Akubra Cattleman

The Cattleman is a wide-brimmed hat of rabbit-fur felt, made in Australia for working outdoors. Its crown is shallow and rounded, pinched at the front and creased down the middle in what the maker calls a cattleman crown; small metal eyelets in its sides let air in. The brim, 83 millimetres wide, dips slightly at front and back and is finished with a bound edge. A thin plaited leather band circles the crown, and inside is a leather sweatband.

Akubra, the maker, traces itself to 1876, when Benjamin Dunkerley, a Cheshire hatter, opened a hat mill near Hobart in Tasmania. Rabbit fur makes a strong, water-resistant felt, and in the 1890s Dunkerley patented a machine for stripping it from the skin. His firm moved to Sydney, took the name Akubra in 1912 and made slouch hats for Australian soldiers in both world wars. In 1974 it moved to Kempsey, on the New South Wales coast.

The Cattleman was launched there in 1991, the company says. The bush hat was already old; Akubra's contribution was a specific version for stockmen and farmers, broad enough in the brim to shade face and neck, and low enough in the crown to set it apart from the tall hats of the American West. Retailers now describe it as Akubra's best-selling hat, and the company calls it a staple of life on the land.

The firm was run by the Keir family, Dunkerley's descendants by marriage, for more than a century, through a change of ownership in 1972, until 2023, when Andrew and Nicola Forrest's investment group Tattarang bought it. The Cattleman is still made at Kempsey, in a process the maker says takes six weeks and passes through sixty pairs of hands, and it is sold in five colours, from pale sand to black, at around £250.