Fire and Steel
As a result of the storytelling workshop in Charleville and follow-on mentoring that I did with her, I knew Nikki Thompson was keen to write about Mick Henricks and The Farmers Forge in Roma. For anyone trying to pitch to any publication, understanding their audience and product is paramount to success. Nikki writes regularly for Maranoa Today but this story felt right for something different.
As a past contributor to R.M.Williams OUTBACK Magazine, I was pretty sure this story would interest them and so it proved. Nikki’s excellent portrayal of Mick’s life and business sparked immediately, and it was published in the Business section of OUTBACK in Issue #160 in April/May 2025. It is shared here with permission from the Editor in Chief, Mark Muller.
The Farmer’s Forge produces top-quality axes in Roma, Qld.
Mick Henricks has a passion for fire and steel. The spark that ignited his business 5 years ago, in Roma, Qld, The Farmer’s Forge, was there from a very young age.
As a child, his favourite place was in the shed on the family farm, often doing things he shouldn’t be – jamming things in grinders and the like. Mick says his father Rob was “big on doing things yourself ” and his mother, Gail, very supportive of Mick’s creativity.
On finishing school, Mick settled into farming life. On reflection he says he regrets not having completed a trade but, at the time, the call to be home was strong, and he enjoyed driving tractors and working with machinery. Moonlighting casually with a local boilermaker, he put his ever-increasing skills to practical use, building for others on request.
Around that time, Mick “properly” met his wife to-be, Mardi Bauer, in Toowoomba. They had been at school together from year 4, but in those childhood years, Mick flew well under Mardi’s radar. Eighteen months after meeting, the couple were married and settled together on the Henricks’ farm.
After downsizing the family farming operation, Mick and Mardi opened a trucking business, which they ran for several years. However, the call to work with steel never abated and Mick attended his first blacksmithing workshop at the Cobb & Co museum in Toowoomba in 2009. Subsequently, between trucking and helping Mardi with their 3 sons, Spencer, 16, Ted, 13, and 9-year-old Jack, he attended as many workshops as possible.
As his skills and reputation grew, the number of enquiries he received to craft things, from garden ornaments to hammers and knives, increased. “Being self-taught is, in and of itself, a double-edged sword,” Mick says. “It’s a more expensive way to learn, as you make more errors along the way, but with each iteration you learn from your mistakes. You build a deeper understanding and almost a relationship with the steel.”
Since then, Mick and Mardi have grown their small business so that Mick now works 6 days a week at The Farmer’s Forge, juggling cattle and kids on the weekend. Axes are Mick’s main market, and a typical week sees Mick do a run of 8–15 axes. Mick also produces 150 hammers a year in 5 styles.
The different axes he makes result from listening to the needs of his clients. Each axe is initialled, and has a crafted timber handle and a leather pouch made by Mick.
While his work can look very industrial and intense, with massive hammers, extreme heat and lots of noise, Mick’s passion for his work and for steel itself shines through. “Steel, which consists of iron and carbon, is something that seems quite solid and strong to most people, but I don’t see it that way,” Mick says. “Every time a piece of steel is in the forge, depending on how the temperature hits the steel, the grains in it will grow. The anomalies that develop mean there is a constant flow of decisions that need to be made to work with the flow of variations.”
When Mick is at the forge, he says he always starts with the end in mind, breaking down the process into steps towards that end, constantly receiving feedback from the alchemy of steel and fire. “Steel is so forgiving, you can turn it into something that looks animated, and it moves so freely when it’s extremely hot. I love when you take it from just a square piece of steel, punch a hole in it, manipulate the steel and then you start to see an axe come to life.”
Forging, with temperatures of around 1000°C, is only one step. Mick aims to get the shape as close as possible to the desired finished product to minimise grinding. The axe is then hardened, tempered and sharpened, ready to be hung on a hand-crafted spotted gum handle. Finally, Mick sews a leather sheaf to store the bespoke axe.
Mick is deeply fascinated by the history of blacksmithing, the evolution of tools over time and the impact that has had on human civilisation.
Although most of his sales are domestic, Mick has a steady customer base in the USA. Many of these are repeat orders for the larger of the 9 axes he makes, The Farmer and The Great Divide. “They reckon our axes are like a hot knife through butter with their timber,” Mardi says. Mick has also attracted a small market in China and Japan.
Mick believes there is much to gain from learning how to use an axe. “Great axemanship comes from attentive use of the swing and from knowing when to let go so the axe blade and gravity do the real work.”
In August 2024, at the tail end of the tourist season and with the cooler weather, The Farmers Forge began to offer courses. The initial plan was to hold one weekend of blacksmithing, at beginner or intermediate level, per month. Over summer, they introduced a 2-hour workshop each Saturday morning from 8am to 10 am to beat the heat. These have proved very popular, and participants take home either a cheese knife or a steak flipper. Full-day workshops will recommence in March, building to 2 per month during the peak tourist months of April–July.
Looking ahead, Mick’s dream is to have a full-time blacksmith employed, so that he can concentrate on the design and manufacturing elements that are his deepest passion.