Huon Pine Gallery and Shop Handcrafted Huon Pine Wares
When you walk into the gallery and workshop at Huon Pine Gallery and Shop in Strahan, you will be greeted by the distinctive smell of Tasmania’s famous Huon Pine and the aromatic oil finishes that are used on the timber work.
Then you will begin to look closer at the displays of beautiful woodwork, admiring the many pieces created from Tasmania’s rainforest timbers.
As your eye wanders further, you may see some of the in-house craftspeople at work or talking, laughing, creating, dreaming or imagining. There is always something happening and there are more ideas for pieces than we have time to create them!
Not all ideas become reality, but we have fun designing and dreaming.
The majority of work on display at Huon Pine Gallery and Shop is handcrafted in the workshop and we are very proud of this! You can often see them working at a lathe, turning Tasmania’s unique Huon pine into Grinders, Spurtles, or other amazing products only to see it the next day proudly displayed on the shelves – if it hasn’t already been bought by an admiring customer.
We also ship our products Australia wide, so if you changed your mind and now wish to purchase something simply view our shop. Place your order online and we will generally ship within 2-3 days.
Huon Pine.
Lagarostrobos franklinii.
Found only in west and south west Tasmania (in a broad arc from the Pieman River in the north to the Huon River in the south), Huon pine trees grow in climax wet temperate rainforests, especially on river banks or very wet areas. The trees grow very slowly – often less than 1mm in girth per year – and reach prodigious ages; scientists agree that many individuals are aged 2,500 years and older. The average timber tree is likely to be at least 1,000 years old. We take very seriously our responsibility to treat such venerable forest denizens with respect and care; all Huon pine used in our workshop is purchased from a licensed sawmill and comes from stockpiles or stumps and long-dead trees retrieved from the forest floor. Every log is thoroughly assessed and carefully cut and seasoned to maximise the timber quality and quantity, and even the smallest offcuts and sawdust are made available to craftspeople for value-adding.
The
Ancient King
From a primeval place, where rivers rise in mist and mountain rain, Where shadows lurk in filtered light, ‘neath the gaze of Father Time,
Where the mossy fronds of ancient pines reach ever for the earth, Where no man had trod, no axe had swung, nor horse nor bullock worked.
Came a forest giant of mellowed gold, borne on flood and coastal tide, washed to a shore in fearful storm, there a thousand years to lie,Had three thousand years stood tall and proud, another thousand dead, would finally fall to a river’s rage, the king had not been spared.
Bleached pale neath summer’s searing sun, torn of limb with winter’s wrath, Two hundred years ‘fore to taste the salt there at the river’s mouth, Cast high upon the swampy shore, there to lie with moss and dirt, to sink deep down into the ground, just a mound upon the earth.
There revealed by the bushman’s axe, as inquiring blow be struck, golden wood spoiled not by time nor tide lay just beneath the crust, For days they toiled with spike and spade, with hook, with block and rope, to exhume, to roll an ancient king to where once more ‘twould float.
With bended backs, this callused crew, floating giant at rope to haul five long miles beyond the bay to those pits where the sawyers toil, There be broken down to quarter, to fine flitch of fifty feet, To be sized to plank, stacked and racked, a shipwrights spec to heed.
A piquant spice of perfumed pine, afore trapped five thousand years, carried on a zephyr breeze to where an ancient king was reared in a primeval place, where rivers rise in mist and mountain rain, where shadows lurk in filtered light, ‘neath the gaze of Father Time.