Geoff Wills

Instrument Building Centre and Red Cedar table

By Doug Eaton

 

Instrument Building Centre

229 Whites Road Lota

 

Geoff had been over to the UK in the 60s sometime and he came back all fired up about early music. He wanted to start an early music society.

So, he enlisted the help of Senator George Georges. He met him in a street somewhere near Trades Hall and asked him if such a thing was organised, whether George would act as patron. He agreed to it on the footpath. With the assistance of Arthur Creedy, Director of Arts at Queensland Government, there were meetings of enthusiastic people and Arthur Creedy attended to contribute some assistance from his department and to guide us through the process of forming a society. Geoff became president, and this was the Queensland Early Music Society. Geoff started building viola da gambas with not much detail available except some photographs.

Geoff and Doug Eaton conducted an instrument making workshop demonstration of instrument making at the Moreton Bay Folk Festival[1] in a lecture theatre at UQ. Geoff by then had finished three instruments, bass, tenor and treble viol, and described the process and all things to do with viols.  My part in the demonstration was to make a bamboo flute and on completion it was given to a member of the audience, never to be seen again.

After the Moreton Bay Festival, Geoff and I discussed the possibility of setting up a teaching facility for instrument makers under his house at Lota. We applied for a grant from the Australian Council for the Arts to equip the workshop with both hand tools and machine tools. One of the things we bought was a wood lathe that had belonged to Geoff Welham. It continued for 21 years every second Sunday morning from 10am, regardless of public holidays etc. During this time, Don Henderson, Geoff Wills and Doug Eaton were the teachers. Many makers passed through the workshop, some of whom went on the become professional makers.

Geoff continued privately making instruments and eventually the question arose, who’s going to make bows for these slightly different instruments that required a different style of bow? And the onus fell on me to research and manufacture.

During this period of the workshop, two craftsmen, well-known for their expertise, were invited to guide us through the making through: first of all a violin, by Ian Clarke, over an eight-weekend period; Lennox Holt took us through the process of bow making for a similar time period.

Going back to 1968, after my return from two and a half years in New Zealand, I felt disillusioned with my commercial guitar, and complained to Geoff, who said: “Don’t complain, make one”. I started my first guitar with Geoff, using mainly his equipment and materials which was finished in 1970. The materials used were walnut veneer for the body which was laminated in a shaped press. And the soundboard was of spruce purchased from a propeller manufacturer in Melbourne called Perfectus Airscrew which was not instrument quality, the growth rings were wide apart and not necessarily quarter cut. For a neck I used cedar from a demolished cedar door; the frames were the right size to cut a neck, and the instrument, when finished, was sprayed using a vacuum cleaner using the exhaust setting. For this operation the guitar was placed on a low bench seat that belonged originally to Fabrizio Reginato, and it showed its history in the thickness of the lacquer in which the bench seat was covered after spraying.

Most luthiers don’t stop at making one. The desire to improve keeps going, and in my case, I wasn’t satisfied until my third guitar (a classical) in 1975. I played this guitar in public and in private for many years.

 

THE CEDAR TABLE FROM WHITES ROAD, LOTA

About 1984 Geoff, I think must have had a call from friends at Cameron Pocket, near Calen, which is north of Bowen, that a whole hillside was going to be cleared of trees and a lot of the trees were cabinet making species such as red cedar. So Geoff wanted to go north in an effort to save something from this process and he asked me and Margaret, my ex-wife, to travel with him. At the time he had an old Chev and also a trailer, hopefully to bring back some nice timber. The people we were to visit were called Mahon. George Mahon was a timberman from a very early age and at this point he would have been in his 70s. George had been a competitive axeman travelling from place to place during the Depression trying to earn money from his skills, otherwise their income would be from their cane farm.

After settling into the first of three houses on the property that George built this one was a slab hut. The second house that he built was of fibro construction and the last one which they lived in was weatherboard. He used to also operate a saw pit and told us that, using the sawpit, he and another person cut enough timber to build a house. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the stack of timber cut in that way was burnt to ashes. So, he had to start all over again, but that shows the character of the man. He would take us for a walk in the forest with an axe over his shoulder, take a chip from the bark of a tree, and look up at the canopy and identify it and he would say what was the best use of the timber in that tree.

So, George took us up to the hillside that was going to be cleared and identified a big red cedar and red bean. We engaged the services of a local sleeper cutter who went by the name of “Baggs”. A whole day, or maybe two days, was given over to reducing both of these trees to manageable slabs, some of which were loaded into the trailer, and the balance was sent by rail down to Manly railway station. On our journey home, because of the weight in the trailer, we had to cut the speed down quite a bit because of the trailer “fishtailing” and also because the gearbox in the Chev was faulty and needed a top-up of oil occasionally during the journey. Geoff had some of the cedar cut to size locally in order to make a dining table and six chairs after the timber had seasoned properly.

It was built inside the house and therefore unable to be removed through the door. A young friend of the family made leather seats for the chairs.