Nerida O’Callaghan still remembers the first time she went to a miniature shop in the 1980s, in Sacramento, California. “I thought I died and went to heaven,” says the 75-year-old, now a retired Sydney primary school teacher.
“I was always interested in miniatures but until then, I didn’t realise it was a legitimate hobby.”
Inspired, she started working on a doll’s house – it would prove to be the gateway drug, as many others who ventured into the world of miniatures before her had found.
“Once you get a doll’s house you buy a few things from time to time – because it’s more fun to fill it up over time. Then I had started making the dollhouse furniture myself, because there was nothing nice for sale for the nursery. Then I moved into making miniature food and plants – and it evolved into what it is now.”
“What it is now” is a shop in her house, in Carlingford in Sydney, where O’Callaghan sells miniature merchandise to populate other people’s miniature worlds. Items for sale include miniature food, miniature plates and crockery sets, miniature gardens, miniature staircases, blocks of miniature cheese and miniature bottles of wine.
They may be tiny, but more than 30 years of making miniatures has left O’Callaghan scrambling for space. A 3.6-metre scene of Paris sits where her dining room table should. “I’m a Francophile,” O’Callaghan says. “The Paris miniature just grew and grew!”
The scene includes a French chocolate and wine shop and a patisserie, complete with a tiny rolling pin dusted with teeny-tiny sprinkles of flour. O’Callaghan uses a scale one-twelfth of the real size, and each piece is handmade with extraordinary and intricate detail.
“There are people who just knit, and they knit miniature things that are so incredible – you wouldn’t believe it! Whatever you’ve got in big, you can make in little,” she says.
O’Callaghan and her work are featured in the new series Tiny Oz, which premieres this week on the ABC, hosted by comedian Jimmy Rees and Adelaide-based miniature artist JoAnne Bouzianis-Sellick.
The show sets a challenge for craftspeople and artisans from across Australia: to hand-build tiny tableaux that represent an earlier slice of Australian life.
The miniaturists have recreated Broome in the pearling era; a hot air balloon launch in Adelaide; and the hundreds of zoo animals that were escorted through Sydney streets in 1916 to their new home at Taronga zoo. We watch as O’Callaghan dextrously uses paper, wires, glue and little scissors to make the tiny palm trees that line Macquarie Street.
O’Callaghan has long been active in the miniature world – a community which, prior to the internet, you could only find by travelling to shows and conventions. “Doll clubs always had big shows on. I met people through that [and] we started a miniature convention in Australia,” she says.
But the scene in Australia has nothing on the US, where miniatures are “second to stamp collecting when it comes to most popular hobbies”. And these days, she says, it’s in decline. “We have started six clubs – but they are all disappearing. So many people who started doing it are getting sick or have retired … [It’s] a dying thing, like all hobbies, because young people are on their computers and don’t want to do hobbies.”
But perhaps the future isn’t so bleak. Bouzianis-Sellick, makes her own miniatures for film animation work in Adelaide. “I get to make mini props and mini wardrobes. I get paid to go to kindergarten every day!”
She hopes Covid-19 – and its resulting lockdowns – have brought a new generation of younger hobbyists to the pastime. “A lot of kids were saying to their parents, ‘I want to be more crafty,’” she says; she remembers waiting in line outside a model store as the pandemic ramped up.
New technologies have given it cross-generational appeal, too. “A lot of the guys who are in their 60s, 70s and 80s say ‘my grandson helped me 3D print a part’,” Bouzianis-Sellick says. “They have found a younger generation that has a more technical side, and they can bring them in.”
Tiny Oz premieres on the ABC on Tuesday 19 April
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