ The Loaded-Handle Build. Padded fabric handles with the padding running the full length of the grip, so nothing digs in on a long walk from the car park.
✓ The Boot-And-Cabin Size. 45 × 23 × 25 cm, about 22 litres, 820 grams empty. A full weekend of clothes, and cabin-bag sized for domestic flights.
✓ The Gillespie Ledger. A hand-numbered tag stitched into the inner pocket, matched to a line in the ledger she started in 1985. The collection runs out at 6,800.
Check availability →
“There’s a woman still travelling with one I made in 2007”
The thing Robyn is proudest of has nothing to do with how a bag looks on the first day. It has to do with year nineteen.
“A woman emailed me in autumn asking whether I could send her a new zip slider,” she says. “She bought the bag in 2007. It has been to Bali eleven times. Nineteen years, and the only thing that’s given up on it is a five-cent piece of metal. The colours haven’t shifted at all. That’s what I want the work to do.”
A few years back one of her regulars sent a postcard from Broome:
“Dear Robyn — the Kombi bag has made it to Cable Beach. Ninth summer with me and it still looks better than the luggage of everyone else on this bus. Thank you for the lot of it.”
— Broome, 2014
It’s still pinned above the machine, next to the Polaroid.
Five designs, one trip — and then the shelves are bare
There are five designs, and each one comes off a different stretch of the same trip. Flower Power Caravan is the Kombi itself, peace signs and all. Sunset Strummer is the guitar that never stopped going round the fire at Nimbin. Stay Wild Forest is the run up through the big timber on the way north. Coastal Surfer Camper is every headland between Byron and Cairns. Cherry Blossom Glamping came last, and Robyn will tell you plainly that it came from a garden in Java and not from anywhere in Australia.
The last run — and why there won’t be another
After the needle procedure in 2023 bought her some time, Robyn did something that surprised the people who know her: she stopped doing the markets entirely.
“I worked out roughly what I had left in the hands,” she says, “and then I made all of it.”
Three years of work, stockpiled on four shelves instead of dribbled out one trestle table at a time. She wanted to finish with a collection rather than a trickle. That run, plus what was already on the shelves, is everything you can see on those four shelves.
That’s the whole of what exists. There’s no next batch and there’s no apprentice — her son is an electrician in Brisbane, and nobody under fifty in the Northern Rivers wants to sit at an industrial Singer for fourteen hours to produce one bag. Robyn doesn’t blame a single one of them.
“I would rather stop on my own terms with an empty shed than have the hand stop me halfway through a bag. When these are gone, I sweep it out and put a sheet over the machine.”
She could have asked a great deal more for them. A hand-quilted weekender of this size — fourteen hours of handwork, hand-cut applique, a full quilted shell — goes for three hundred and forty to four hundred dollars in the craft tents at Bangalow and the Channon. Robyn sold hers at those prices for thirty years.
She’s not pricing the last of them anywhere near that, and she’s quite direct about why.
“I’ve made bags about leaving for forty-one years. I’m not going to end up with seven hundred of them sitting on a shelf in a shed. Take one. Put it in the boot and go somewhere. That’s the entire idea of them.”
Final collection →
What buyers say about the Hippie Bus Weekender
✅ Kerry M., 57, Ballarat VIC ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“I didn’t expect a travel bag to put me in a good mood, but there you go. It lives by the front door and every time I pack it the weekend feels a bit more like an actual trip. A bloke on the platform at Southern Cross stopped me to ask about it.”
✅ Narelle D., 63, Toowoomba QLD ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“Took mine to Bali in February. Three women at the pool asked me where it came from. The work in it is unbelievable — every stitch sits exactly where it should. I understand now why one bag takes as long as it does.”
✅ Jo H., 51, Fremantle WA ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
“A fiftieth birthday present to myself. It reminds me every day that I’m allowed to actually go. And it holds up — two camping weekends in the Margaret River region and a fortnight in Vietnam, and it still looks new.”
Where can you buy Robyn’s Hippie Bus Weekenders?
Robyn’s bags are sold in one place only: Backroad Goods, the small online shop her grandson Jarrah (28) set up and runs from Ocean Shores, ten minutes up the road.
“Jarrah does all of that,” she says. “I’ve never seen an order come in. He photographs them on the bench, packs them, and drives them to the post office himself. Without him this would just quietly stop and nobody would ever know it had happened.”
One word of warning. As the bag has become better known, copies have started turning up on Temu and the big marketplaces. They look close enough in a listing photo and they’re not from this shed. The real ones carry Robyn’s hand-numbered tag stitched into the inner pocket, and they’re only available through Backroad Goods.
When the last one goes, that’s it
Between the final-collection price and the last fortnight, the shelves are emptying faster than Jarrah expected.
This is the last chance to get hold of a piece of genuine Australian handwork — and a wearable piece of 1973 — before it’s finished for good.
UPDATE:
“Demand has been higher than we planned for. A good part of the final run has already gone out this week. Once they’re gone that’s genuinely it — there’s no restock, because there’s nobody left to restock it.”
— Jarrah Gillespie, Backroad Goods
Final collection →
Common questions
Where can I get one?
Only through Backroad Goods, using the links on this page. They’re not sold on Temu, Amazon or any marketplace. Anything listed there is a copy and doesn’t carry the hand-numbered tag.
How long will they be available?
Until the shelves are empty. It is a fixed number and there will be no restock — Robyn has stopped making them. When the last one is posted, the shed gets swept out.
Can I try one without any risk?
Yes. Every bag comes with Robyn’s 90-day, no-questions money-back guarantee. If it’s not right for you, email info@backroad-goods.com and send it back. No forms and no argument.
How do I look after it?
Spot-clean only, air dry, and keep it out of the washing machine. That’s the whole of it. There are bags from 2007 still going with nothing more than that.
The bottom line
This is the bag you won’t want to put down.
Every single one is the work of a real pair of hands, and it feels like a bit of packed-up freedom. As though every time you walk out the front door you’re taking some 1973 sunshine and a quiet “let’s go somewhere” along for the drive.
Thank you, Robyn.
Robyn’s personal 90-day money-back guarantee
Her parting condition, and she was firm about it: a 90-day, no-questions-asked money-back guarantee on every bag in the final collection.
“These should only end up with women who will actually use them,” she says. “If it’s not right, send it back. I just want it to make somebody happy. That’s the only reason any of it was worth doing.”
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What people are saying online
📰 Steph W., Newcastle NSW
“Drove up to Mullum to meet Robyn last month. The shed is something else — fabric everywhere, little cut-out Kombis pinned to the wall, Polaroids from her trip in the seventies. I came away with two. One for me, one for Mum’s seventieth.”
📰 Bec T., Hobart TAS
“Took mine down the east coast over the Christmas break. Two separate people asked me about it at the same servo. One of them tried to buy it off me on the spot. Now I understand the fuss.”
📰 Lou P., Adelaide SA
“Finally a travel bag that doesn’t look like it came off a pallet. Bought mine four years ago. It has done eleven weekends away and still looks new. If you can get one, don’t muck around.”
The last of the shed →