Meet Fletcher Cashion: University of Tasmania alumnus, carpenter, award winner and one of the hundreds of Tasmanians who have worked on the new Forestry building at the heart of our Hobart campus.
Fletcher began his career with the Hansen Yuncken construction company in 2022 as an apprentice before advancing to a supervisor position while studying a Diploma of Construction Management at the University in 2023.
Not long after completing his diploma, he went from studying at the University to helping build a part of its future – an opportunity that Fletcher describes as a stroke of serendipity.
“It seems a bit serendipitous to go from studying at the University of Tasmania to implementing the skills I developed from one of their courses on a university project.
“It has been a really good opportunity to immediately put my skills to the test, and it’s an awesome building to have worked on,” he said.
Fletcher won the State Apprentice of the Year award at the Master Builders Tasmania Awards for Excellence in August 2024 and was in the top three apprentices nationally, accolades that he attributes to his hard work and university study.
“My decision to study the Diploma was a real point of difference when it came to receiving the Apprentice of the Year award,” he said.
“With the Forestry building, I took on more of a supervisor role, which meant that I needed a different set of skills moving off the tools.
“I needed an understanding of the things that happen behind the scenes from day to day, like managing contracts, stakeholder engagement, and general cost management within construction.
“I learnt all these skills from my studies, and I was immediately able to incorporate them into my day-to-day work, which made the transition much easier.”
After three years of planning and construction, the new learning and teaching facility is almost complete. With over 150 tradespeople currently working on the site, excitement is at an all-time high.
“We take a lot of pride in what we do and our ability to deliver this project; we’re all super, super excited and proud to show people what we’ve done over the last three years.
“We all have a passion for building, and this is a very unique project with lots of unique construction methods,” said Fletcher.
These unique construction methods can be found in the project’s focus on sustainability, with an adaptive reuse approach that has nearly halved the potential embodied carbon of the project and provided plenty of opportunities for creativity.
“It’s been a really interesting build,” he said. “A lot of the existing structure has been maintained and altered to take the space from offices and a furniture shop to a fully functional educational space.
“The use of different materials that have a better impact on the environment, like carbon-neutral brick tiles and carbon-negative hempcrete, is pretty awesome.
“The way that the University has gone about sustainability has really shaped the project that they’ve wanted to create and give back to the people.”
For Fletcher, this project has been an opportunity to build a legacy as a Tasmanian, a builder and a member of the University community – a landmark that he and his team can point to for decades to come.
“For the rest of my life, I’m going to be able to point at the Forestry building and say that I was a part of that.
“To see Robert Morris-Nunn, who designed the dome originally, come back however many years later and talk about it, still filled with joy and pride in that work, I think our whole team will have that same mindset about the Forestry building,” he said.
Despite the challenges and hard work, there is clearly a lot of love for the building across the Hansen-Yuncken team, including a few favourite spaces and a renewed passion for the future of sustainable construction.
“There’s an area called the learning landscape. It’s a big seating area with lots of curved joinery units and timber flooring, and it’ll have plants all through it. I think it’s a really cool space,” Fletcher said.
“It was very tricky and very intricate, and I’m ready for it to be finished now, but I think once it’s done, that’ll be an area that I’ll look back and think ‘yeah, that was pretty cool to be a part of’.
“I think this building will be a great demonstration of what is possible using more sustainable methods of construction,” he said. “It has really set the benchmark in what can be done through adaptive reuse construction.”
In addition to the over 1000 tradespeople who have been involved across the life of the project, there are more than 10 current students and alumni who have worked on the Forestry building, including eight engineers from the University’s School of Engineering.
The award-winning Forestry building will open for students in Semester 1, 2026.
Banner image: Fletcher Cashion in the learning landscape.