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Company History


Our business is the result of a merger of three iconic Australian brands, associated with drawing, and mathematics education.

>W&G< drawing instruments
MATHOMAT geometry templates
Objective Learning Materials (OLM)

 

The Mathomat geometry templates, with their highly developed student books, are the result of a fusion of the manufacturing know how in W&G and Mathomat with the educational publishing resources of OLM.

The integration of these businesses is the work of their current owner, John Lawton. John is also involved in education research as a PhD student, his Linkedin profile can be viewed here.

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Our mission

Our product design philosophy

 

 

>W&G< drawing instruments began in 1937. The company’s highly regarded protractors and scale rulers were manufactured at our factory in Melbourne, and sold worldwide, for over 50 years. Our customers include architects, engineers, drafts people, and printers, as well as fashion designers and those involved in navigation, survey and mapping. The W&G tradition can be seen in our STYLOMAT range of drawing tools for fashion design, our DOUGLAS range of navigation protractors, and in our optical tools for optical prescription dispensers. Our drawing tools are now made by a number of Asian based factories. Our experience in manufacturing results in a high level of engagement with these factories over the manufacturing processes, materials and procedures that are used in our products. We make certain that our tools are the best possible quality and value for money, as well as ensuring that they come from factories that comply with SEDEX audited labour conditions. 

 

MATHOMAT geometry templates were invented in 1969 by Craig Young, a mathematics teacher. In his early career Craig had been an engineering tradesman at the Government Aircraft Factory (GAF) in Melbourne. As a classroom teacher, Craig soon realised that his students had problems doing technical drawing in geometry because of the practical limitations of traditional mathematics drawing sets. Craig set about designing a much more practical and inspiring technical drawing tool, the Mathomat template. Mathomat has since became an iconic Australian geometry tool, it has been specified by many schools, and has been used by very many students in Australia (and also more recently in South Africa) since.

 

Objective Learning Materials (OLM) was created by Richard Clivaz in 1984. Richard had been employed in publishing work at David Syme & Co (then publishers of The Age Newspaper) in Melbourne. In this role he helped to secure the Australian distribution rights for a number of highly creative mathematics education publishers. These included the now famous Dale Seymour, Key Curriculum Press and Cuisenaire imprints from the USA, as well as UK based publishers such as Tarquin Publications. When David Syme and Co decided to divest this activity Richard took the plunge into entrepreneurship and bought it from them. He created the very successful OLM publishing business to represent the titles in Australia. The OLM annual catalogue became a greatly appreciated read by many classroom teachers.

 

 

Our mission
Our product design philosophy