But lured by his daughter Michelle to come live in Bellingen and watch his grandchildren grow up, he’s found himself with a new career, one that is the inverse of what he was doing previously.

Underneath Qudo, the Japanese restaurant in the old Masonic Lodge, Tim has set up a production studio and is doing some teaching on the side.

“Before, my teaching was the main thing and my pottery was the sideline,” he says.

Tim sees a nice synchronicity between the site of his studio and the Japanese influence on his pottery.

He studied at East Sydney Technical College in the 1970s under Peter Rushforth, widely regarded as the father of Australian studio ceramics.

Tim was also taught by Japanese master-potter Shiga Shigeo, who came to Australia to work with our ‘unknown’ clays and brought East and West together, experimenting with new glazes that mirrored the colours of the landscape here.

Shiga also taught local potters the two-section pot making technique, whereby a very large pot can be made in a more controlled manner, one half at a time.

“It’s kind of nice for me that we’ve got the Japanese restaurant upstairs and Taka is one of my students. I was very much influenced by the Japanese pottery scene,” Tim says.

Qudo co-owner and chef Taka has also taken advantage of the proximity by commissioning Tim to produce some plates and cutlery holders for the restaurant.

Following the path laid down by Shiga, Tim encourages his students to explore the geological side of pottery by digging their own clay.

He waxes lyrical about a sample excavated from the bottom of a cliff in Valla.

“Look at that,” he says. “It’s not even cracking when you bend it. It’s a fantastic stoneware clay. Beautiful.”

From Urunga, there’s some pure Kaolin clay, named after the village in China where the manufacture of porcelain first began.

“A few of the students have brought in a bucket from their property to show me and we’re trying to do things with the samples,” he says.

Tim has some vacancies for students in his classes, which run on Monday, Thursday and Friday mornings and Thursday evenings.

Local potter Nick Hannah is also teaching at the studio on Wednesday mornings.

You can contact Tim by emailing der_kinderen@yahoo.com.au

On YouTube, The Potter – timon