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A highway upgrade is going through the bush he has carved every tray from since 1986. There’s a reason he isn’t starting again somewhere else, and it’s the reason his last serving trays are now half price.

2 days ago | Advertorial | Fiona Rees

Royce Dunstan found out from a can of orange paint.

Last spring he walked up the hill behind his shed to look at a blackwood the winter storms had brought down. Somebody had been there first. There was an orange cross sprayed on the trunk, a numbered metal tag nailed into the end grain, and a line of pink survey tape running off through the bush towards the road.

The letter came nine days later. The state was compulsorily acquiring the family’s 85 hectares for a highway upgrade that still hasn’t broken ground. The timber rights had already gone to a timber broker from the mainland. For forty years, when a blackwood came down on that hill, Royce hooked a chain to it and dragged it home. Now the broker’s crew gets there first. Every fallen trunk is graded, tagged and sold on as “specialty timber” at boatbuilder prices, a good share of it in containers headed overseas.

“I want to be clear, I wasn’t planning on packing it in,” he says, flatly, no drama in it. “Nobody asked me a single question. The block changed hands and I found out from a paint can.”

It started with a windrow

The Huon, October. The shed is corrugated iron, behind a weatherboard house at the top of a paddock. It smells of sawdust, two-stroke and, faintly, apple blossom from the orchard below. The workbench is worn pale in two places where his forearms rest. On the wall hang a bandsaw, a row of carving gouges and one photo: his grandfather and two blokes in front of a stand of blackwoods, taken in 1931, the year the family took up the block. The valley still calls itself the Apple Isle’s orchard, and for most of Royce’s life that was simply what people here did: pick apples and keep the bush at the top of the hill. From the window over the bench you can see that bush. These days you can also see the fence, and the sign in front of it.

“My grandfather took up the block,” Royce says. “My dad looked after the bush, felled the odd tree, the careful way. I was up there with him from fourteen.” In the winter of 1986 the neighbour bulldozed the blackwood gully below the orchard for more pasture. Every tree went into windrows and was burnt, over one long, wet winter. Royce was twenty-eight.

“I wasn’t saving a tree,” he says. “The tree was already gone. I just couldn’t stand there and watch that blackwood burn.” In the spring of 1986 he took one trunk home on a borrowed trailer. It sat in the shed for two years drying out. Then he carved a tray out of it for his mum — a Highland cow, like the two shaggy ones his dad ran in the top paddock. It’s on a kitchen bench in Cygnet and it has been in use every day for thirty-eight years.

Every shape he’s carved since is something off that hill. The Highland cow. The eagle, for the wedge-tails that nest above the block. The trout and the bream, for the river at the bottom of the valley. And the bulldog, for Digger, who slept under his bench for eleven years.

Two things ruin a wooden serving tray

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “A year later the shine’s gone cloudy, it’s flaking at the edges and there’s a crack across the middle. So you buy another one.”

The first is the lacquer. Tip almost any wooden tray from the shops towards the window and you’ll see the shine — a sprayed-on coat that makes cheap timber look rich in a photo. Olive oil, lemon, a warm dish and a few trips to the sink, and the coat goes milky. Then it lifts. Then the little clear flakes are on your cheese.

The second is timber that was dried too fast. A freshly fallen blackwood trunk is close to half water. Royce air-dries his timber for months, finishes it in a small drying kiln, then lets it rest again before a gouge touches it. Skip that and the tray looks perfect the day it turns up and shows a hairline crack across a compartment six weeks later for no reason you can see.

He throws away one tray in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He doesn’t have the first problem at all, because there’s nothing on his trays to peel.

Why a peeling tray can’t be saved

Most weeks somebody turns up at the shed with a tray under their arm and asks him to save it. Never one of his — these are trays people bought in the shops or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a year or two. There’s a crate in the corner full of the ones he had to hand back: an acacia platter shedding its finish in little white flakes, one gone grey and furry after a few runs through the dishwasher, a bamboo one that came apart in three layers like a wet book, a “rustic” one with a crack straight through the cheese compartment.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is bring them back. “There’s nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once lacquer lets go, you’d have to sand the whole thing back to bare timber, and a cheap tray hasn’t got that much timber in it to start with. Once it cracks across, that crack’s staying.”

Most of them go home with one of his instead. One serving tray, carved from one block of Tasmanian blackwood, oiled and nothing else — nothing sprayed on, nothing to flake off two years from now.

What comes off a plastic party platter

In 2013, doctors at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan tested something most of us do without a second thought. They served hot noodle soup in melamine bowls — the hard, shiny plastic most party platters, kids’ plates and divided snack trays are made of — and measured what came out in people’s urine over the next twelve hours.

After the soup from the melamine bowls, the volunteers passed roughly six times as much melamine as after the very same soup from ceramic bowls. Heat is what pulls it out of the plastic, and acid helps it along: hot party pies, warm dips, snags off the barbie, tomato sauce, a squeeze of lemon. Exactly what ends up on a party platter.

Every tray gives a little of itself to whatever sits on it. The difference is what it gives. Plastic gives up plastic, and plastic doesn’t belong next to your food — not hot, not sour, not at all. Timber gives up nothing you’d mind eating.

What makes Royce’s serving tray different

Carved, not pressed: Every compartment is cut out of the solid block by hand. Nothing glued on, nothing pressed out of a mould.

Rescued, not felled: The timber comes from trees that came down on their own in the Huon Valley — storms, floods, old age. No living tree is cut to make a tray.

Deepens with the years: Blackwood mellows from warm gold to a rich, dark chocolate-red in its first year in the light. A tray bought this spring will look better next Christmas than it does the day it turns up.

Dried slowly, then rested: Months of air drying, then a kiln, then rest again before the first cut. This is the step cheap trays skip.

Food-safe finish only: Scraped by hand and oiled with food-safe mineral oil. No lacquer, no sealant, nothing to chip off into your food.

No two alike: Every tray comes out of a different trunk, so colour, weight and grain vary. Yours is the only one like it.

One tray, a dozen jobs

Cheese in one compartment. Crackers in the next. Grapes, nuts and olives in the rest.

Royce carves the compartments deep and rounds every inside corner, because he knows how a serving tray actually gets used. It goes out on the deck on Christmas Day with prawns, cheese and cherries. It goes on the coffee table for the footy with chips and nuts. It goes in front of the grandkids with apple slices, cheese cubes and the four crackers they’re allowed before tea. On a chest of drawers it holds keys, rings and reading glasses. Same tray, a dozen jobs, and nothing about it says kitchen gadget when the guests turn up.

What his customers say

Three reasons there is no next block

Everybody who hears about this asks him the same question, and they usually ask it within about ten seconds: why not just buy the timber somewhere else?

There are three answers, and any one of them on its own would be enough.

One: there’s no timber he can afford to carve. A blackwood that comes down in a storm, split and twisted, used to be worth nothing to anybody. That’s why it went in a windrow and that’s why Royce could have it. To the broker it’s now worth boatbuilder money. “I rang him about one trunk. One. A storm took it down in July, split right through, no mill in the state would want it. He wanted fourteen hundred dollars.” Royce shakes his head. “For a tree I’ve pulled off that hill for nothing since I was twenty-eight. At that price a tray costs four hundred bucks. Nobody puts cheese and bikkies on a four-hundred-dollar tray.”

Two: his hands are about done. “And to be honest,” he says, turning his right hand over on the bench, “these are about done too. Forty years of gouge work. The thumb doesn’t close the way it used to.” He can still put in a day at the bench. He can’t put in a day and then get up and do it again the next morning. Every tray on the shelf was carved while his hands still worked properly.

Three: there’s nobody to hand it to. Royce is 68 and he works alone. There’s no second bench in the shed, no apprentice, no son who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you’ve got it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody’s got that kind of patience for a wooden tray any more.” What comes out of that shed in a good week is what one man can saw, dry, carve and oil by himself, and one in five of those goes in the burn barrel before it ever gets wrapped. There’s no factory behind it and no second batch sitting on a shelf somewhere.

The last thing he still gets to decide

Which brings us to the price, and to the only real choice he has left in any of this.

So he cut every tray that’s left in half, from A$178 to A$89. “Forty years of making something people put food on,” he says. “I want to picture them out on the deck on Christmas Day. Not in a storage shed off the Huon Highway with a padlock on it.” He nods at the window and the fence. “They’re getting the bush. Fine. They’re not getting these.”

His niece Tegan (34) set the little shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I don’t know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I wasn’t spending another winter stood behind a trestle table at the Saturday market in the cold. She was right.”

Where can you buy Royce’s serving tray?

The serving tray is sold only through Cedar & Tin, the small shop Tegan runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else. Whatever is still on the shelf when the shed shuts on 30 November ships from Tegan’s place until it’s gone — and then there are no more.

One word of warning: a machine-cut tray stained dark photographs almost exactly like a hand-carved one in a listing photo. The difference only shows when you run a thumb along the inside of a compartment, where the timber either follows the cut of a gouge or the flat path of a router.

Fill it. Serve on it. Put it in front of fourteen people on Christmas Day. If it isn’t right — the size, the colour, the grain, or no reason at all — send it back within 90 days for your money back. No restocking fee, and nobody will ask you to explain yourself.

This is a paid advertisement for Royce’s Hand-Carved Serving Tray, sold by Cedar & Tin.

Melamine figures: Wu C. et al., “A crossover study of noodle soup consumption in melamine bowls and total melamine excretion in urine,” JAMA Internal Medicine, 2013.