EVOLUTION
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(1)
In The Beginning
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It’s 1953.
He’s 14.
He’s an immature example of a species of early Man, although not so young that he cannot already feel Nature’s power, in his hands, and also Her other power, the one She has put in his head, somewhere just behind the eyes, where dreams begin.
His dreams are yet only a child’s dreams, with no clear form or direction, simply vague images of open skies and the wide unbroken landscapes of his childhood, and of faraway places, and the stories that may exist in them. He has much to learn.
One day after school his mother takes him aside, and with her jaw set and the stoic look of the proud and resourceful farm girl she will always be, tells him, to his dismay, he is now “The Man Of The House”, and the best he can make of it is that his stepfather has buggered off, while his elder brother remains, as ever, steadfastly somewhere else.
He says nothing, simply nods and looks at the floor, but when she’s gone he cries a little, for his mother, and for the sadness of life, but mostly from the knowing that a Time has ended.
A few weeks later she buys him a boxed beginner kit of hand tools — ripsaw, claw hammer, screwdriver, chisel, carpenter’s pencil, small wooden spirit level, Stanley plane, tape measure, pliers, width scriber, and a gut-buster drill with six drill bits. He studies it, makes thank you noises that are caught up in a scatty jumble of feelings, feelings that will take him the next 70 years to craft into clarity.
And so, it’s in this way that Fate designates him a Home Handyman, as these are serious man-work tools, for the fixing of cupboard doors, for the hanging of pictures, and for the lining of unfinished sleepouts.
He squares his slight shoulders, and picks up his hammer.
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It’s 1959.
He’s 20.
It's the year he gets married.
They move in with his wife’s widowed grandmother and rent two rooms from her. It’s an old place at the rear of a corner shop in an inner suburb, with a backyard only big enough for a clothesline and an apricot tree.
There’s a geriatric galvo lean-to against the end fence, but inside it’s only fingertip to fingertip wide and a bit over twice as long. There’s no windows and the roof nearly touches his head. It’s half full of firewood, rotted bags of decayed almonds, musty stuff from the past. In no known universe would he consider this a Shed. Whether it’s a farmyard three-sider with walls of stacked mallee roots and a brush roof, or a full brick double with an electric roller door in pastel shades, a Shed is a state of mind, the place where a man can go to make what he can make, and fix what he can fix. And, perchance, to dream.
But this isn’t one of those places.
His dreams are now of one day building a car, of playing with engine parts, creating life. But he’s still an evolving human being, caught somewhere between Homo habilis (Man the Toolmaker), and Homo sapiens (Man the Thinker), but he doesn’t really know that yet. Evolution takes time.
He still has his beginner’s hand tools, but he now has some grownup tools as well, from when he went off to learn to be an Engineer, tools he made in the first year of his apprenticeship, in the gritty grotty clunk and clamour of the Railways’ Big Sheds, in the dying days of steam. These are robust tools, for the crafting and machining of metals — hacksaw, square, scribing block, G-clamps, drill steadies, inside and outside callipers. He also has tools added by choice — tinsnips, files, pliers, and an assortment of spanners. He quickly found that it was the spanners he liked best, the feel of them in his hands.
But after eighteen months in their rented rooms he still has nowhere at hand to forge his dreams, so he borrows a mate’s shed, makes his son a push-along 1932 Ford V8 roadster hot-rod, from scraps of Masonite and bits of packing crate, solders up flattened-out fruit cans for the engine, uses Sellotape containers for the air filters and a pair of aluminium cake tins for the rocker covers. The only things he buys are a couple of pieces of steel to fabricate the steering, and the four wheels. It has no inner life, but it’s a car, of sorts. With no shed he can call his own this is as far as his dreams will stretch.
But he improvises.
He strips the head off the family car, does it out there in the street, and even though it probably doesn’t need it, he gives it a meticulous de-coke and valve-grind, on the kitchen table. He imagines it makes the car run better, but this is really only for his hands, his restless hands, so they’ll feel a degree of purpose. While he waits.
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It’s 1962.
He’s 23.
They’re in their Housing Trust maisonette in a crap suburb, but it has a big backyard. He puts a basic steel garage kit on Time Payment and assembles it at the end of the driveway, makes a workbench from an old door.
He buys a substantial vice. With a great deal of satisfaction he bolts it to his makeshift workbench. He’ll have this vice for the rest of his days, as a bench vice, above all things, is the ultimate symbol of making and fixing. He scabs a couple of packing crates, fits shelves, starts collecting stuff. There is a sense of arrival, and as his first bold move, he buys an arc welder, and a Black & Decker quarter inch electric drill, the cheapest on the market. The drill will never live up to what he asks of it.
He converts his son’s street rod from push-along to pedal power. He still believes that any son of his will undoubtably be as fired by internal combustion and dreams of wheels as he is. He has a long journey ahead towards Wisdom.
At night, at the kitchen table, he designs a two-door sports coupe, tube frame, sleek fibreglass body that looks a touch Italian. It will never get off the sheet of paper.
But he scabs the wreck of a 1952 Singer SM 1500cc sports car. It’s resplendent with potential. He cuts, he welds, he truncates, he drills, he fashions, his hands shaping one of the dreams in his head, and eventually it becomes a pale representation of a 1926 T-model ‘bucket’ street rod. Sort of.
He drives it around a few times, exhilarated by the engineering, especially in its ability to corner like a roller skate. He enters it in a club meet once or twice, races it against the clock, where parts of seconds are a measure of tuning cause-and-effect, and for a while he revels in the joy of a thing that he’s created.
He tells himself he feels a pang of loss when he does the grownup thing and sells it to add to their home deposit fund, but it will be many years before he evolves enough to realise it was simply a thing of a Time, and also that it’s actually the making his hands need, and not the using.
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It’s 1964.
He’s 25.
They sign up for their first home, in a small estate out on the fringes, a plain and simple three-bed Contemporary of concrete brick in buff tones with a deep-six corrugated asbestos roof. There are no frills. But it has a decent space at the end of the driveway, and as part of the move, with the help of mates, he dismantles his garage, digs out the stumps, and re-erects it there, puts in his cupboards and shelves, the work bench, bolts the vice back on. Then he lays a concrete floor, does it the pioneer way, with a shovel and sweat.
He adds a heavy duty 3/8 inch drill to his arsenal and makes a wall stand adaptor to take it. He finds a 6v/12v battery charger at the tip and resurrects it. His dominion is growing, so he dreams some more dreams, of wheels, and energy.
He registers a Trade Name and sets up to make a range of speed equipment, but it’s restricted to lowering kits, floor gear change conversions, and extractor manifolds, as these things are the limits of his tools and his time and his creativity. But they fill the void, for now, and spin a little extra money.
But then his younger brother, a like-minded rev-head, acquires the tattered remains of a 1935 Ford 10 Prefect and a 1935 Ford V8 roadster, and in no time at all the V8 running gear is shoe-horned into the bowels of the Prefect. They dub it “Henry” and they’re set for the local club dragstrip.
“Henry” is fun but accomplishes nothing much because neither of them have serious money, and by 1965 the drag racing infant is already beginning to feed only on serious money.
But some kind of a fire has been lit.
He guts the poor little Prefect body down to a shell (in another lifetime he will muse over what will become the tens of thousands of dollars worth of classic cars he has consumed out of hand in his day), conjures up the sweetest tubular frame chassis, pensions off the flathead and slips in a 292 cubic inch Ford V8 truck engine that his brother finds for a song because its only other remaining usefulness would be as a boat anchor. But with eight very short exhaust pipes bellowing no-one can hear the bearings, and anyway, in its new life it will only have to run in 10-12 second bursts. Hopefully less.
He races it himself only once, gets a Runner-up in class. The trophy will be lost somewhere in years to come, lost in the shuffles of their life. Glory is a fleeting thing. Ephemeral.
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It’s 1966.
He’s 27.
They have only one mortgage now, but two kids, and they’ve hit hard times. He’s head-hunted by a tractor agency looking for a field serviceman, out in the bush where he was born. It has a house and a Holden ute tossed into the package, so they get renters in to pay the mortgage and he signs on for one year. But just the one. There is only so far that a city girl’s love will stretch.
The place has a sort of a shed. It goes well with the sort of a house and the sort of a town. But he’s happy here, feels connected to his forebears. He casts about for a one year dream, fixes his gaze on the hazy blue ranges in the distance, and the hint of salt-lake shimmer. He begins to make sketches in his head.
He finds the remains of a Bedford van round the back of the Golden Fleece Roadhouse out on the highway. A couple of hippies passing through one night had limped in on three cylinders and gone to sleep in the back, and whatever they'd been smoking had gotten away from them during the night, and by morning everything from the steering wheel to the tail-lights was history. They hitched a ride with a semi and said they'd be back in a few days. That was three years ago. Old man Bailey reckons they probably aren't coming back. He’s glad to see it go.
Him and his mate tow it out to the tip and cut the body off, then roll the remains into the shed. He lifts the head, drops the sump, and strips out its ailing lung. The top compression ring has broken up and taken a piece of the piston with it. He rats the scrap metal bin at work till he finds a similar piston with the same gudgeon-pin size, cleans it up on the lathe to suit, then sifts through the rubbish heap out the back for a set of rings that are near enough. A de-coke and a valve-grind and she doesn't sound too bad.
Next he cuts the remining bones of it in halves, straight across — chassis, tailshaft, exhaust system, the lot — cuts two feet out of the middle and welds it back together, re-machines the universal joints, shortens all the brake and fuel lines, raises the springs a bit, coat of grey paint, oversize tyres on, and she’s starting to look like the sketches in his head. By the time the roll-bar is in place, front seat and floor re-fitted, and a huge padded crate in the back for the kids, the thing looks like it’s ready for a moonwalk.
It’s one of the best things he’ll ever drive. Because it’s about Freedom. Freedom and the wide open skies and exploring the wilderness. For a few weekends there is a simple joy in his heart. But only in his.
© T. R. Edmonds 2025
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