Heart and sole: the Salvadorian shoemaker catering to Melbourne’s well-heeled

Shoemaker José Rodríguez, who fled El Salvador for Australia in 1988, in his workshop at Melbourne’s Trades Hall. Photograph: Ellen Smith/The Guardian

In the basement of Melbourne’s historic Trades Hall, the home of Australia’s organised worker movement, a 66-year-old Salvadorian is keeping a different kind of labour tradition alive. For the past decade, José Rodríguez has been down here, surrounded by old masonry, industrial sewing machines and multicoloured rolls of leather, hand-making bespoke shoes.

It’s a slow craft, and in an age of mass-production, a highly specialised trade.