“For 38 years I’ve told people the same thing: your olive oil isn’t bad. Your bottle is.” — Why a 72-year-old potter from Maldon is letting her last 219 hand-painted oil dispensers go at a special price, before her shed closes for good.

Every time someone picks up one of Leonie Prowse’s oil dispensers at her market stall, she asks the same question first: “Where do you keep your olive oil at the moment?”

The answer is nearly always: in the bottle it came in, next to the stove, on the windowsill. Leonie nods and says the sentence she has been saying since 1988.

Leonie is 72. She has thrown pots on a wheel for more than forty years, in an old corrugated-iron shed behind her weatherboard house in Maldon, Victoria. This October she fired her kiln for the last time.

“People reckon their oil’s gone off. It hasn’t. It sat in the sun. That’s the bottle’s fault, not the oil’s.”

The bottle that broke on Keith’s kitchen floor

Maldon is a little gold-rush town of about 1,600 people in central Victoria, half an hour from Bendigo. In 1972, at eighteen, Leonie started painting flowers on plates and jugs in the decorating room of a Bendigo pottery, until she was let go in 1983.

Her husband Keith cooked at the pub in Castlemaine and cooked at home every Sunday, with olive oil from the Greek deli in Bendigo. He kept it where most people do: in a clear glass bottle on the windowsill above the stove.

One Sunday in the spring of 1988 he tasted the oil and pulled a face. “Tastes like crayons,” he said. The bottle was only two months old, with a greasy ring on the sill under it. Two weeks later he knocked it off the sill with his elbow, and Leonie spent the evening on her knees with paper towel.

“I said, Keith, I’m a potter. Why on earth are we keeping oil in glass? The next morning I went out to the shed and threw him one out of clay.”

The tin shed behind the house

In 1984 Leonie set up a second-hand kick wheel and a small kiln in the tin shed behind the house and made mugs and bowls for the Castlemaine market and the Easter fair in town every year.

After 1988, people started asking for “one like Keith’s.” She reckons she has made about 5,800 since. Each one takes about three hours of work, spread over a week: throwing, trimming, pulling the handle, two firings and the painting in between. Then she fits the steel spout by hand and tests it with water over the sink.

“If it drips in my sink, it doesn’t leave the shed. I’ve thrown plenty back in the scrap bucket.”

Five things the bottle on your benchtop gets wrong

After 38 years at her stall, Leonie can list every complaint about oil bottles in her sleep:

• It lets the light in. Clear glass lets the sun straight into the oil. After a few weeks on the windowsill, good oil tastes flat and stale. Keith called it “crayons.”
• It tips over. Tall, thin bottles are top-heavy. One elbow or one cat, and you are on your knees with paper towel.
• It drips down the side. Cheap spouts leave a drop behind every time. It runs down the bottle into a greasy ring that dust and crumbs stick to.
• It stays open. An open spout lets in dust, kitchen grease and, every summer, the flies.
• It ends up in the cupboard. Plastic bottles are too ugly to leave out. So the oil goes behind a door, and you reach for butter instead.

What 38 years taught her about an oil bottle

Each of those five problems is why her dispensers look the way they do. People who order one usually write first: “It’s heavier than I expected.” That is on purpose.

• “The Dark Clay Body”: Thick, glazed clay, painted all the way round. No light gets through to the oil, so it can stay out on the benchtop where you use it.
• “The Low Belly”: About 25 centimetres tall and 12.5 centimetres wide with the handle. The weight sits in the wide, round bottom, so it stands like it means it. “Keith knocked it with his elbow a hundred times,” Leonie says. “It wobbled and stayed put.”
• “The Pulled Handle”: A loop handle with room for three fingers, pulled by hand from the same clay. You pour like from a little jug instead of squeezing a slippery bottle.
• “The Self-Closing Steel Spout”: A stainless steel spout with a small black flap. Tilt and it swings open, set it down and it falls shut, so dust and flies stay out. The stream is thin and steady and stops cleanly.

“I didn’t invent anything. I just made the bottle I’d want next to my own stove.”

Three patterns from the garden, and never a fourth

Wild Rose is the old roses along the back fence that the miners’ wives planted. Red Poppy is for her mother’s poppies by the verandah, with a band of cobalt blue like the old Bendigo plates she painted as a girl. Native Hibiscus is the big pink and lilac flowers by the water tank every summer.

“Three is plenty. I paint what grows round here, and nothing grows prettier.”

The morning her shoulder said no

What Leonie will miss most are the mornings: a cuppa in the shed, magpies in the gums, the first lump of clay on the wheel.

Centring that clay takes your whole weight, leaned in through the shoulder. Last winter her right shoulder began to ache every time. The doctor called it arthritis. It won’t get better.

“I can still paint a rose. I just can’t get the clay to sit still for me any more. Two kilos of clay and it wins every time now.”

In October she loaded the kiln one last time. There is no one to take over. 219 oil dispensers are left, 73 of each pattern. On 31 December, the kick wheel goes to the art room of the secondary college in Castlemaine.

“An oil bottle belongs next to the stove, not in a china cabinet”

Hand-thrown, hand-painted oil bottles like these sell for A$180 to A$240 in craft galleries. For her last 219, Leonie could ask that much. Everyone would understand. She won’t.

“If it never gets an oily thumbprint on the handle, I made it for nothing.”

She is asking far less. She wants her last dispensers on real benchtops this Christmas, next to real stoves, getting used every day.

Leonie doesn’t use a computer. Her granddaughter Tayla, 22, a vet nurse in Ballarat, saw the full shelves at Sunday lunch. “Nan, the Easter fair’s not till April,” she said, and spent the next weekend setting up the page where you can order now.

“Tayla says more people will see them in a week than came to my stall in forty years. I told her fine, as long as they get used.”

What home cooks say about Leonie’s oil dispensers

• ★★★★★

  “My olive oil lived in the cupboard for years because the bottle was so ugly. Now the Wild Rose one sits by the stove and I actually cook with it. No more sticky ring on the benchtop either.”

  Lyn M., Bendigo, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected, and that’s a good thing. My old glass bottle went over twice last year. This one doesn’t budge. The little flap is clever too, it just closes when you put it down.”

  Deb R., Castlemaine, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the Red Poppy for my daughter’s new kitchen and the Native Hibiscus for myself. Both turned up packed in so much paper I thought the box was empty. You can see every brush stroke up close.”

  Carol S., Geelong, VIC

Three questions people ask before ordering

Where can I buy one of Leonie’s oil dispensers?

Only through this page. Leonie’s dispensers are not sold on Amazon, Temu or in any shop.

How long will they be available?

Only while stocks last. The kiln has been fired for the last time, and there are 219 dispensers left across all three patterns. Once a pattern is gone, it’s gone for good.

What if it’s not right for me?

You have 90 days to try it at home. If you’re not happy, just send a short email and you’ll get your money back. No questions, no fuss.

More from kitchens with one by the stove

• ★★★★★

  “I’ve got arthritis in both hands and slim bottles always slipped. With the handle I just tip it like a little jug. It’s the first oil bottle I don’t have to think about.”

  Barb K., Ballarat, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “Every summer the flies were onto the oil. Not this year. The flap stays shut until you pour. My husband reckons it’s the best-looking thing in the kitchen.”

  Sharon D., Wagga Wagga, NSW
• ★★★★★

  “Gave one to my sister for her birthday. She rang me that night and said, ‘This was made by a real person, wasn’t it?’ I said yes, a lady in Maldon.”

  Trish W., Adelaide, SA