Martin Geddes has spent close to fifty years in the metal trades — fourteen of them in heavy manufacturing as a qualified boilermaker and welder, building draglines, presses and structural steel, before he ever stood in front of a class.
Then came thirty years of teaching — most of them at TAFE Queensland, leading metal fabrication, welding and blacksmithing programs and mentoring a generation of tradespeople.
The Churchill Fellowship
In 2005 Martin was awarded a Churchill Fellowship — one of just fifteen Queenslanders that year. It sent him abroad for eight weeks of advanced study: to the John C. Campbell Folk School in the United States — a name American smiths know well — training under Elmer Roush, Lonnie Farmer, Jerry Darnell and Tal Harris, and to the Czech Republic, including the Hefaiston gathering at Helfštýn Castle among a hundred-plus European smiths.
Writing the standards
Since 2024 Martin has been the lead Subject Matter Expert for the Manufacturing Industry Skills Alliance, rewriting Australia’s national blacksmithing competency standards — six units revised and three entirely new ones written, now published on training.gov.au. Put simply: he’s literally writing the book the trade will be taught from.
The last blacksmith teacher
When TAFE Queensland wound up its blacksmithing program in 2023, Martin was the last teacher standing — a story covered by ABC News. Rather than let it die, he built and now runs a working blacksmith shop at the Cooneana Heritage Centre in Ipswich, where nationally recognised classes have run since 2021.
Still at the anvil
The work hasn’t slowed. Recent projects include forging a run of heavy needles with the local community — tooling made from scratch, drawn out under the hundredweight power hammer, upset and finished by hand. Martin still runs a monthly open-forge night, and still believes the fastest way to learn is to make something and get it a little wrong.
Capta Majora
Capta Majora — “seek greater things” — is the Geddes family motto, and it’s about the only inheritance Martin has leaned on harder than an anvil. It’s why the trade wasn’t allowed to quietly disappear, why the standards are being rewritten properly, and why these resources exist at all: so the next smith can aim higher than the last.
See the work
The trade, in motion.
Steel moves better than it reads. Watch a little of what comes out of the Cooneana shop.
