KOBK.REGISTER · EST. 2026

The Register

A free national directory of Australia's menders, restorers and rare trades. Find the person and contact them directly.

practitioners listed

trades

states and territories

3,402

tracked in the wider dataset

Show the rarest trades

The trades where we found the fewest people nationally. Grouped by trade, scarcest first.

Claim, add or amend an entry How this record is made

Updated September 2026. Counts are floors, not ceilings.

How this record is made

Australia is quietly losing the trades that keep objects alive, and there has never been a national record of the people still practising them. This is that record: menders, restorers and rare trades, on the record and findable, before the knowledge goes.

Who belongs here

The work keeps existing objects going. Repair, restoration, conservation, or the proper mounting and display of objects. Rare making trades belong when the making skill is the mending skill: caning a chair, forging a lost fitting, binding a broken book.
Real and reachable. A verifiable person, business or organisation the public can actually engage. Where the only contact we found was a mobile number, the entry is here without it, and says so.
We do not publish mobile numbers. A landline, an email or a website is a business contact. A mobile is usually a personal one, and it is not ours to publish. Those entries are held without a contact while we ask each person how they would like to be reached.
Accurate, and honest about how it got here. Entries marked compiled from public listings carry public facts only and say so. Claimed entries appear in their subjects' own words, dated. We would rather say less than dress a guess as fact.
Here willingly. Anyone leaves with one message, same day. Anything wrong is fixed the same day too.
Not here: building trades working on buildings, and makers of wholly new work with no repair dimension.

Where it comes from

Drawn from guild directories, public listings, phone directories, heritage registers, fellowship rolls and the Australian Business Register, with new data landing monthly and as it comes in. Updated September 2026.

What it cannot see

The compiled layer sees only what leaves a public trace: directories, guild rolls, business registers, the open web. So much of this work has always travelled by word of mouth, and not every name is in lights: a workshop with no website, a practitioner known by a single handle, a number you only get by knowing someone. Counts are floors, not ceilings. If someone is missing, that is a gap in the data, not a judgement of the work, and the form fixes it in two minutes.

A consent-first effort runs alongside this page. Practitioners known to us through stories, fellowships and teaching, and all First Nations practitioners and community-held practices, appear only by their own decision and in their own words. Their absence from the compiled listings is design, not oversight.

What the counts mean. Every count on this page is what we could find on the date shown. Not a census, and not a verdict. A trade appearing under the rarest trades says something about the size of this record, and about the trade. It says nothing about any business listed under it.

What we are not

KOBK is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting for any business listed here, and no listed business has been asked or has any commercial relationship with us. We do not check qualifications, insurance or workmanship, and nothing here is a recommendation. Nobody pays to be listed.

This register stands alongside, and in respect of, the people already carrying this work: the Centre for Rare Arts & Forgotten Trades in Ballarat, the Lost Trades Fair, the watch and clockmakers' and picture framers' guilds, and the conservators of the AICCM.

Sources. Guild and association directories, public listings, phone directories, heritage registers, fellowship rolls, the Australian Business Register and the ASIC business names register. The two government datasets are used under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Australia, filtered and reformatted by KOBK Pty Ltd. Neither the Australian Business Register nor ASIC endorses this register or KOBK.