I didn’t begin with business. I didn’t begin with vision. I began with survival.
I grew up inside abuse and neglect — not always loud, not always visible, but constant enough that my nervous system learned one main skill: endure. As a kid in a bad family I was taken to a large farm in Victoria and they introduced me to a man who they had working on their farm – they told me he had had a bad family growing up and he worked with wood which was something that allowed you to think about your past while you worked – and they said in that way he was a productive man.
However I showed some talent at school. And I liked to gain the affection of the teachers. I didn’t know how to get involved with wood. My step father never let me use any tools at home. So I stayed in school – and never really left.
I probably stayed in school too long because school was safer than home. It was structured. Predictable. You knew when bells would ring. You knew what was expected of you. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed.
I followed education the way some people follow a road out of town — not because they love the road, but because it leads away from where they started.
Eventually I graduated. A long-awaited degree. In something called “business.” It was abstract to me. Like learning the map of a country I had never walked in. I had no hope of becoming a business man like the other students.
Moreover on the day I graduated, something strange happened. Instead of feeling complete, I felt empty. Like I’d finished a road that didn’t actually go anywhere.
So I picked up a piece of wood. Not as a plan. Not as a strategy. Just to see. I worked on it for a while. Slowly. Clumsily. To make sure — to check whether this was real or just a distraction. Whether my hands were telling me something my head hadn’t yet learned to say.
And they were.
searching around for wood. Going into the bush or people’s places I know might have some wood down the back. People were surprised I had something I wanted to do. I hadn’t wanted to be learning at school for about 10 years.
After that I lost my workshop, which was borrowed from someone. So I left. I went travelling, not for leisure but for direction. I was looking for a new place to do my workwork — not just a place, but a way of living where making something with your hands could also make something in you.
That search ended in Tasmania, in the hills.
There, alone, I began making furniture. Rustic, imperfect, honest. Made from recycled wood. Wood with history in it. Nails pulled, scars kept, shapes that refused to be smoothed into sameness.
For ten years I worked mostly alone, though I would load my diesel ute on a Saturday, and sell what I’d made at Salamanca Market.
I learned what wood does when you respect it.
I learned what I do when I am not being watched.
I learned that making things was also making myself.
But isolation is not a final form. Thanks Nietzsche!
Something in me started wanting people again — not the chaos of my childhood, but the possibility of shared work. So I went back to university, not to escape life, but to understand it with a social degree.
That’s when woodcraft stopped being only mine.
It became something for a community.
First through a project called Cognitive Factory — working on capacity, designing woodworking systems with people who had acquired brain injuries. We weren’t trying to make perfect products. We were trying to make possible work.
Then came Woodwork Warriors — working with wood in a psychosocial centre. Wood became a way to breathe. To slow. To belong without needing to explain yourself.
And then, slowly, Woodcraft Adventures — not just making with wood, but making toward capacity. Toward dignity. Toward the idea that work could be shaped around people, not people crushed into work.
Looking back, this wasn’t a straight path.
It was a long road away from harm.
Then a wrong road that looked like success.
Then a piece of wood in my hands.
Then mountains.
Then people.
Then community.
This microenterprise didn’t begin as a business.
It began as a body learning it was allowed to make something.
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