1948 CARVING MALLET (for tapping fine detail)

Sometime around 1948 when I was just finding my feet in Australia I was boarding in Clanalpine St. Mosman and I rented a single garage for my motor cycle. It had a small workbench which I used for woodcarving in my spare evening hours when I was not building at DeeWhy (see OB1) or working at my architectural job with Fowell, Mansfield and Maclurcan in the city.

I was later switched to a job on the TSS Monowai in Mort’s Dock in the harbour where I was able to pick up scrap pieces of teak from the decking of the ship. It was a lovely timber to carve and I found I had a need for a delicate tapping mallet to assist in the precise carvings. It was a small ‘tapper’ held in the palm of my right hand with the chisel or gouge in my left. It was a form-fitting exercise which was a negative sculpture in its own right and it proved to be very useful. It is an interesting mix of functional art.

I carved one amorphous amoeba form in teak which I fixed above the main door of my OB 2 house at DeeWhy – maybe it is still there ?

Anyway, Ben now has the mallet and he kindly took a few images of the mallet in 2015.

mallet-1948-1