Albert Rae is a practitioner of a dying art, giving permanence to the temporary.

He and his eight employees, working on mostly post-war machinery in a factory north of Adelaide, make high-quality, bespoke boxes.

Rae’s handmade boxes have housed gifts from Australian governments to world leaders, including Queen Elizabeth, and contained 10,000 sets of the paperback Harry Potter series distributed across the country.

WATCH: Scroll down to see Rae at work in a beautiful short film by Randy Larcombe.

The success of the business he bought with his wife Scarlett more than a decade ago, Boxbiz, stands in glaring contrast to the slow decline of the state’s broader manufacturing industry.

But Rae has always looked to longevity where others have seen disposal.

“When I was a kid in Belfast, for Christmas they used to get these dinky toys all beautifully packaged up,” he recalls.

“In those days foam hadn’t been invented, so they’d just put a toy inside a box and the thing that held it together was a cardboard cut out, for the wheels and for all the bits and pieces.

“And every time, when I played with the toys, once I finished with them, I put them all back in the boxes and put everything back in as it was, as if it was brand new, and that’s what I’ve always done.

“It probably all came from my father, who said that if you look after toys, or tools, or whatever, they will last you a lifetime.

“That was in the days when they used to make things to last a lifetime. These days there’s so much obsolescence built in.”

Rae’s passion for the endurance of society’s most disposable of materials followed him to Adelaide.

By the early 2000s, he and Scarlett had worked for large organisations for years, and wanted to take destiny into their own hands.

“We were looking at buying our own business because … if something happened when I was working, people wouldn’t employ a 50-year-old, so we decided to buy our own business,” Rae says.

“The boxes that we make are all made by hand.

“We take a lot of care and attention … so that, as long as they look after the boxes, they will last a number of years.

“We’d like to keep it going and keep the skill.”

He relies mostly on demand outside South Australia for his “niche” product, taking between one and 2000 orders at a time.

“We have made them in the past for the prime minister’s department and for the premier’s department, both here and in New South Wales.

“Any time [former foreign minister] Alexander Downer was giving gifts, he was very keen on being sure it was South Australian product.

“About three or four months ago, Premier Jay Weatherill was going over to the Vatican. He needed a presentation box for a sash to give to a cardinal, and needed another box for a book on wine production in South Australia, which he was giving to some dignitary over there.”

The factory’s success has led the Raes to invest in another, ostensibly flagging industry.

“As a matter of fact, we’re acquiring a book-binding business at the end of this month.

“We’re looking to expand because there’s a synergy between what we do and what the book binding business [does].”

And with “common sense, a lot of hard work, attention to detail and attention to quality”, the couple intend to endure.