At the edge of a quiet roadside near Hagley, Tasmania, James Boxhall works alone with an axe, a billhook, and a chainsaw, restoring a centuries-old tradition that once framed the very fabric of early white settlement in the region. He’s not building fences of wire or concrete—he’s laying hedges, and in doing so, he’s reviving a fading art and preserving a vital part of Tasmanian rural heritage.
The work is physically punishing and solitary, but for Boxhall, it’s a calling. “I like working with the hedges,” he says. “All the tools, axes and bill hooks and things like working with timber—it’s good.” Hedge laying, the rural craft of bending and weaving living trees to form dense, stock-proof barriers, has largely disappeared from much of Australia, yet Boxhall has made it his full-time occupation for more than 20 years.
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What started as a curiosity grew into a lifelong vocation. “We had a pretty big hedge laying scene in Tassie right up to the 1950s and ’60s before it fell well and truly by the wayside,” he recalls. “I did a little bit on a farm where I worked. The boss there had some old tools and gave me a bit of a rundown.”
Later, a hedge layer from Shropshire, England, arrived to work on a farm at Chudleigh. Boxhall spent years alongside him, learning the traditional techniques first-hand. The knowledge he gained set him on a path that now spans decades. “I’ve been doing it for 25 years… full-time for about 20 years,” he says.
Boxhall describes the process with the ease of someone whose craft lives in their hands as much as in their words. “Once [the hedges are] about 12 or 15 feet tall… you’re cutting them down, but you’re not cutting them completely off,” he explains. “You’re leaving about 10 or 15 percent… laying them over one on top of the other in the line of the hedge… to create a stock-proof barrier.”
Most of the hedges he works with are hawthorn, valued for their dense growth and vicious thorns, which keep livestock at bay. “They respond really well to being cut. As ridiculous as it sounds, being a tree, they actually say hawthorns love the axe.”
There are other varieties, like blackthorn near Evandale and White Hills, but the principle remains the same: transforming wild growth into structured barriers using age-old tools and practices.
The cycle of a hedge’s life is long and rhythmic, requiring careful maintenance over decades. “They’re trimmed for 20 or 30 years, stock-proof,” Boxhall says. “Then as the hedge gets a bit thin at the bottom, you stop trimming the top, let it grow up… and lay it again.” Many of the hedges he now restores haven’t seen this kind of attention in over 60 years. Some, he estimates, were last laid in the 1920s.
“In some of the trees, you can see where we’ve laid it over, where it’s been laid over 50 or 60 years ago… sometimes you even see the axe mark.”
It’s not just history in the technique, but also in the hedges themselves. They served as the original fences of early Tasmanian settlers. “Wire fences were 80 or 90 years into the future,” says Boxhall. “All you could do was either have hawthorn hedges, dry stone walls, or post and rail fences.”
Hedge laying is done only in the colder months, typically March through to September, when sap is low and the trees are less likely to be damaged. Even then, it’s hard work on the body. “These big hedges are hard on your body. You’ve really got to pull to get them down… they’re quite heavy,” he says. Despite this, he still enjoys working roadside, chatting with curious passers-by and welcoming a moment’s pause.
He’s mostly solo these days. “I used to have someone full-time… now mostly I do it by myself… which is okay. I can put my own music on the speaker then.”
The solitude is sometimes interrupted by surprising discoveries. “You find some of the things in the hedges… [they] were just the rubbish tip of the farm.” He recalls one find near Campbell Town: “As I was cutting down, it threw out a heap of sparks and I blunted the chain. There was an old rabbit trap… then I looked up and there was the trap hoe sat up in the branch… I often think, did they then get the call-up to go to the war?”
Each job presents its own challenges. Older hedges may be grown through with wire from post-war decades. “It is just slowing us down… blunting the chain or having to cut around the wire in the wood.”
Scratching around under the hedge and when you’re actually doing the main cut, which is the pleach, quite often you’re kneeling down and I did kneel on a thorn which went straight into my knee.
When the cycle is maintained, hedge laying can be more efficient. “They always talked about doing a cricket pitch a day, that’s 22 yards… but because this hedge wasn’t laid for 60-odd years… it’s a lot bigger.” For newer hedges, especially those planted himself, Boxhall says they can manage 25 to 30 metres a day once they reach maturity.
The materials matter too. Stakes and binders are cut from local dogwood, a hardwood species referred to colloquially as hazel. “The stakes we’re using here are probably between 12 and 15 years old… quite a dense timber, so they’re really good.”
Safety is always top of mind. Aside from the ever-present thorns—“I did kneel on a thorn which went straight into my knee”—there are sharper dangers. “I’ve only ever had one close call… the leather gloves got wet, and it cut through the glove and into my thumb.”
But perhaps the biggest risk is the traffic. Working by the roadside, Boxhall has a new appreciation for road workers. “Some of these cars are coming screaming past… just won’t slow down. The local traffic’s really good… but just occasionally you get some very enthusiastic [drivers].”
Despite the risks and the wear on his body, Boxhall isn’t planning to stop. “Keep keeping on,” he says. “It is an interesting job, working with chainsaws, timber, and all the tools.”
He travels across the state and even interstate, from Victoria to a farm in New South Wales where he’s worked annually for over a decade. Still, his heart remains in Tasmania.
Asked for his favourite part of the Meander Valley, he doesn’t hesitate. “I grew up at Meander… back to the 1800s… my ancestors hunted and trapped up there… that’s probably my favourite part, I think.”
For Boxhall, the hedges are more than a job. They are a connection to history, to land, and to craft—a living fence line tracing the contours of Tasmania’s past.
