How We Got Here

A personal history of woodworking, community making, and learning to let the maker lead.

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Starting with Wood

I didn’t come to wood through a tidy apprenticeship or a family tradition. I came to it sideways, after a childhood that was difficult in the ways that difficult childhoods are — uncertain, sometimes frightening, not always safe. Wood was something I could hold. It didn’t move unless I moved it. It didn’t shout. It had weight and grain and smell, and it asked something honest of me in return for what it gave.

Before any of that, I had done what seemed sensible. I studied business. I finished a degree that taught me about markets and margins and efficiency, and I came out the other side feeling quietly hollowed out. The language of commerce — productivity, throughput, return on investment — didn’t map onto anything I actually cared about. I wanted to make things. Not in a romantic, Instagram-filter way, but in the literal, physical sense: to start with raw material and end with something that hadn’t existed before.

So I started with wood. In Tasmania, that means you’re never far from it. The island is forested deeply, and its timber culture runs through the place like a root system — sometimes visible, sometimes not, but always there underfoot.

Recycled Timber and Learning by Doing

I learned mostly from recycled timber. This wasn’t an ideological statement at first — it was practical. Recycled timber is cheaper, and when you’re teaching yourself, you need to be able to afford your mistakes. But working with reclaimed wood teaches you something that new, dressed timber doesn’t: it teaches you to listen. Old timber has already been somewhere. It has nail holes and stains and memories of other uses. You have to work with what it is, not what you wish it were. That discipline turned out to be one of the most important things I’ve ever learned.

I made furniture. Tables, mostly. Benches. Things with flat surfaces and straight lines where I could learn to be precise. I worked alone, in sheds and makeshift workshops, gradually acquiring tools and knowledge in roughly equal measure. There was no teacher. There were books, and there was failure, and there was the slow accumulation of understanding that only comes from actually doing.

Salamanca Market and the Dignity of Being a Maker

Eventually I started selling work at Salamanca Market in Hobart. I was called Rustix. If you know Salamanca, you know it’s a particular kind of place — a long, stone-walled Saturday morning that has been going long enough to have its own rhythms and its own community. Makers, farmers, artists, and an enormous river of tourists and locals moving through, looking, buying, talking.

Selling at the market taught me something I hadn’t expected to learn: that being a maker carries dignity. When someone picks up something you’ve built and asks how you made it — not out of politeness but out of genuine curiosity — something shifts. You are no longer just a person trying to sell an object. You are the person who knows something. You have a skill, a practice, a story. That exchange — between the made thing and the person curious about it — turned out to matter enormously to me, and it’s something I’ve come back to again and again in the years since.

I also began to notice something about the effect of making on confidence. For people who have spent years being told — explicitly or by circumstance — that they are not capable, that they do not produce value, that they don’t belong in professional or creative spaces, making something with their hands and selling it for a fair price can be quietly revolutionary. The object is the evidence. It exists. It was made. That matters.

Making something with your hands and selling it for a fair price can be quietly revolutionary. The object is the evidence. It exists. It was made. That matters.

Moving Toward Community

For a long time, woodworking was a solitary practice for me. That suited me in ways I didn’t fully understand until later. Solitude in a workshop feels productive and safe. You control the pace. You control the outcome. Nobody interrupts the grain or changes the plan.

But I was also studying social work, and the two things — the shed and the study — were pulling me toward each other. Social work gave me a language for what I was already feeling: that isolation is not the same as independence, that meaningful work is always relational at some level, and that people who have been excluded from economic and social life need genuine pathways back in — not charity, not pity, but actual opportunity to contribute and belong.

The Cognitive Factory was an early attempt to put these ideas together. It brought together woodworking and people with cognitive impairment, and it taught me immediately how much I had to learn about working alongside people whose experience of the world is different from mine. The work wasn’t always smooth. The systems I’d developed for myself didn’t automatically transfer. I had to slow down, pay attention, and rethink what ‘good work’ actually meant in a shared setting.

Woodwork Warriors followed — a project built on a similar premise but with a wider net. More participants, more complexity, more negotiation about what the work was for and who it served. I was learning, again by doing, that community making is a fundamentally different practice from solitary making. The tools are the same. The timber is the same. But the relationships, the power dynamics, the question of who decides what gets made and why — all of that is different, and all of it matters.

Cherbourg: Relationships, Ownership, Place, and Listening

The experience that changed me most was time spent learning at the Cherbourg Men’s Shed in Queensland. Cherbourg is an Aboriginal community, and the Men’s Shed there operates with a set of values that I’ve been trying to articulate and practice ever since.

What I learned in Cherbourg is that productivity is not the point. This sounds simple, but it cuts against almost everything that social enterprise and disability employment programs are designed around. The programs I’d encountered — and in some ways the ones I’d run — had a tendency to organise themselves around outputs. How many items were produced? How many participants attended? What was the revenue? These are not unimportant questions, but when they become the primary frame, they can subtly distort everything else. They can turn participants into workers in the worst sense: people managed toward an output, rather than people building something meaningful in their own lives.

At Cherbourg, relationships came first. Not as a strategy — not ‘we build relationships so that productivity will follow’ — but as an end in themselves. The shed was a place where men could come, belong, contribute at whatever pace and in whatever way made sense for them. Ownership mattered: this was their shed, their project, their community. Place mattered: the shed was located in, and accountable to, a specific community with a specific history. And listening mattered, not just as a communication technique but as a posture — the willingness to sit with uncertainty, to not impose a predetermined plan, to find out what people actually wanted before deciding what you were going to offer them.

I came away from Cherbourg with a clearer understanding of something I’d been circling for years: that the maker leads. Not the program. Not the organisation. Not the facilitator, however well-meaning. The person doing the making is the one with the stake in it, and any project that claims to support makers while actually directing them toward someone else’s goals has got the relationship backwards.

The maker leads. Not the program. Not the organisation. Not the facilitator, however well-meaning. The person doing the making is the one with the stake in it.

Woodcraft Adventures and Microenterprise Builder

Woodcraft Adventures grew out of all of this. Christiaan and Priscilla’s work — the handcrafted Tasmanian wooden animals, the custom orders, the workshops — is not just a small business. It’s a demonstration that meaningful, skilled, community-connected making is viable. That you can build something local and particular and human-scaled and have it sustain you. That craft is not a nostalgic hobby but a living practice with real economic and social potential.

The Microenterprise Builder model emerged as a way of thinking about how to support other people into similar possibilities. A microenterprise is small by design — it doesn’t aspire to scale in the way a conventional business does. It aspires to fit the person running it. It fits their skills, their capacity, their community, their life. The role of a support project is not to build a production line and staff it with makers. It’s to help each maker find, grow, and sustain their own practice.

This distinction matters enormously, and it’s one I’ve had to be deliberate about. Social enterprise can easily replicate the same exclusions it’s trying to address. If the enterprise needs output to survive, the pressure to produce can crowd out the very flexibility and autonomy that made participation possible in the first place. The better model — harder to fund, harder to explain, but closer to right — is one where the enterprise provides infrastructure, skills, market access and support, and the maker decides what to make, at what pace, for whom.

What FNB Hobart Makers Is Trying to Build

FNB Hobart Makers is the current expression of everything described above. It is an attempt to build something genuinely different from a standard social enterprise or supported employment program — something that takes seriously the lessons of Cherbourg, of Salamanca, of the Cognitive Factory, of all the workshops and sheds and markets and difficult conversations that have led here.

At its core, FNB Hobart Makers is trying to create shared skills. Not just shared tools or shared space, though those matter too, but a living community of practice where knowledge passes between people — where someone who has been making for twenty years and someone who picked up a chisel for the first time last month are both part of the same conversation, and both have something to offer it.

It is trying to provide practical support — real, specific, unglamorous support — to people who want to build creative livelihoods but face barriers that the mainstream market doesn’t accommodate. People with disability. People recovering from difficult experiences. People who have been told, in various ways and for various reasons, that the creative economy is not for them.

It is trying to build dignity — the kind that comes from making something real, selling it fairly, and being known in your community as someone who contributes. Not the managed dignity of a program participant, but the earned dignity of a maker with a practice and a reputation.

It is trying to nurture local creative livelihoods that are genuinely local — rooted in Hobart’s particular character, its materials, its markets, its communities — rather than chasing trends or scaling toward something unrecognisable.

And it is trying to build community connection. Not as a program outcome to be measured, but as the actual point. The shed, the market stall, the shared meal, the conversation between makers who wouldn’t otherwise have met — these are not inputs to something else. They are the thing itself.

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I started with a piece of recycled timber and no idea what I was doing. I’m still learning. But what I know now, after all of this, is that making matters — not because it produces things, though it does, but because of what happens to people when they make. When they discover they are capable. When they are seen. When they belong somewhere because of what they can do and who they are, not in spite of it. That is what we’re trying to build. That is how we got here. And it’s where we’re going.