There was no grand relaunch. Just nap time, a dusted-off box of beads, and a table near a window where the bush pressed close, and the sea wasn’t far. That’s where NOA Australia came back to life.
Notes of Australia
The name holds two things. It’s a tribute to Nicky’s son Noah, born during a period of upheaval, the pandemic, a move interstate, and a return to Victoria. And it stands for Notes of Australia: the landscapes, coastlines, and native world that have shaped Nicky’s creative instinct since childhood.
She came to craft not as a hobby but as a language. Painting classes as a kid. Shells collected with her mum. Her late grandmother’s button collection became a whole line of feather fascinators, selling out at the Camel Cup in Alice Springs. Every place she’s lived, Perth, Alice Springs, and Lakes Entrance, has left its mark on the work.
“I have always found myself coming back to beads. They’re so sustainable, can be made out of anything, and have been used in so many cultures for millions of years.”
– Nicky
Beads resist mass production by their nature. Works can be broken down and reimagined with almost no waste. In an era of fast everything, making something beautiful by hand, one bead at a time, is a quiet act of resistance.
Where the bush meets the sea
Tourists pull over at Jimmy’s Point lookout on Kalimna Hill every day to photograph the view Nicky drives past on her commute. She hasn’t stopped noticing it. That’s the pace of Lakes Entrance, unhurried, present, and it runs through everything she makes.
Some days she’ll create three pieces and discard them all. Other days, she has to stop herself from keeping everything. That tension between artist and business owner is part of the work, too.
One of a kind
Every piece Nicky makes is unique, not as a marketing line, but as a genuine conviction. Baroque pearls, dried flowers, natural gemstones: the materials themselves resist uniformity. Nothing in nature is perfectly symmetrical, and neither is anything from NOA Australia.
In 2025, she began teaching beading workshops at a local Neighbourhood House. Teaching something she’d always found intuitive showed her just how much she’d developed, and gave her back an appreciation for slowness, for process, for the quiet hours that are easy to overlook when self-doubt is loud.
What it means to be the Regional recipient
She applied on a whim. Read her own application back and thought the selectors would laugh. When the acceptance came, she screenshotted it and sent it to her mum, just to make sure she was reading it right.
That detail matters. Because putting handmade work into the world, work you designed, threaded, and made by hand, makes judgment feel personal. Being selected wasn’t just an opportunity. It was validation.
The work keeps going
New this season: hand-stamped photo gift cards, made using linocut stamps Nicky carves herself. The idea came from a simple truth, her grandparents love getting mail, and so does her son. In a world where photos disappear into feeds and cards go in the bin, she wanted to make something worth keeping. Something sent through the post with a little hand-designed love in it.
It’s a small thing. But it’s the small things here that carry the most weight.
Find Nicky and the full NOA Australia collection at The Finders Keepers Sydney Design Market, Carriageworks, Eveleigh on Gadigal land, 1–3 May. One week before Mother’s Day. Daily entry $7, tickets on sale now.