Behind the Making  ·  Woodcraft  ·  FNB Hobart

Where It Started

Some projects begin with a plan. This one began with a piece of Tasmanian timber and a shared question: what if the things we make could carry meaning beyond their shape?

Christiaan and Priscilla worked together on a collection of five hand-crafted wooden animals, each one cut, shaped, and finished from local Tasmanian timber. They are not decorative in a distant way — they feel like companions. And each one was given a theme, a small, honest word that ties it to something larger than itself.

Together, these five animals have become the unofficial mascots of FNB Hobart Makers — the making and craft arm of Food Not Bombs Hobart, a community built around mutual aid, shared skills, and the belief that ordinary people making things together is quietly radical. If you'd like to know more about what drives that work, the About page tells the story well.

What follows is a short account of each animal, and the theme it carries.

The Five Mascots

🐨 Woodland Wombat — Belonging

The wombat is a creature of place. Low to the ground, unhurried, deeply at home in its patch of earth — it does not wander looking for somewhere better. It belongs where it is, and it stays.

Belonging is not always a feeling that arrives easily, and mutual-aid communities know this as well as anyone. People come to a shared table from all kinds of circumstances — not all of them easy, not all of them chosen. The Woodland Wombat holds the theme of belonging as a gentle reminder that a community is built, steadily, by people deciding to show up and stay. You don't have to have everything sorted. You just have to be here.

🐯 Lost Tiger — Hope

There is something quietly moving about a lost tiger. The name carries weight in Tasmania, where the thylacine — the so-called Tasmanian tiger — passed from the world within living memory. Its absence is part of the island's story, and its image lingers.

To name this carved figure the Lost Tiger and give it the theme of hope is a deliberate and tender act. Hope is not optimism — it is not the insistence that things will be fine. It is the willingness to keep going anyway, even when something precious has been lost, even when the path forward isn't clear. In the context of mutual aid, hope looks like continuing to feed people, to share skills, to make things together, even when the conditions that make such work necessary feel overwhelming. The Lost Tiger carries that kind of hope.

🦆 Riverstone Platypus — Adaptability

The platypus defies easy description. It borrows from so many different templates — bill, fur, webbed feet, electroreception — that biologists initially thought early specimens were a hoax. It does not fit a single category, and that has never stopped it.

Adaptability is one of the quieter forms of strength. Community making projects often look a little unusual from the outside, too — they don't always fit neatly into categories like "shop" or "charity" or "workshop". FNB Hobart Makers sits at the edge of several things at once: craft, mutual aid, community skill-sharing, small commerce. The Riverstone Platypus is a good mascot for that kind of comfortable strangeness. Being hard to categorise is not a weakness. It's just what it means to be genuinely useful in more than one way.

🦔 Curious Echidna — Discovery

Echidnas move through the world nose-first. They are curious in the most literal sense: probing, investigating, following a trail to see where it leads. They do not rush. They are patient in their curiosity, and thorough.

Discovery, as a theme, speaks to what happens when people try something new — pick up a tool they haven't held before, join a community they weren't sure would welcome them, or begin a small project without knowing if it will work. The making table at FNB Hobart Makers is exactly that kind of space: one where curiosity is welcome, where not-knowing is fine, and where the point is often the finding-out rather than the finished thing. The Curious Echidna holds that spirit well.

😈 Wild Heart Devil — Courage

The Tasmanian devil has a reputation that precedes it. Loud, fierce, a little alarming if you've only heard the stories. But spend time with the reality and you find something different: a creature that is scrappy and determined, that holds its ground, that is unafraid to take up space.

Courage, in the context of mutual aid, is not always the dramatic kind. Sometimes it looks like asking for help when you need it. Sometimes it looks like standing up for a community that others overlook, or running a stall, or choosing to share resources instead of hoarding them. The Wild Heart Devil is a mascot for that everyday courage — the scrappy, determined, unapologetic kind. It knows what it is. It doesn't make itself smaller.

A Closing Reflection

Five animals, five words. Belonging. Hope. Adaptability. Discovery. Courage. None of these themes were chosen arbitrarily. They map, roughly and honestly, onto what it actually feels like to be part of a community that makes things together in service of mutual aid — the good days and the harder ones both.

Christiaan and Priscilla's woodcraft project gave those words a physical form: something you can hold, set on a shelf, or give to someone who needs a quiet reminder of one of them. That is not a small thing. Handmade objects carry intention in a way that mass-produced ones rarely do, and these five carry plenty of it.

The things we make carry the values we make them with. Each of these five animals is a small, handmade argument for the kind of community we're trying to be.

If any of the five resonates with you — if you see yourself in the wombat's rootedness, the tiger's quiet hope, the platypus's comfortable strangeness, the echidna's curiosity, or the devil's scrappy courage — you're welcome to bring one home. You can browse all five animals and the rest of our handmade collection through the Shop. Each purchase directly supports Food Not Bombs Hobart and the mutual-aid work it makes possible.

Thank you for reading — and for caring about the story behind the making.