“My hands are done. These are the last boards I’ll ever make.” — Noel (68) is selling his final blackwood chopping board pairs at a special price. One board for raw meat, one for everything else.

From a machinery shed at the end of a gravel track outside Smithton, in Tasmania’s far north-west, Noel Kerrison is letting go of the last blackwood boards he will ever make. Each pair is cut from Tasmanian blackwood grown on his family’s dairy farm, every board one solid piece, shaped by hand with a rasp. His hands are giving out, and when these 312 pairs are sold, the shed closes for good.

“I’m sixty-eight,” Noel says, turning a finished board over in his hands. “Some mornings I can’t close my hand around the rasp till smoko. The knuckles swell up and the grip just isn’t there anymore.” He sets the board back on the shelf. “Blackwood is hard timber. It doesn’t forgive a shaky hand. I’d rather stop than send out a pair that isn’t right.”

At nineteen Noel took a job at the sawmill outside Smithton and graded blackwood there for 41 years. The timber for his boards comes from the Kerrison farm, from the blackwoods along the creek his grandfather fenced off from the cows. Noel only takes the ones that come down on their own: wind, lightning, old age. “I’ve never dropped a living blackwood for a board,” he says. “Never had to.”

Two things ruin a wooden chopping board

The first is the glue seam. Turn almost any wooden board over and you will count four or five narrow strips glued together and sanded flat so it looks like one piece. It isn’t. Water works into the seams, the strips move against each other, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil will close again.

The second is timber that was dried too fast. Rush it and the board looks perfect the day it arrives, then shows a hairline crack a few weeks later. Noel saws every log into slabs and leaves them to air-dry up in the rafters of the shed for at least three years before he cuts a single board.

Then he shapes every board by hand: the curved edges, the handle rings, the long slope of her shoulder, all with a rasp, a scraper and sandpaper. Because of that, no two pairs come out exactly alike. If the two boards of a pair don’t sit right against each other, neither one leaves the shed.

Two shadows on brown paper

For their 40th wedding anniversary, Noel wanted to give Raelene something she would use every day. One evening she stood next to him at the kitchen window, her head on his shoulder like always, and the low sun threw their shadow on the wall. He taped up a sheet of brown wrapping paper and traced it with a carpenter’s pencil.

He cut two boards from that outline. The tall one in his shape, the short one in hers. Raelene, who ran the school canteen in town for thirty-one years, put them to work the same week. “The tall one’s yours,” she told him. “Raw meat goes on yours. Mine is for everything else.” As it turns out, that is exactly what food-safety experts recommend.

Most kitchens still use one board for everything, or two that look alike and get mixed up. Noel’s can’t be mixed up. The shape tells you which one is which.

What comes off a plastic chopping board

In 2023, engineers at North Dakota State University measured what actually comes off a chopping board when a knife hits it, day after day. On the common white plastic boards, the answer was somewhere between 14 and 79 million tiny plastic particles a year.

Every board gives up a little of itself under a blade. The difference is what it gives up. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic does not break down, not in the bin, not in the ground, not in you. Blackwood gives up blackwood.

“But isn’t wood bad for raw chicken?”

It’s the first thing most people ask, and the research says the opposite. At the University of California, Davis, food microbiologist Dean Cliver put salmonella, listeria and E. coli on boards of wood and plastic. On the wooden boards, the bacteria died off within minutes and could no longer be found on the surface. On knife-scarred plastic, they hid in the grooves and were hard to wash out.

You still scrub the board after raw meat. But a solid blackwood board with no glue seams gives bacteria nowhere to hide, and it doesn’t shed plastic into your dinner.

What makes Noel’s boards different

• One solid piece each: Sawn from a single board of Tasmanian blackwood, never glued up from strips. No seam means nothing to crack open and nothing for germs to hide in.
• A board for raw, a board for the rest: The tall board (38 × 20 cm) for raw meat, chicken and fish. The short board (30 × 20 cm, both just 1 cm thin) for bread, cheese, fruit and veggies, and it goes straight to the table as a serving board.
• Made to be handed down: Wash by hand, stand it up to dry, rub in a little oil once a month. Looked after like that, solid blackwood lasts for decades.
• Kind to your knives: Blackwood is softer than the hard eucalypts, bamboo or glass, so your knives stay sharp for much longer.
• Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled. No varnish, no lacquer, nothing to chip off into your food.

The end of an era: Noel’s last 312 pairs

Noel is 68 and he works alone. “There’s no one to take it over,” he says. Raelene passed away in January 2025. He still walks out to the shed every morning at five, the way he always did.

But his hands have made the decision for him. A full day at the bench now costs him the next one. “Forty-one years at the mill and seven on these,” he says. “My hands are telling me to pull up. I’ve listened to timber my whole life. I reckon I can listen to them.”

His daughter Kylie got him set up on Cedar & Tin, a small online shop for makers like him, over a single weekend. “I don’t know the first thing about the internet,” he says. “I know blackwood.”

Most of the pairs go out as presents. Kylie says more than half are sent to someone other than the person who paid: newlyweds, anniversaries, parents who reckon they don’t need anything. People see the two shapes leaning on each other and think of somebody. With Christmas coming, she expects the last pairs to be gone before December.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “Through the week the big one’s for raw chicken and snags and the little one’s for everything else, and it works. When we have people over I scrub them both and put them out side by side, and someone always asks where I got them.”

  – Dianne T., 61, Devonport, TAS
• ★★★★★

  “I was a cabinetmaker for thirty-odd years, so I went over these pretty hard. Flat, no glue lines, edges eased nice and even, and the handle holes are sanded smooth inside where most blokes don’t bother. Whoever made these knows what he’s doing.”

  – Barry H., 72, Bendigo, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “I bought one pair for us and one for our son and his wife for their first anniversary. She stood them up on the bench and just smiled. Ours get used every day, raw chicken on the tall one, everything else on the short one, and with a bit of oil they still look new.”

  – Lorraine M., 66, Toowoomba, QLD

Where can you buy Noel’s boards?

The pairs are sold only through Cedar & Tin, where Kylie looks after his orders. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else. When this batch is gone, there will be no more.

Why only A$79 for both boards? A single handmade blackwood board easily goes for A$110 at a craft market. Noel set the price himself. “I’m not trying to get rich off my last batch,” he says. “I want them in somebody’s kitchen, not sitting on my shelf.” The regular price of A$129 is down to A$79 until the last pair is gone.

Cut on them. Serve on them. Put the short one on the table for Christmas lunch. And if the pair isn’t right for you, for any reason or none, send it back within 90 days for your money back.