Jacob 'Shakey' Butler paints murals at Spearwood Wool

History buff and Spearwood Wool director and co-founder in 2000, Andrew Basire, commissioned acclaimed self-taught Fremantle-based artist Jacob 'Shakey' Butler to paint two murals based on old pictures of long gone aspects of the local wool industry.

Together they chose suitable pictures found on the internet to be painted on the show floor's concrete walls to remind visitors to Spearwood Wool of the way things were in the past.

Mr Butler started on the first mural - about 25 square metres on a high section of wall - last week and when Farm Weekly visited Thursday he had almost completed it, working from a scissor lift using pressure-pack aerosol cans of paint.

"The one he's doing at the moment is a 1920s Clydesdale (horse) drawn wagon loaded with wool bales," Mr Basire said.

"I reckon, being the 1920s, it was probably coming out of the old wool stores in Cantonment Street (Fremantle) and heading for the wharf," he said.

"You can see it's got Bremen on one or two of the wool bales, which I assume is the destination."

Renowned Germany wool comber and wool top maker Bremer Woll-Kmmerei, known as BWK in international trade, was based in Bremen from1884 until 2009.

"The other one he is going to paint is an old blade shearing photo - it is of a blade shearer out in a paddock shearing a sheep on a tarpaulin,'' Mr Basire said.

"That would be early 1900s probably - I have to research the history of that one a bit more."

Mr Basire started in the wool industry as a 16-year-old roustabout going north to the Murchison and Gascoyne with shearing teams working shed to shed on big pastoral runs for eight weeks at a time and learned on day one you needed long, strong gardening gloves to handle fleece from northern sheep because of the amount of burr in the wool.

He said the murals were commissioned to record history.

The part of the wool industry where he got his start working for shearing contractors Doug Kennedy and then 'China' Bill Young, no longer exists.

"In our part of the industry things have changed, we used to open bales to show the wool, now we display it in sample boxes, things change over time," Mr Basire pointed out.

"Even in the four or five years since my son Liam has joined us, there have been changes.

"I think it is important that the history of our wool industry - how things have changed and how things have progressed - is recorded and not forgotten.

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"I'm blown away by how big this (first mural) is and the detail he is able to get into it."

Mr Butler, whose career as an artist began in 2013 working on Fremantle wharfs when he began painting workmates' hard-hats, said his passion is telling stories through paintings based on historical research - "trying to bring heritage back to life".

"I think a lot of history is lost, particularly on young people, these days - they don't seem to care too much about it, they're more interested in their phones and what is happening now," Mr Butler said.

"If I can find these old photos and bring them back to life, then hopefully it will get people more involved in where the picture came from and it also pays tribute to the workers who came before."

He said part of his interest was a "dialogue" sometimes generated by his murals, when people recognised relatives from previous generations in his works and could add family information to what was already known about the person or picture.

Mr Butler said he hoped that would be the case with the Spearwood Wool murals.

He said painting the murals involved "going up and down in the scissor lift a fair bit" to check proportions of the super-sized artwork.

"I just take a photo of the wall, sketch (the subject) out (overlaid on the wall picture) so I can see how that design is going to fit," Mr Butler explained.

Once satisfied with the design, he saves it on an iPad as a visual template, using panel joints, electrical conduits, door frames and other fittings and fixtures on the wall as reference points for his freehand painting.

Some of his other murals include a Kulin Bush Races tribute on a wall of a local basketball court and Collie Murals Trail contributions of Collie timber and underground coal mining tributes, Collie Returned and Services League and a painting of three sisters titled 'Kwobidak Kondarm' at Collie Senior High School.

Spearwood Wool's is his first woolstore wall.

Last year Mr Basire commissioned Mr Butler to paint a full-length portrait mural of his brother, who had died aged 60, on a wall at the family farm near Williams.

Next year Mr Butler and photographer wife Ange plan to travel across Australia and hope to capture community events in murals on walls in country towns as they go.