There must be a few of us Aussie 'Catters who don't have to work for a living (or get a better run at the web during working hours. It was about 5.10 AM, Sydney time, when Mark posted ... and I just got around to dipping in the Mudcat's pond in my lunch ¾-hour! (However, I am sitting here in my comfortable Blundies ... for office work (and my 6 kilometre walk home) these are my fairly dressy pair, with squared off toes. In the bush I prefer the work styles, wide and round toed.)
The Blundstone factory is down in the coolth of Tasmania, not far from the old Moonah Ice Rink, where a friend and I spent some time in the 1960s trying to develop grass cutting and sorting machinery for harvesting particularly nasty Tasmanian Native Bass Grass ... 6/7 metre leaves with two edges like hacksaw blades and a a surface like sandpaper - worth a fortune, back then, for street-sweeping machine brushes ... probably replaced by some cunning plastic confection nowadays!
For a while I had a link to the Blunstone factory "Blunnie-cam" ... a view of Mt Wellington, behind Hobart ... on a really good day you could see the mountain. (The rest of the time you could see mist or rain.) I think it's the cold weather Tasmanian cowhides that make the boot leather so tough!
BTW: Joybell
"... we saw a big sign in a clothing shop that read: "Fair Dinkum Aussie Dry-as-a-bones" (type of brown waterproof cattleman's coat)..."
As you would realise, the real product was called "Driza-Bone" but they've been bought by some Pommy outdoor clothing firm in the last few years, so Driza-Bones might well be made in Mexico these days!
Also BTW: What years, in the '60s, were you at Nariel? I worked on Murray 2 Hydro dam in 1967 (before going back to Tasmania for 2 years) ... but never got to the festival (6-day working week on the dam site) - although I used to get down to Corryong for the Saturday night dances in the Memorial Hall with Con Klippel and the Nariel Creek Band.