Bakers lend a hand to help RedBeard make its daily bread

Down a quiet lane in the central Victorian town of Trentham is a little bakery. The laneway is named after John Wolff, who hand-built the bakery's wood-fired scotch oven in 1891.

Bread from that oven fed the farming and forestry town until 1987, when, unable to compete with cheap, fluffy white factory bread, the bakers let the fire die, and the oven went cold.

In 2005, brothers John and Alan Reid discovered the oven, recently renovated by a local musician, and went into business baking sourdough bread. They named the bakery RedBeard, and it again became the heart of the community when locals were invited to cook their roasts and bake cakes for special events once the bread had been made. Eventually, Alan went out on his own and John continued building the business with their sister, Judith Reid.

But John Reid, 58, is not at the bakery today. He seldom is these days. Early this year, he started getting headaches and on February 14, he couldn't drive home after a bake. On February 23, he was diagnosed with stage four glioblastoma brain cancer and a week later, surgeons were only able to remove half of the 6cm tumour that had formed in his brain.

Word of Reid's condition spread across Victoria's tight-knit baking community, many of whom had trained at RedBeard, which specialises in handmade organic sourdough bread.

"Wild-ferment bakers came out of the woodwork, out of retirement, to offer their help," says Reid's sister, Judith. "They volunteered their time and arrived at midnight to start mixing. Some arrived at 3am to shape the dough. There is a lot of respect for what John has done for baking."

One of the helpers is British-born baker Michael James, formerly of Tivoli Road Bakery in South Yarra. A good friend of Reid's, they travelled together in the United States visiting bakers. "He was known everywhere we went," says James. "He has a reputation that is known globally. Locally, he is an important mentor."

John and Judith Reid have travelled all over Australia, scouring country towns for disused scotch ovens, identifying them by their chimneys protruding from old buildings. After cataloguing them, they try to restore them and find bakers to work in them.

James starts listing Victorian bakeries whose bakers spent time with Reid at RedBeard: Basilio in Ballarat, Oak and Swan in South Gippsland, Two Fold, Daylesford. "John has a vision where every town has its own baker, baking sourdough bread and pastries made from local grain," says James.

He has taken over Reid's pet project: perfecting croissants and other butter pastries using specially raised sourdough mothers. "It's more complicated than it looks," says James.

The stoic Englishman pauses. "John is the heart and soul of RedBeard," he says quietly. "He is a foundation of our nation's artisan baking community. We are here to make sure what he started continues."

Reid has not only trialled old-fashioned heritage grains but, working with writer Bruce Pascoe, he has planted trial plots of kangaroo grass and native millet in a paddock opposite the bakery in an effort to bake bread from native Australian grains.

Now undergoing treatment and spending time with his wife, Thais, sons, and close family, Reid would desperately like to go back to bake, says Judith. "Despite the fact he has lost 50 per cent of his vision, he is still able to cut and portion raw dough, weight-perfect for a loaf – without scales – and form it by hand."

Reid's wife and business partner, Thais, intends to keep the bakery running. RedBeard's improvised bakery team moves quietly, efficiently around each other in a well-rehearsed dance of weighing, measuring, cutting, cooking, shaping and baking. There is a warm energy occasionally dampened by tacit sadness.

Apprentice Fin Ward, from Darwin, chops leeks silently. Cook Angela Nicolettou, who joined the team in November, came for a sourdough bread-baking workshop and was so impressed by Reid's ethos she asked if she could help in the kitchen.

"RedBeard is a very special place," says Nicolettou. "It's not just about bread; it's about creating and spreading knowledge and building relationships at the same time. "John's condition…" She falters. "I just feel so privileged."