Our store is the heart of the community.

The Chudleigh General Store has been the enduring heart and soul of Chudleigh since 1886. The little northern Tasmanian town, at the gateway to some of the most spectacular surviving wilderness in the nation, once had two grocery stores, four churches, a school, a police station and a maternity hospital. It now has only the Chudleigh General Store, a community hall and the Melita Honey Farm (once the other general store).

The 15km journey to Deloraine to buy goods for farming families to survive was once a hazardous journey by horse and cart through heavily forested areas like Needles (a place so named because driving though it was said to be so difficult it was like threading yourself through the eye of a Needle).

In recent years, closure of the store became a real possibility when large supermarket chains began offering home delivery and deep-freezing technology allowed families to keep food for months at a time when previously it would perish. But Chudleigh General Store was always so much more than a place to buy bread. Over the years it has evolved as a place to not only hear about the news of the town and families in the local vicinity but to stop, rest, kick off your farm boots and break that bread around a warm open fire with friends.

While the Pandemic almost became the store’s death knell, it may also have helped save it; just as it has made us all pause and re-evaluate what is important in life. Throughout the Covid crisis, the store remained open to locals offering phone and car service, while the owners allowed the store to quietly reveal itself to them through a gradual and sensitive restoration process. Slowly the store started to come to life again. It was almost like it had a voice and was guiding the owners’ hands telling them how to bring the shop back to its former glory. First, there was a hidden fireplace – the focal point of the new café within the shop – now known as The Hearth of Chudleigh.

It then told us to remove a stud wall to showcase its heart – the Hearth – which is now, also, a kind of theatrette space where talent can perform for the café. Then there was the beautiful counter made from a three-hundred-year-old tree, previously hacked in half to make way for a display fridge as previous owners took drastic measures to try to survive.

Local craftsman Paul Hickman used his amazing skills to gently nudge a new extension of the counter beside its original, making a near-seamless extension. Blackwood timber floorboards, removed of their grey paint, next, shone through after years of having their beauty hidden. The store has also guided owners to a 150-year-old staircase (yet to be installed after a bit of rejigging) to replace its graceful original that was once the artery to the attached home.

The shop has struggled, but continues to breathe a kind of life into the community. It has battled to survive, staved off hardship and tragedy and continues to draw people in because of its charm. It is this charm that is being featured, in the shop, in a bid to get the new hearth and heart of the shop warming up and beating again. Fun-themed nights (featuring food from around the globe) history, poetry, nostalgic board game and card nights, will all be regular mainstays of the Hearth of Chudleigh café, within the shop.

We are no longer a general store, but an antique emporium, cafe, B&B and live event venue. Following the granting of a special liquor licence, we are now open Wednesday to Sunday, 11:45am to 5pm; and also Friday evenings for bookings and special events.

The new Hearth of Chudleigh, within the Chudleigh General Store, will be all about spreading love, laughter, song and a reinvigoration of the importance of our humanity towards one another, using good old-fashioned food, fun, laughter, silliness and a larrikinish yarn or two. This is something very much alive in many of the old bushman living in the area, many of whom have descended directly from some the original pioneers, settlers and convicts who opened the valley up to settlement.

The owners would like to thank: Ken Faulkner, Dave Irving, Paul Wynter, Paul Hickman, Suzie Haydon, John Hawkins, Linda Motton and and Rose Turtle Urtler, who have never wavered in their belief in the shop and given their love and support to its owners, ensuring The Chudleigh General Store remains the mainstay of community life, in a special little town, known lovingly by locals as “the centre of the universe”.