The accidental goldsmith: how Ian Buchanan found his calling

AFTER 55 years at the jeweller’s bench, Murwillumbah silversmith and goldsmith Ian Buchanan says he still enjoys the work as much as ever.

Having recently celebrated his 85th birthday, Buchanan still spends his days creating fine jewellery and sculptures in gold, silver and bronze from his studio at M|Arts Precinct in Murwillumbah.

“When you’re making stuff, you don’t have to deal with people for nine-tenths of the day,” he said.

“I work for myself, it keeps my hands busy and gives me plenty of time to myself.”

 

A member of the Gold and Silversmiths Guild of Australia, Buchanan’s workshop resembles a treasure trove, filled with handcrafted rings, necklaces and bracelets. At the back sits his workbench, where he spends hours bending wire, soldering metal and transforming raw materials into custom-made pieces shaped by his clients’ ideas.

His path into jewellery making began after deciding life on his family’s Murray River farm was not for him.

“I’d been working on cattle stations, and I got this story from mother that father was sick, and I had to come home and run the family farm,” he said.

“But actually, it was just mother being manipulative, because he wasn’t really sick.

“So, I decided to do something else, rather than live on the farm and work with him.”

A government retraining program led him to jewellery making, where he quickly discovered he had found his calling.

“I decided, well, I had to do something, and jewellery seemed like a pair of pliers and a saw and a torch and not much else,” he said.

“It’s all little chores and problems with each piece to be solved.”

For 15 years Buchanan lived aboard a converted cargo boat on Europe’s canals, travelling through Holland, Belgium, France and Germany while making jewellery and supplying Australian galleries.

 

“It was an old cargo boat, which I fitted out and turned into a two-bedroom apartment with a granny flat and a workshop,” he said.

“You could stop for a month or two, three months and move on, whatever.”

Much of his work was once sold through galleries around Australia before changing tastes forced him to adapt.

“I used to sell through a string of galleries up and down the coast, from Darwin down to Melbourne,” he said.

“But all of that sort of withered away in the early 2000s.

“Galleries went out of fashion.”

Despite spending more than half a century crafting jewellery, Buchanan has little interest in wearing it himself, only occasionally trying on a new piece to see how it feels.

“Anything new I wear, just to see what it’s like, but no, I don’t wear any jewellery,” he said.

Instead, it has always been the work itself that has kept him at the bench.

“I wasn’t the slightest bit interested in jewellery, but I discovered after about three or four weeks that I was enjoying it,” he said.

“So, I just happened to make a good choice, a smart choice.”