Retiring principal of the Bungendore Woodworks David Mac Laren is known as a formidable personality in the arts, with interests that spread well beyond wood. Arts editor HELEN MUSA explains why.

In a remarkable display of grace and perspicacity, David Mac Laren will pass on the directorship of the Bungendore Woodworks Gallery after 40 years at the helm.

This is no ordinary retirement, for instead of throwing up his hands in despair at the current problems of small businesses, he has, after consultation, handed over the ropes to a young Canberra Wood craftsman Ralph Barford.

Mac Laren will keep working privately in wood, but wants to enjoy time on his 40-hectare farm too.

Although he’ll still be hovering around for a bit, the day-to-day running is already in the hands of managers Andrew Oliver and Sharon Rasker.

To anyone who suggests the Woodworks is closing, his retort is, “it’s not gonna happen”.

Bungendore Woodworks is one of the great success stories in this region, both for the arts and for tourism. With the Octagon Gallery upstairs, it has become a destination point for wood-lovers and the general public, as evinced when in March it was selected as best Gallery in Australia by the US-based World Art Awards.

The official citation read: “Attracting 120,000 visitors a year, multi tourism, award-winning Bungendore Woodworks gallery specialises in exhibiting and promoting Australian made wood art and sculpture of a very high standard.”

Modest enough to admit to all and sundry that he couldn’t have survived without the support of the richly-endowed community of Australian woodies, Mac Laren sees himself as an introvert.

Be that as it may, he is known as a formidable personality in the arts, with interests that spread well beyond wood.

For some years, urged by his former colleague Stan d’Argeaval, he turned the Woodworks into a mecca for jazz, with Don Burrows, Kevin Hunt and George Golla regularly playing there.

Mac Laren wasn’t always going to be a woodie.

A New York boy who grew up on Long Island, he still holds American citizenship – that’s why he received an “honorary” Medal of the Order of Australia in 2018.

After school, he spent a short, unhappy period at Yale studying for mechanical engineering.

“Yale was all about preparing for a career, ” Mac Laren says. “I needed to change from engineering and I wanted to leave the US, but I needed a place where English was spoken. Canberra looked nice and sunny, so in 1962, I went to the ANU and studied philosophy and literature.”

The Vietnam War intervened. Instead of staying overseas as many would have done, Mac Laren repatriated for the call-up but was rejected because he suffered from Crohn’s disease.

He fell among the theatrical crowd in New York and became a playwright, living the life and having several works staged, for no pay, by La Mama.

“This is when New York was bankrupt, so the arts flourished,” he quips.

By now married, he was feeling isolated, until one day the finger of fate pointed at him.

Wandering around Manhattan in 1973 he spotted a gallery called Impressions in Wood, and fell in love.

“I thought, this could be wonderful,” he said. Soon he was working there with a team of makers who talked nothing but wood – he was hooked.

Some of them moved on to a larger space on the Lower East Side, making domestic furniture and kitchens while designing small items for craft fairs, a solid background in the medium.

Then, after seeing the 16 tall ships in the US bicentennial Parade of Sails on July 4, 1976, he and his wife returned to Australia, where they bought a 40-hectare property with a mining shack on it in 1977.

Soon enough Mac Laren was engaging local wood makers in crafting objects for an exhibition, also travelling far and wide to meet just about every woodie in Australia.

Thrown in the deep end of business, he used Impressions of Wood as a model, saw the leather shop in Bungendore and thought, “I need a showroom – you get energy from showing other people’s work.

“I pushed ahead, though I was pretty isolated,” he says.

His collaboration with Bungendore architect Maurice Barnes saw the quixotic design of the present gallery come true when the Bungendore Wood Works and Gallery were opened in January 1994. Barnes had used Australian materials, including Jarrah posts, beams and staircase; Tasmanian Oak floors, Ebonized Victorian Ash frames, and NSW Flooded Gum wall panelling.

While nowadays Mac Laren would be rated highly as an astute businessman, he prefers to see himself as a strategist, saying, “whatever I do, I have strategies”.

These strategies led to national tourism awards and a national tourism conference in the early ’90s brought in not only politicians but a huge lift in business.

It hasn’t been plain sailing. There was the 1983 drought and the 1993 Recession We Had To Have. Fire claimed his first workshop, replaced in 2003 by a new one. Then covid knocked the wind out of their clients, who went for safety and conventionality.

At the beginning, people told him they’d give the Woodworks a year, but Mac Laren’s resourcefulness, dedication to innovation and his relationship with his fellow makers have triumphed.

He still thinks like a playwright and has been staging a series of exhibitions divided into acts. When we spoke, he was planning on using his dramatic skills by doing the actual handover as a play in the Octagon – his will be a hard act to follow.