Will the Wombat | The BBQ Cleaver

The Inspiration The wombat is a tank on four short legs. Thirty-five kilos of muscle and cartilage, built low to the ground, capable of a surprising sprint when it decides the conversation is over. Its backside is its best feature — a plate of tough cartilage and thick hide that it uses as a door, backing into a burrow and blocking the entrance so hard that anything foolish enough to follow gets pinned against the roof. It digs tunnel systems that outlast it by decades, and in a bad fire season those tunnels quietly become shelter for half the neighbourhood. It also, famously, produces cube-shaped droppings. Up to a hundred a night, stacked on rocks and logs as a kind of geometric noticeboard. No other animal on earth manages it. Armoured, unglamorous, structurally over-engineered and completely unbothered. We couldn't think of a better animal for a cleaver. The Design Will is the knife you pick up when the job stops being delicate. Ribs, chine bone, shoulder joints, a chicken broken down four ways before the coals are ready — the work where finesse is the wrong tool and mass is the right one. The weight sits high in the spine, so the swing does the work and your wrist doesn't. Lift, drop, let gravity finish the sentence. The blade is tall enough that once you've broken something down you can turn it flat and scoop the lot into the tray without reaching for a bench scraper, and flat enough along the edge to land square on a board every time rather than skating off a bone. It is not a subtle knife. Wombats aren't subtle animals. Both get the job done and neither asks for applause. The Specifications [To come]