Blokes and Sheds
About ten years ago Dave, a friend who is a gardener and odd job man, came around to see me. He’d just had a rather disturbing experience.
One of regular customers rang him up with some bad news. Her husband had just died and there was an urgent job that she wanted Dave to attend to. When he got there, the distressed wife demanded that Dave “clean out the shed immediately - take everything down the dump right now.” The shed had long been a bone of contention between the husband and wife.
When Dave went down to the shed, which was at the far end of the yard and backed onto a laneway, he opened the door on a revelation.
Inside were dozens of push lawn mowers, handles, blades, sharpening tools, everything that the connoisseur of the human powered lawn mower could ever need or want. All beautifully ordered and kept in good nick.
It turned out that this bloke ran a Saturday morning swap shop for those who appreciated a good push lawn mower. Other lawn mower fanciers would come around and discuss the virtues of the mountain ash handle as against the imported hickory ones or the correct angle at which a blade should be sharpened.
The old shed still glowed with the presence of the man and his life of unique and gentle obsession - and it was all about to disappear under tons of far more mundane household rubbish at the dump. (Most of it did go to the dump - Dave kept a couple of things but it mostly disappeared. Collecting too much stuff can be a hazard in Dave’s line of work).
This shed was a one man, highly personal museum, a one person-sized piece of history.
With urban consolidation and infill housing, a great many sheds are vanishing. This was history that is deemed too microscopic, too irrelevant, too petty to be worthy of record. So no-one knows what the sheds of 1946 looked like nor 1923 or 1887.
So I set myself a kind of project, looking for and photographing sheds - both the inside and outside.
I quickly found that it was what went on in the shed that really mattered. How people gave people meaning to their lives, how they found self-expression or satisfaction.
A complicated aerial or a smoking chimney, a big pile of machinery parts or some comfy looking chairs by a shed door - all signs that a highly regarded shed was inside.
Order or the lack of it in a shed was important. Most men don’t have much of a chance to order anything much in their lives. The domestic arrangements (for good or bad) have tended to become the female domain. And at work, if you are part of a larger organisation or a white collar workplace, you don’t get much chance to make a mess - other people call the shots. So the shed becomes a place where you can let things evolve completely naturally, like your own personal piece of geological strata or a personal compost heap.
For many men the shed is a still place, a central point in a world that is whizzing around at an ever-increasing pace, getting madder and madder every year. But your shed can stay just about the same; that 3/8″ spanner you put on the corner of the bench last October will still be there next October. The shed is a place for reflection and meditation. Not everyone chooses a church or yoga for deep thought and the pondering of life’s great mysteries.
Nor is the shed necessarily a place for isolation either. It can be a place where men pass on useful knowledge to sons - and even daughters. Bikes are repaired, things taken apart and their innards examined. The spirit of enquiry in shed science lives on.
The social shed is used to make wine or beer or cook up the tomato sauce, to make sausages or all the things that were once done in the farmhouse in the old country.
I also met some extraordinarily talented people who work in modest surroundings but produce work of immense skill and quality. They seemed to be reservoirs of knowledge, confident of the capability of their hands to make useful and durable products or possessing insights into solving problems that would defy many others.
After some years of shooting photos and chatting with shed owners around Australia, I approached a publisher or two with the idea for a book. Eventually Angus & Robertson (now HarperCollins) accepted and Blokes and Sheds became (to everyone’s surprise, me included) became a best seller.
It has precipitated a renewed interest in shed culture (which is good) and been part of The New Blokism (which if you don’t know about, you’d better not ask - I’m not too sure myself).
I’m glad I made the book, if only for the fact it gave the thumbs up to thousands of shed owners around the country.
