“When the bush comes off a paddock down here, the timber gets burned. I have spent forty years carving Christmas trays out of it instead.” — Lindsay Heazlewood (68) carves every tray from one solid piece of Tasmanian blackwood.

His grandfather took up the dairy block near Beech Forest in 1931. When the last of its bush was cleared in 1986, every blackwood on it went on a burn heap — and Lindsay dragged one of them off it. Christmas 1988 he gave his mother a little tray shaped like a Christmas tree, carved from that log. Forty years later, those trays — each one cut from a single piece of wood, never glued together from strips — are still the only thing he makes.

Beech Forest, December. The shed is corrugated iron, down the track from the old dairy, with a strand of tinsel along the top shelf that nobody has taken down in years. It smells like sawdust, warm machine oil and, faintly, cut grass from the paddock outside. 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 photograph: three men and a draught horse in front of freshly cleared ground, taken in 1931, the year the family took up the block. Blackwood has grown in the wet gullies of the Otways for as long as anyone can remember, and for most of Lindsay’s life clearing it for pasture was simply what people here did.

“My grandfather cleared the first of it,” Lindsay says. “My dad milked on it. I fenced it and fixed it until I was twenty.” In 1986 the last of the bush came off the back block. Timber that is no good to a sawmill gets pushed into windrows and burned, and 120 acres went that way over one summer. Lindsay was twenty-eight.

“I was not saving a tree,” he says. “The tree was already down. I just could not watch that blackwood burn.” He took one log home on a borrowed trailer. It sat in the hay shed for two years drying out. Then, the week before Christmas 1988, he carved a little tray out of it in the shape of a Christmas tree and gave it to his mum. She filled it with her shortbread that night. It still comes out of her cupboard in Colac every December, thirty-eight Christmases running.

He has carved every Christmas since, and every shape has a reason. The tree came first, for his mother. The reindeer for his grandkids, who used to leave carrots out on one for Santa’s team. The gingerbread man for her biscuit tins. The snowman because it is usually thirty degrees on Christmas Day and his wife thought that was funny. The Santa hat and the stocking because people kept asking.

Two things ruin a wooden serving tray

“Everybody buys the cheap one once,” he says. “By next Christmas the shine has gone cloudy, there is a dark line down the middle and it rocks on the table. So you buy another one.”

The first is the glue seam. Turn almost any wooden Christmas tray over and you will count four or five narrow strips of plantation timber glued together, sanded flat and stained so it looks like one piece. It isn’t. Water works into the seams every time it goes in the sink, the strips move against each other through a hot, dry summer and a wet Otways winter, and the joint opens into a dark line that no amount of oil closes again.

The second is wood that was dried too fast. A freshly felled blackwood log is close to half water. Lindsay air-dries his wood 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 arrives and shows a hairline crack across a compartment six weeks later for no visible reason.

He throws away one tray in five to stay ahead of the second problem. He does not have the first problem at all, because there is nothing in his trays to glue.

Why a glued tray cannot be saved

Every December somebody turns up at the shed with a tray under their arm and asks him to save it. Never one of his — these are Christmas trays people bought in the shops or online, sometimes for good money, and used for a season or two. There is a crate in the corner full of the ones he had to hand back: a cheap tree tray with a black line straight down the trunk where the glue let go, a reindeer gone grey and fuzzy after a few trips through a dishwasher, a snowman shedding its lacquer in little clear flakes.

He can tell you what killed each one, usually in about four seconds. What nobody can do is put them back together. “There is nothing in there to fix,” he says. “Once a glue seam opens, that tray is finished. You can sand it, you can oil it, you can leave it in the sun for a week. The line comes back.”

Most of them go home with one of his instead. One tray, one piece of Tasmanian blackwood and nothing else — no strips, no glue, no lacquer, no seam that opens two Christmases from now.

What comes off a plastic party platter

In 2013, doctors at Kaohsiung Medical University in Taiwan tested something most of us do every Christmas without a second thought. They served hot noodle soup in melamine bowls — the hard, shiny plastic most Christmas platters, kids’ party 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: warm dips, sausage rolls, seafood sauce, a squeeze of lemon. Exactly what ends up on a Christmas 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 does not belong next to your food — not hot, not sour, not at all. Wood gives up nothing you would mind eating.

What makes Lindsay’s trays different

• One solid piece: Carved from a single block, never glued from strips. The grain runs unbroken from the rim to the bottom of every compartment, and through to the back, which is how you can tell.
• Rescued, not felled: The timber comes from land clearing and storm-downed trees in the Otway Ranges. No living tree is cut to make a tray.
• A cabinetmaker’s timber: Tasmanian blackwood has been prized by Australian furniture makers for 150 years. It is dense and close-grained, it does not splinter, and it takes oil to a deep golden-brown that only gets richer.
• 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 flake off onto your biscuits.
• No two alike: Every tray comes out of a different log, so colour, weight and grain vary. Yours is the only one like it.

Six shapes, out every Christmas, used all year

Lindsay carves the compartments deep and rounds every inside corner, because he knows how a little Christmas tray actually gets used. The tree goes out with shortbread on Christmas Eve. The reindeer holds cherries on the verandah. The gingerbread man gets macadamias and the stocking gets the chocolates nobody admits to eating. And because they are just timber, they do not have to go back in the cupboard on Boxing Day: olives and cheese at New Year, a school-holiday snack in January, keys and reading glasses on the dresser the rest of the year.

Each one is small enough to fit in two hands — the tree is about 20 by 14 centimetres, the snowman, the biggest, about 30 centimetres tall — and big enough to set a little Christmas on any table in the house.

What his customers say

• ★★★★★

  “I bought the tree for my mother’s eightieth and I nearly kept it. She turned it over twice looking for the joints. Then she made my sister come into the kitchen to look at it. It has been on her bench since the first of December with her rum balls on it, and she has started apologizing to guests for taking any, which I take as a good sign.”

  – Lorraine K., 58, Warrnambool, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “The grain runs right through to the back, which is how you know it is one piece. The tree tray I bought at a discount shop two Christmases ago was four strips and the middle seam had gone black. I wash this one by hand, oil it once a month, and after eleven months it is still dead flat on the table. No rocking, no split, nothing.”

  – Trevor B., 64, Ballarat, VIC
• ★★★★★

  “I ordered the reindeer and the gingerbread man for the grandkids’ biscuit plate on Christmas Eve. Now I own two Christmas decorations I use every week of the year. My granddaughter calls the reindeer ‘Rudolph’s plate’ and will not eat her apple slices off anything else.”

  – Denise P., 61, Toowoomba, QLD

One man, one pair of hands

Lindsay is 68 and he works alone. There is no second bench in the shed, no apprentice, no son who wanted the trade. “It takes years before you have it in your hands,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of patience for a little wooden tray anymore.”

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. That is the entire supply. There is no factory behind it and no second batch waiting on a shelf somewhere.

His niece Kirra (34) set the small shop up online for him over a single weekend. “At my age I do not know the first thing about all that internet business,” he says. “She told me I was not going to spend another December standing behind a trestle table at the Christmas market in the heat. She was right.”

Where can you buy Lindsay’s Christmas trays?

The trays are sold only through Backroad Goods, the small shop Kirra runs for him. Not on Amazon, not in the shops, not through anybody else.

One word of warning: a glued-up tray of plantation timber with a dark stain photographs almost exactly like a single piece in a listing photo. The difference only shows on the back, where the grain either runs through or stops at a seam.

Fill it. Serve on it. Put it under the tree for somebody who still bakes. If it is not right — the size, the shape, 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.