Stewart Campbell learned to turn wood as a boy, at his father’s lathe on the family croft in Scotland. Life took him away from it for the best part of thirty years — but recently he’s come back to it, and this time it’s stuck. Based in Oakford, on the southern edge of Perth, Western Australia, he’s now making bespoke pieces the way he’s relearning the craft itself: by trial and error, and enjoying every minute.
He’s filming the process from start to finish, block to finished piece — mistakes and all — and he’d like you to come along. Follow and comment on the social channels (linked in the footer), and browse the site to see what’s currently available. If something catches your eye, send an enquiry and we’ll come back to you with details, availability and pricing (which varies with your location).
Given his first lathe at the age of ten by his father, a woodturner by trade, Stewart learned the craft as a boy on the family croft in the west Highlands of Scotland. Then life intervened: thirty-odd years working on oil rigs around the world, with little time for the workshop.
Now settled in Perth, Western Australia, he’s picked it back up — not as an expert, but as someone rediscovering a craft he loved as a boy, learning as he goes. He turns the old, the discarded and the broken into something worth keeping.
Stewart is also the author of Beyond the Derrick, a memoir of those thirty years and what came after.
Stewart Campbell.
Perth, Western Australia
Funny, candid and deeply human, Beyond the Derrick is an insider’s account of the oilfield and an honest story about work, resilience, family and finding your footing again when the life you built suddenly shifts beneath you.
Growing up in the west Highlands of Scotland, Stewart Campbell never imagined a career that would take him from the North Sea to Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Angola, Chad, Iraq, Australia and beyond.
Over the next thirty years, the extraordinary slowly became ordinary. Sleeping in a Renault in the middle of nowhere. Being chased by wild dogs in the Caucasus. A near-drowning beneath a life raft. A wedding ring lost in Iraq. Motorbike crashes. Food poisoning in places where you really didn’t want food poisoning. Almost dying on a mountain. Ship graveyards, radioactive landscapes, deepwater oilfields and deserts that seemed to stretch forever. Somewhere along the way, the unusual became routine.
But this isn’t just a book about places.
It’s about the people who made them unforgettable. The friendships forged on rigs and in workshops. The absurd humour that thrives in remote camps. The cultures where the people made life harder than the environment ever did, and others where strangers became lifelong friends. It’s about watching an industry grow up, from the rough-and-ready days of the 1990s to an era where safety became more than a slogan and started shaping every decision.
It’s also the story of what happened when the work finally caught up with the man doing it. A body quietly keeping score for thirty years. Depression that arrived before he recognised it. A diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, followed weeks later by an aggressive lymphoma, forcing him to confront the one thing he had never planned for: Who am I when I can’t do the job anymore?
Funny, candid and deeply human, Beyond the Derrick is an insider’s account of the oilfield and an honest story about work, resilience, family and finding your footing again when the life you built suddenly shifts beneath you.