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It\u2019s that rarest of things, a hot late-summer afternoon in Hobart, and Laura McCusker opens the gate to her workshop wearing sweaty black shortalls and scuffed work boots. She\u2019s a little sunburnt, a little messy, and doesn\u2019t seem to care.<\/p>\n
McCusker\u2019s settled family life imploded three years ago, and at the age of 51, the celebrated furniture maker and designer is crafting her world afresh. \u201cI\u2019ve always tried to design my life,\u201d she tells me over coffee at a corrugated iron smoko shack with two kayaks suspended from the roof \u2013 the only insulation \u2013 beside her century-old red-brick workshop. \u201cI\u2019m now redesigning it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The new rules are reflected in the furniture taking shape at this former apple-packing shed in suburban Moonah, beside a poplar-lined rivulet branching from the River Derwent. McCusker\u2019s signature has long been pale, almost Scandi-hued timber pieces: tables, benches, cabinets and screens in Tasmanian oak with a mid-century accent. But nearing completion here are a darkly varnished dining-room table and a coffee table, the latter in fluid organic lines. Strikingly -expressive works, these hint at a bolder and more experimental spirit.<\/p>\n
Then there is Forest Stand, commissioned last year by Launceston-based Design Tasmania for its permanent wood collection. A quirky clothes stand made from offcuts of Tasmanian oak, Huon pine, golden sassafras, myrtle and Tasmanian blackwood, left over from bespoke commissioned tables, the piece is sculptural and playful and light on its feet. It functions as a clothes stand \u2013 just. But it\u2019s also an essay about the many lives of wood: its arboreal origins, its subtle beauty, its utility, with something to say about its maker, too.<\/p>\n
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\u201cI\u2019ve always tried to design my life \u2026 I\u2019m now redesigning it.\u201dAdam Gibson<\/p>\n
Most of all, the new rules are inscribed in the credo McCusker is determined to live by. The mother of two worked her Blundstones off to forge a happy home. Her daughter, Ella, has just finished a teaching -degree and Jim, her son, is at university. Now that her marriage has ended, she\u2019s just as determined to be joyously single, unfettered and answerable to herself alone. \u201cIf I\u2019m in the zone it\u2019s work, work, work; if I feel like taking time off, I go camping,\u201d she says. \u201cThis is going to sound soooo Tasmanian, but I have a swag and I toss it in the ute, clip on the cover. Leave.\u201d<\/p>\n
Born in Adelaide to an Irish father and Brazilian mother, both medical specialists and recent immigrants, she moved to Sydney as a teenager. Much like her parents, she had a talent for maths and science, but there were early signs of her mania for making. \u201cI had no interest in dolls, dress-ups or games of make-believe,\u201d she recalls. \u201cBut give me plasticine, cellophane, crayons, paper, wire and glue and I\u2019d be happy for days.\u201d<\/p>\n
As a 21-year-old, she enrolled in the UTS architecture school because she wanted to make a table \u2013 an indispensable, universal, humble domestic object \u2013 and to make it beautiful. But after three days of -abstruse theory, she dropped out, \u201crunning and screaming from the classroom\u201d. She made that damn table anyway through a cabinetry course at TAFE, which led to a course in the finer aspects of woodwork \u2013 from wood types, veneers and joinery to coopering, laminating, designing and making custom furniture. Fine woodworking was, for McCusker, \u201cthe perfect combination of art and engineering, maths and making\u201d. She\u2019d discovered her true vocation. And it would become her life.<\/p>\n
She leads me to her workshop, an Aladdin\u2019s cave of timber and tools and furniture pieces at all stages of gestation. The walls are an orderly farrago of marking gauges, chisels, files, block planes, engineer\u2019s squares, sliding bevels, calipers, cabinet scrapers, handsaws, woodworking rasps, screwdrivers; everything in its place and a place for everything. Ella, who is down from Sydney and \u201con the tools\u201d today, is applying a treacly coat of tannic varnish to one of McCusker\u2019s most recent \u201cdark\u201d pieces. And there, in a shadowy corner, is an astonishing thing: a stack of five raw Huon pine slabs, each one about five centimetres thick, 70 centimetres wide and seven metres long, still in their crusty skin of aged bark.<\/p>\n
Related Article It\u2019s always a shock to see a stash of rare Huon pine, in any state, and McCusker admits she \u201calmost cried\u201d when these \u201csister slabs\u201d (from the same source) were brought in. It was so evocative of the magnificent tree that once was, and had been for centuries. This rich, butter-hued timber is as precious and alluring as the lustre of gold or the scintillation of diamonds. The boards belong to MONA\u2019s founder David Walsh and she will say only that they\u2019ll be used for something \u201camazing\u201d.<\/p>\n A rarely discussed dimension of the \u201cMONA effect\u201d is its role in sustaining the state\u2019s high-end craft economy. McCusker \u2013 who made a 60-metre table for the wedding of Walsh and Kirsha Kaechele, furniture for the MONA Pavilions, outdoor tables and benches for the Moorilla wine bar, a tasting table for the Moorilla cellar door, and dining tables for The Source restaurant \u2013 has long been a beneficiary of MONA\u2019s twin divinities and their almost Pharaonic passion for building.<\/p>\n I first interviewed Laura McCusker in the winter of 2020 for a piece in this magazine on Tasmanian women designers. Sitting with her today in the smoko shack, beneath the suspended kayaks, and beside a well-worn upright piano, I ask the most elemental of questions: \u201cSo what\u2019s changed for you these past six years?\u201d Her eyes widen and she shoots back, \u201cWhat hasn\u2019t changed?\u201d Then she turns, heads to the sink, returns with coffee, and breaks the seal on the most delicate of subjects.<\/p>\n When marital problems hit in mid-2022, McCusker began to study her marriage as if it were a carefully crafted object, modelled by hands and guided by hearts. \u201cThe Japanese would say that the greatest respect you can give to a loved yet broken object is to repair it,\u201d she tells me. \u201cThe cracks are part of its beauty. You don\u2019t throw it away. Relationships age and take on character, just like the furniture pieces I\u2019ve dedicated my life to.\u201d She was looking for ways to put it back together, this thing of human beauty.<\/p>\n It was a fine idea and noble sentiment, in keeping with McCusker\u2019s instinct for braiding together her life and work, but it ultimately proved futile. Despite her best efforts, the fissure was irreparable. The break, inevitable.<\/p>\n When I spoke with McCusker back in 2020, it was striking how strongly her story was impressed with the trope of woman-in-a-man\u2019s-world. The other Tasmanian women in the story \u2013 jewellers Anita Dineen and Emma Bugg, and graphic designer Megan Perkins \u2013 weren\u2019t lugging and planing planks for a living. McCusker told how her first job in Hobart, after moving from Sydney in 2003, was making furniture for a luxury yacht, in a shipyard with 350 men. On day one, there was a mad scramble to remove the girlie pics from the tea room.<\/p>\n Talking to her now, she adds a not-insignificant gloss. \u201cI was a young mother at the time, breastfeeding Jimbo. I used to say goodbye to him around 6am and wouldn\u2019t see him again till six in the evening. It was a really tough time. But we had a mortgage and no money and I needed to get a job to provide for the family.\u201d<\/p>\n She remembers starting her own practice in inner western Sydney three decades ago, in 1996, with her apprenticeship and trade certificates in woodworking under her belt, and a \u201cbig pregnant belly\u201d \u2013 she was carrying Ella \u2013 beneath her overalls. \u201cI was working right up to 38 weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n The decision to have children early was all part of the plan, she says, the \u201cgrand design\u201d of her life. The idea was to free herself up in her 50s. Things have panned out, pretty much, as expected. \u201cI feel like I\u2019m having my 20s in my 50s,\u201d she says with a quick smile of delight at the paradox. \u201cIt\u2019s so much more fun to be 20 when you\u2019re 50, if that makes sense. I\u2019m fitter than I\u2019ve ever been. I know who I am. I\u2019ve got housing security, job security, more financial security than I\u2019ve ever had. In your 20s, you\u2019re still trying to work out who you are.\u201d<\/p>\n Of course she\u2019s ended up with a tad more freedom than she hoped for. \u201cMy new plan is to work out how to do this in a way that\u2019s still fun and joyful. I know I\u2019m incurably optimistic, always looking for the silver linings. I think it In the early years of her career, and her relocation to Hobart, she was acutely conscious of her femininity in a male-dominated world of tools and machines, that required strength, skill and precision, and an element of danger. She wanted more than anything to fit in. So the girl with her Brazilian mother\u2019s soft, brown eyes and heavy hair \u201clearnt to speak bloke, my accent changed, I became harder. I wanted to just get on with my work and be judged by my work.\u201d As part of that strategy of effacement, she set out to \u201cdial down her femininity\u201d, lest it become a distraction. \u201cIt was survival strategy via camouflage. I\u2019m sure I\u2019m not the first woman to use this technique.\u201d<\/p>\n \u2018I\u2019m older, wiser and I\u2019m not worried about making other people feel comfortable.\u2019<\/p>\n Laura McCusker<\/p>\n Now, three decades after McCusker started fashioning a life in wood, \u201cI\u2019m older, wiser and I\u2019m not worried about making other people feel comfortable. I know I am good at what I do and I make no excuses for who I am.\u201d And with time has come a deeper appreciation of \u201ctraditional feminine skills\u201d in the worlds of business, craft and art. \u201cI would say, \u2018Don\u2019t throw that stuff out thinking you have to blend in.\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>\n McCusker has learnt lessons from life that she\u2019s taken into the workshop, and lessons from the workshop that have aided her in life. There\u2019s a quiet meditative conversation going on during the slow, reflective process of woodwork, despite the background hammering and the shrill ringing of saws. \u201cYou learn to read the timber,\u201d she says. \u201cRead its grain, its growth, what part of the tree the board has been cut from. You can go against the grain \u2013 and sometimes you must. But your knives need to be sharp, the cut not too deep, and take it slow.\u201d<\/p>\n Related Article Her children, she admits, often roll their eyes when she talks this way, when she comes over all Jedi Wood Master, but she can\u2019t resist the temptation to view working with wood as a metaphor for working through life. A piece of timber\u2019s most beautiful feature, for McCusker, is as often as not the result of stress. \u201cOf fracture. Of tension. Of the tree responding to wind, to lean, to damage, to uneven light. What we admire as beauty is often the visible record of difficulty. Those glorious growth rings \u2013 so striking when they arc across a board \u2013 are also where the tension lives in the tree. Where torsion builds. Where movement is stored. They are beautiful \u2013 and they can be unstable. They demand respect. Allowance. Understanding.\u201d<\/p>\n I leave McCusker at her studio and drive two hours north along the Midland Highway to view Forest Stand. The work is an evolution from a more functional piece designed a decade earlier for a client to encourage his partner to dismantle the \u201cclothes monster\u201d in the corner of the room, and actually put his clothes away. Responding to a commission last year from Design Tasmania, she returned to the idea. This time she used specialty Tasmanian timbers left over from commissioned tables \u2013 cast-offs, as she puts it, \u201ctoo good to throw away but not good for very much else\u201d. The fine bones of this functional sculpture mesh into a fretwork of contained and open spaces, some seeking earth and stability, others breaking free.<\/p>\n Arts consultant Pippa Dickson, who met McCusker more than 20 years ago when she arrived in Hobart as a young mother and designer, sees Forest Stand as a riff on an earlier cluster of verticals and play of shadows. This piece dates from 2003, an undulating slatted screen of blackbutt titled Barcode Screen, a bespoke version of which is in Walsh and Kaechele\u2019s -private collection.<\/p>\n Consistently through both McCusker\u2019s work and her personality, Dickson sees \u201cstrength and elegance, grit and refinement\u201d, a combination that \u201cfeels entirely her own\u201d. For sure there\u2019s an evolution, but there\u2019s also a straight and consistent grain.<\/p>\n The next day, McCusker sends a note to say that our discussion about design and life, design in life, and designing life \u2013 at least having a good crack at it \u2013 has prompted thoughts about purpose. As is her way, she frames her meditation in tangible terms that relate to her craft.<\/p>\n \u201cIf perfection isn\u2019t attainable,\u201d she writes, \u201cthe question then becomes: which side of perfect do you choose? Functional perfectionism? Or dysfunctional perfectionism?<\/p>\n![\"\u201cIt\u2019s](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/801e1d9114e0732023fc1540cafe6d5d9eaedda1.jpeg\")
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McCusker working on the wedding table of MONA\u2019s David Walsh and Kirsha Kaechele in 2014.Jonathan Wherrett<\/p>\n![\"Laura](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/73f21597561506a0ea2971cf0d53a0e9d42cad29.jpeg\")
Laura McCusker with her kids.Courtesy of Laura McCusker<\/p>\n
irritates the shit out of my children sometimes. But, what are the options? This stage of life can be a bit rough, but if you learn how to, you know, read the surf \u2013 and how to sort of ride the waves \u2013 then you\u2019re much better than just being thrown around by it.\u201d<\/p>\n![\"After](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/6ad7ade47c4b86dac09a222f0e3047679b33ee4a.jpeg\")
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The quirky \u201cForest Stand\u201d commissioned last year by Design Tasmania for its permanent collection.Peter Whyte Photography<\/p>\n
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