Dr. Mike Epworth has spent decades researching and building Jimmy Possum chairs. These enchanting Australian folk chairs, which originated in Tasmania’s Meander Valley in the 19th century, are attributed to Jimmy Possum, a person who remains an enigma, a mystery.
While each Jimmy Possum chair is unique, built from salvaged wood, they all have the same interconnected design: The front and back legs intersect the seat and are housed in the arms – no glue or nails required. When you sit in a Jimmy Possum chair, everything tightens and compresses. And all the tools you need to make one fit in a backpack.
Mike and his partner, Bronwyn Harm, research Jimmy Possum chairs. Mike builds chairs. Together they travel around, teaching other folks how to build these chairs, making a point to reach out to young and old non-woodworkers. They’re also working on a book about these chairs, which we’re thrilled to publish (hopefully in 2026).
Story, memory and community are embedded into every Jimmy Possum chair Mike makes. And each one can only be built by following the wild line, “the natural path of timber splitting, the intuitive movement of a drawknife, the instinctive curve of a component shaped to follow the body,” Mike writes.
The wild line is the chair’s story. Here’s Mike’s wild line, his story.
A Childhood Spent in the Outback, Swept Up in Cyclone & Deeply Influenced by Family Heritage
Mike was born in 1962, during a drought in Wallumbilla, a small, rural township east of Roma in western Queensland, Australia.
“I didn’t know what rain was until I was 3,” he says.
The first year of his life, Mike and his family lived in a one-bedroom, round-timber farmhouse, built in the 1890s. It had a tin roof with tin walls and was unbearably hot in the summer. When Mike was 1, his father built a house. Mike spent much of his childhood outside on the family farm.
“It was horse riding and mustering [rounding up of livestock], the whole usual country suite of activities,” he says.
Mike’s father got a new job, and the family moved to Sydney. One day, while Mike’s father was driving over the Sydney Harbour bridge to work, he noted old buildings being torn down. He asked about the bricks.
In an interview with Ed Le Brocq on the podcast “Conversations,” Mike says, “They said we’re just taking it to the tip. So he did what any Australian would do and got two cartons of beer and before you knew it we had a whole lot of bricks to build a house. And these were all convict bricks. Turns out, my ancestor on the First Fleet was a brick maker.”
This ancestor, Anthony Rope, made the first piece of recorded Australian furniture, a bed, in April 1788, Mike says.
In 1974, Mike and his family moved to Darwin, near Nightcliffe Beach. On Christmas Day that year, Cyclone Tracy hit. It destroyed 80 percent of the town’s houses. Mike was 12 years old.
In his interview with Le Brocq, Mike says, “I can remember just watching this huge picture window and watching all the trees just bent over, feeling terribly safe, and then a big gust of wind took an air conditioner and broke one door and went right through to the other side and literally the whole room was sucked out. And so we rushed into my brother’s bedroom and we waited there until the eye of the cyclone passed over, which, I always thought was placid but it’s not. You go from a very heavy storm to a very mild storm but it’s still a storm. So my father snuck out and got all our Christmas presents. And we all thought it was going to be our last Christmas.”
They opened their presents.
“And then we heard this freight train. That’s all I can describe, it was this huge noise … it would go bang, bang, bang. And it was the cyclone coming, the wind coming, from the other direction. And eventually it hit us and the whole room just exploded … a wall went flying off, there was just glass, everything was just flying around. So I jumped on my brother and my father took my mother and my other brother and we went across to the bathroom. Fortunately, we a had a rope in there so we were able to tie the towel rack to another rack, which braced that structure. If we hadn’t had that, I don’t think we would have survived.”
They stayed there, listening to the peeling of iron.
The bathroom door blew in. Mike and his father held it up, and the family survived. In the morning, they saw complete devastation. At first, they thought they were the only ones to have survived. But then they began to hear small voices, here and there. Officially, 66 people died. Mike says, unofficially, it was closer to 300.
In the aftermath of the cyclone, Mike witnessed the beauty of the human spirit. To this day, he believes that most people are good – and helpful.
The debris he witnessed the next morning holds firm in the mind – “all those bits of what was so important to people,” Mike says. “That was their identity and their whole life was just expunged. The image of all those bulldozers pushing all these bits of life into a pile, and off it goes.”
After Cyclone Tracy, Mike was sent to a boarding school in Toowoomba, the largest inland city in Queensland. His family stayed in Darwin to rebuild. While Mike was away at school, his grandfather stopped by unexpectedly. While pushing cattle along the river, Mike’s father was struck by lightning and died. Mike was only 13.
“I was keen on history and tradition, and I felt severed by that,” Mike says. “My father would take me around, showing me how to do normal farm things. You learn by doing with your elders. And so when you lose that, you are then conscious of the loss of that.”
After Mike’s father died, his family bought a little farm on the outskirts of Toowoomba. His mother found a job teaching. And his grandfather, a banker, became an influential presence in his life.
“He was a maker,” Mike says. “That’s where I picked up a lot of my work. A lot of the characteristics of my work was actually carrying on from him.”
His grandfather would pick up pieces of material and tell stories about place and origin – where the material came from.
“He was always talking about the family heritage,” Mike says.
It was his grandfather who introduced Mike to Australian vernacular furniture, or ‘make-do’ furniture.
“It’s what I call extemporize social design; of the moment, of the place,” he says. “It hasn’t the virtues of aesthetics a lot of times because it’s not this contemplated thing. Nor is it a technically superior thing. It’s peasant stuff. But what it has is social resonance. Connection. Love. And these are the things in short supply.”
The Influence of R.M. Williams
The ‘make-do’ culture is strong in Australia, Bron says, prompting Mike to tell the story of R.M. Williams, also a maker.
“Every time an American president comes over, he’s given a pair of R.M. Williams boots,” Mike says.
Reginald Murray Williams left home as a young teenager, worked on cattle ranches for a few years then found work as a camel driver for a missionary. Together they lived in the bush, often with Aborigines. R.M. sold hides, married, had six children, and after learning how to make leather goods, set up shop in Adelaide. He borrowed too much money to expand his business and, at one point, was deep in debt. He met an elderly woman who owned a mine. She had spent 25 years looking for gold with no success, and was looking to sell. R.M. had a good feeling.
“He hustled,” Mike says. “Sold his stuff and got the money. Within two weeks, it was the biggest gold discovery in Australia.”
Now a multimillionaire, R.M. used the money to help form the company beloved by many today, putting once-poor leather makers up on a pedestal.
“Even though they might be financially or materially poor, in his opinion, they were the kings or queens of the land,” Mike says. “They were very important.”
R.M. divorced, remarried and had four more children. Eventually, R.M. met Mike’s mother. He offered to marry her three times. Each time, she refused. But he was an influential part of Mike’s childhood.
Mike came from a family of poor farmers, he says.
“We have a lot of different strains,” he says. “Any new-world person is a construct of a lot of different threads of history. But they were all very aspirational towards education. My father had a Ph.D. and my brother got a Ph.D. We were all made to focus and appreciate and value education as a way of getting out of the boom-bust cycle of farming.”
In many ways, R.M. gave Mike “social permission,” he says, a sense of acceptance and the idea that there is an esteemed place for makers in Australian society.
Discovering Jimmy Possum
Mike left home at 18 to hitchhike around the country. He made money by picking fruit. He met and stayed with a man who taught him the basics of how to make packing-case furniture. In 1982, he went back to Toowoomba and started to make his own furniture.
In 1987, he headed to Melbourne to study at the Melbourne School of Woodcraft. He got a part-time job working for an antique dealer, and on his first day, he saw his first Jimmy Possum chair.
(A fun aside: Mike was at a swap meet in 2016 and found this same Jimmy Possum chair he first laid eyes on in the late 1980s. He bought it.)
Mike fell in love with Jimmy Possum chairs and began making them.
“We have this thing called ‘cultural cringe.’” Mike says. “It’s very much Australia. It’s very hard to say, ‘This is Australian and you should be proud of it. This is distinctly Australian and this is why it’s Australian. We need preserve it.’”
Coined by A.A. Phillips in a 1950 essay called “The Cultural Cringe,” the phrase refers to the idea that one’s own culture is somehow less-than compared to other people’s cultures in other countries.
“We need to preserve all the handmade chairs,” he says. “It’s a beautiful tradition. But we need to understand that just as when you say a Shaker chair in America or a Windsor chair, it evokes a countryside. It evokes a people and culture. I want the Jimmy Possum chair to evoke Australia.”
Mike makes Jimmy Possum chairs in the traditional fashion. Yet, the word “tradition” should be used with caution, he says.
“There’s this whole idea of replication of tradition and interpretation. Rather, we should always be looking at the context of what we’re doing now.”
He uses green woodworking as an example. Green wood requires cutting timbers down, and even gathering fallen timber, he says, interferes with insects and fungi.
“We remove timbers that are required and used for habitat,” Mike says. “Even that has an effect. And I do worry that it if becomes popular, it gives people an excuse or provides people with the means to go cut a lot of trees down, which we shouldn’t be doing. We’ve got enough timber out there already and its beautiful timber.”
Wood for Mike’s Jimmy Possum chairs is salvaged. It comes from houses that are being torn down.
“You repurpose the wallboards and the structural rails of the houses and it’s all fine,” Bron says.
“And when you split it, it’s just beautiful,” Mike says. “It’s straight. There are no branches coming off. It’s right in the middle, straight up.”
It’s finding the wild line.
“When you split that timber, you’re looking at the story of a tree,” he says. “So it’s journey of discovery of the actual material of the world. It’s also a journey of discovery to the outside connection.”
Chairs, to Mike, are anthropomorphic objects. We’re custodians of stories, he says. Chairs are stories. A member of your family makes a chair. They sit in it and tell stories. The next person who comes along sits in the chair and the feeling of the chair’s arm triggers a story. The headrest triggers another one.
Finding Bron (Again)
Mike and Bron first met and formed a friendship 35 years ago in Toowoomba, Queensland where they both attended senior high school.
“After about six weeks hanging out together our young lives took us on similar but divergent paths,” Bron says. “I studied a fine arts degree in Toowoomba, Queensland, majoring in sculpture and printmaking. Mike went to Melbourne, Victoria, to study a fine furniture degree, separating us for about 30 years. Our friendship never waned. We would bump into each other socially around the holiday season, when Mike returned to visit family.”
They found each other again thanks to the digital age and LinkedIn. They were eager to rekindle their friendship and learn about each other’s life journeys.
“He was making chairs, beautiful chairs and Tasmania,” Bron says. “The birthplace of Jimmy Possum chairs was the place we needed to go – together.”
They’ve been together ever since.
“We went to a small town in North Tasmania to embed ourselves into the community,” Bron says. “We met many local people with loads of family stories, folktales and oral histories. We spent quite a few years getting to know people, making great friendships. We saw and documented many beautiful, historic chairs. People made their chairs unique by adding their own personal flare – using a different timber, applying a different head rest shape or design, or a painted finish, repurposing and reusing what they had on hand.”
After that trip, Mike refocused his research. He took his original topic – communal making and portability – and applied what he had learned (and is still learning) about Jimmy Possum to it.
Influencing Young People
Mike has always been an avid reader, thanks to his mother. (His favorite book is “In Cold Blood,” by Truman Capote, and he continues to find the most beautiful nuggets of insight in Edward Gibbons “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”) Mike achieved academically. He earned his master’s and doctorate degrees in visual art, design history and studio practice from Griffith University. But growing up, he had difficulty learning. Making, Bron says, helped Mike process and order his thoughts.
“He really found that making with his hands sort of settled things out when he was having difficulty in the high school years,” Bron says.
While in school, Mike’s thoughts were often not tangential, which proved to make certain tasks – such as writing – difficult. Building a chair liberated him from the non-sequential rut he often found himself in as it forced him to go from one step to the next.
This is one of the reasons Mike and Bron are so dedicated to reaching out to young people and teaching them making as a means.
“As far as heritage crafts, we’re focusing on the wrong demographic by looking at older people,” Mike says. “We should be looking at young people in crisis because you have a transformative experience. If chairmaking or blacksmithing or whatever is a transformative experience, then you’ve got an advocate for life.”
To that end, Mike and Bron are focusing on the knowledge that needs to be transferred. They visit schools and are actively involved in their community. They bring their workshop with them. Part of the class is seeking out old pieces of wood in the community. Then, Mike asks students for its story. People have different stories about the wood, where it came from, how it came to be.
“And as you journey through the collection of timber, suddenly you’re collating all this information,” Mike says. “People start to compare notes and get a better understanding of their landscape, time and stories. And in these little country towns, some people have been living there generations and have never talked to each other. And now they’re working side by side. On the second day, they start to talk. They start to laugh. And they start to remember people and share stories. All of these things go into the building of that chair. And when that chair goes into a library or health clinic, it’s imbued. It has that aura of all those stories – those connections beyond the physical elements.”
Bron describes it as folks creating goodwill between themselves and the object they’re making. And that connection between the object and their experience is something they will take forward into their life.
“That’s one of the major things for Mike’s practice in his chairmaking is the fact that he salvages timber and repurposes timber and makes something all new again,” Bron says. “And that applies to people as well. You can reinvent yourself and go forward.”
A Well-lived Life
Mike talks while sitting in a Jimmy Possum chair decoupaged with old newspaper clippings from the 1970s. Headlines reading “Women Now Think for Themselves” and “Big Brother Is Watching You” are pasted onto wood acquired from an old shed owned by a pack rat named Joe, where Mike found the newspaper as well.
Another chair is built from wood taken from a nearby abandoned house that local kids like to tag – the result is a delightfully colorful graffitied headrest and arms. Another chair is made from rich Australian red cedar, repurposed from an 1840s cabinet.
The chairs are extraordinarily comfortable, Mike says.
“I sit in them all the time. A chair to me must be comfortable. Otherwise, it’s a sculpture.”
On a sun-dappled porch, Mike and Bron’s dogs, Zig and Zag, lounge on Jimmy Possum chairs. Mike painted one to reflect the land around him – the large rock next to their property (the second biggest in Australia), the sea, the sun and the sky.
A sign hangs from the ceiling of the workshop, with views of the rock: “Open weekends 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sorry – Closed weekdays for addition of fantastic shell collection.”
“That’s what sums up our philosophy of life,” Mike says.
Walking around their property, Mike virtually shows his workbench attached to a tree and the space he uses to conduct chair workshops out of his home. He opens a gate to reveal their cat, keen on watching the fledglings testing their wings. There’s a chicken coop. And a 1967 caravan for visitors to sleep in.
“I tend to not go out too much because I love home,” Mike says.
He and Bron recently got a gig documenting folk furniture in old homes and museums. He’s working on his book. And teaching workshops whenever he can. (You can find information about upcoming workshops here.)
Mike’s always in search of the wild line – in objects, in community, in his life.
— Kara Gebhart Uhl