EVOLUTION
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(3)
The Dawn Of Wisdom
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It’s 1982.
He’s 43.
The company folds in around him, and he’s found good mates. And then there’s the fat salary. And the Pension Fund. And the superb wines. Love and optimism return, so they re-boot their lives, go chasing after their once-upon-a-time dream of a home in the hills, to be among tall stringybarks, with koalas, a pantheon of birdlife, ghostly mists in winter, wildflowers in the spring.
It’s a leggy, split-level pole house, so there’s an absolute cave underneath at the back where the platform’s been cut into the hillside. This gives him so much space that the reels of fence wire and bundles of star droppers and the new chainsaw and all the rest of his tools are spread out, just a little untidily, as though a bit too much exuberance is at play.
They lavish sweat on Nature’s own work, and her green fingers go mad again, and together they carve out a little piece of heaven-on-a-hillside. Up go two more pergolas, they build in the bottom half of the house, wrestle up a pair of garage roller doors, install all the bushfire measures, then he carves yet another house name from a redgum slab, hangs it out over the letterbox.
But, this little piece of heaven is on a hillside that faces north, where the desert summer winds are born, and it looks down into a heavily wooded gully, and it’s a timber house, and it’s up on poles, and it’s on a narrow dead-end road, and a narrow dead-end water main. You couldn’t design something more inappropriate. Some of life’s lessons come hard.
In only their second year Ash Wednesday sends them a blast furnace from Alice Springs, and it howls over the ridges and up their gully and there’s burning birds and falling embers and a holocaust of choppers and it’s Apocalypse Now so they turn tail and run and run and run and don’t draw breath, until they find the beach.
< >
It’s 1983.
He’s 44.
It’s a sweet old Queen Anne villa from the 1920s, with paired verandahs, high ceilings, jarrah floors, and it’s perched up on the coastal cliffs south of the city, giving views of the ocean that one day real estate agents will go mad for.
It’s at what was once the limits of the suburban fringe and the railway line, where the day-trippers came to play on the beach and the rocks below, where the flappers and their beaus would carouse on the strand, then take tea and scones in the twee café.
But it was built by a family of battlers, from Cindercrete block and second-hand doors and windows, so it will always be a challenge to keep time and the salt air at bay. But they’ll be in this house for the next 25 years.
Up until recently it was surrounded by fruit trees and almonds, on an expanse of land big enough for two full-sized blocks to be carved off, and modern places built on them. What’s left is on the market, the owners seeming to only see it as some kind of awkward remnant, so it’s short on fences, a clothes line, and most of the driveway. And there’s no shed.
But for these two refugees it’s love at first sight, and the best part is, it barely needs a mortgage at all. They sign the papers ten minutes after walking in the door on Open Inspection day.
The garage goes up first, another steel framed kit, and the Italians rock in to whack down the floor and fix the driveway. But the back yard still has a leftover look, as if it isn’t quite sure what it’s attached to any more, its new context. So he starts by putting up their biggest yet pergola, covers it with shade cloth and glory vines, then buys an angle grinder and a masonry drill, and sets about another round of landscaping, this time with low sandstone walls, a swathe of old red brick paving, chunky outdoor furniture.
She blesses it all with her green fingers and soon there’s gardens, a silver birch, a magnificent tree fern, hanging baskets overflowing with flowers. Barbecue nights are so relaxed friends never want to go home.
Out the front he cleans up the lawn, then sets about installing a fully automated drip irrigation system, front and back, to do the watering for when they finally get to chase their other dream, of faraway places. And in time he adds yet another pergola, his seventh, and what will be his last, puts it up over the driveway for the Company car, as her Mini just about fills the garage.
And so they get on with the final years of their careers, watch their other two leave home and become adults. The mortgage is long gone, so it’s then that they set out to discover the rest of the world, while they watch over each other and mellow into late middle age. It’s become a pretty sweet life.
< >
It’s 2003.
He’s 64.
They’re both retired, so there’s freedom to travel at will, but best of all, now there’s two grandkids to indulge.
It’s in this time that he finds a quiet joy in his shed, working at his own dogged pace, especially when it’s winter and the outside world lashes the roof, and he can be alone amongst the elements, but not at their mercy. But he’s stuck for room. His Company car is no longer in the drive, her Mini is no longer under his elbows, as both are gone in the new order of things, turned into a joint Mazda. But now it’s the Mazda that’s under his elbows.
He re-positions the clothes line out the back, re-jigs a heap of paving, takes off the entire end wall of the shed, adds two metres to its length, puts the end wall back on. It’s then that he gets a bench grinder, sets it up on its own pedestal, because in the world of men and their sheds a bench grinder is surely the mark of a home handyman who has “arrived”, as it speaks of tool sharpening, and luxury accessories.
As his first major shed project, he sets about building the world’s biggest toy-box for his grandson, starting with a four foot by three foot top of a coffee table he made long ago from old floorboards, back when all their furniture comprised of scabbings, makeovers, and hand-me-downs. The top was always going to come in handy one day. For something.
The rest of the toy-box is from timber and fittings from his collection of scrap, as that’s the only way some things should be done. But he still clings to the ancient myth of the true sub-species habilis, the maker of things solely by hand, as if religion is at work, its creed requiring long rip-saw cuts to size down planks, all holes to be done with his fifty year old gut-buster drill, and lots of hacksawing-up of lookalike medieval corner plates and hinges, with bolt heads hand filed into studs that would’ve once looked at home on a castle drawbridge.
He’s three-quarters the way through sanding the whole thing down ready for staining when his right shoulder finally gives up and his arm stops working. It takes two weeks rest and a shot of cortisone straight into the shoulder joint to bring it back to life. He bows – ungraciously – to the gods of his primitive ancestors, and buys a sander.
One of his favourite bits of home video is of him and the two kids together assembling the monster in their family room, then climbing inside when it’s done, giggling in the dark like fugitives, then doing a jack-in-a-box for the camera.
He may’ve wrecked his shoulder, but he reckons there’s still plenty of mileage in him and his shed and his tools (albeit now power-driven), so he dives into a dolls-house for his grand-daughter, a four-roomed, two-storey Mock Tudor job with stairways and a front door and a shingle roof. He also makes it exclusively from scrap, but this time solely old bits of their own past houses, and tells her of their origins, another piece of family mythology to pass on when he’s long gone. Small monuments, placed near the heart, mean more than big ones any day.
The grandkids love visiting. There’s the secret corners of Grandma’s garden, with gnomes and fairies and one-eared cats to be discovered. And down on the beach there’s rocks and pools to be explored, shells to be endlessly collected, sandy rivers and crab colonies to be built. And on some occasions there’s Grandpa’s shed. Being in it with Grandpa is like entering a cave of mysteries - so many jars, so many tools, so many cupboard drawers, so many What’s this for Grandpa?
They front the workbench. He’s eight and growing fast, she’s five and he stands her on a stool. He tells them it’s the stool his Dad made for his Mum in 1935, when they were newlywed pioneers on a scrub block, out west in the sandhills and the mallee, and makes it sound like it’s a holy artefact from Lord Of The Rings. They hang on every word.
The three of them make wooden warrior-knights together, lets them fretsaw out the shapes, then finds paint and art brushes and they deck them out. Geez, they’re rough, but it’s never about aesthetics. It’s about hands and memories. It’s only then that he realises, he never did this with his own kids, and thinks – why not? Why wasn’t there more hours back then? More openings? More inclination? But he has no answers, feels a sharp pang of regret.
It's about this time that his other shed truly materialises. While a man’s shed is a place to retreat into, and make stuff, for some there is another place where all sorts of other things can be made. That shed in his head. Where the raw materials are words and ideas and the tools are a pad and a biro and a clip board and a jumble of story bits that continually shamble about in his imagination and give him no peace.
At first it’s in their family room, with its soft green cushions on bamboo, with arrays of their trip photos on the walls. And here he sits, him and the cat, for a couple of hours from four every morning, and writes writes writes, crafting, assembling, exploring the lyrics of life, and then, of necessity, wooing the fickle mistress that is commercial literature.
With poetry, short stories, and a novel published, he attacks the old verandah sleepout, turns it into a decent bedroom, then sets about converting the large spare bedroom into a nifty study. His best mate gives him a desk, scarred by time and traffic, and on it he sets up his new Hewlett Packard, a printer, and shelves for reams of paper. The shed in his head has truly arrived.
< >
It’s 2009.
He’s 70.
In time he will quip that turning 70 is the most dangerous thing a man can do.
It’s about three a.m. He shocks awake and before his eyes is one of those Times Square ticker-tape news bulletin things going by, and it’s clacking out –
SOMETHING TERRIBLE IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!
- and he finds he’s laying on the edge of a dark dark hole knowing that if he makes one wrong move he will surely topple in and he and his universe will be gone forever so he tries to sit up but his whole left side has stopped working including his mouth and he’s making these strange grunt noises and one eye is wide and full of panic and one eye isn’t doing anything and for two days it’s all a blur until the ticker-tape goes off again right there in the ER and he remembers calling for her out of the side of his wonky mouth but the rest of the horror he will never make a serious attempt to remember.
“T.I.A.”, they say. “Two of them”, they say. “But you’ve been lucky, no lasting damage”, the experts pronounce. Say it like a toss-away line. But at that moment he doesn’t feel the slightest bit lucky. His family rotates past his bed, fretful. The support machinery brings in two women who’ve been through it themselves and look fine, and they dole out pamphlets that he’ll never read because it would make it – make it – too real. But every night for a couple of weeks after he gets home he has to fight the heebie-jeebies in the dark and can only snatch sleep with the sheet pulled up over his head as if that alone will keep out Nature’s Nightmares.
For about a month the two of them do little but draw breath, but they both know a point in Life’s Cycle has been reached.
They tissy up the few cosmetics the house and garden need, to maximise impact, tee up an auctioneer, turn the study back into a bedroom. Then he sets about weighing up the contents of his shed, attacks this with a touch of ruthlessness, like he’s angry. Which he is. But he knows it’s time, time to re-assess, time to put his shed’s accumulated contents through the filter of practicalities.
The eventual pile out on the verge for the hard refuse truck is big. Damn big, includes a sound system past its best, great chunks of lumber, sheets of iron, precision engineering tools from another time that went rusty for want of purpose, he even adds his arc welder, with mask, leads, and welding rods.
The postie can’t believe his luck, spends fifteen minutes of his letter-rounds time working out how the hell he can put the welder kit on his Post Office Issue motorbike, gives up, promises – just about passionately – that he’ll be back after work if it’s put aside. He nods, knows a worthy fellow scabber when he sees one.
After 25 years in their white cottage by the sea, even with constant rust battles, three termite attacks, and some rising damp, it still breaks their hearts when they see the Auction sign go up.
On the last morning of their two-day move-out, he stands in his empty shed. He knows about Endings, but this one bites. Bites hard. His cheeks ache and his nose runs and one tear gets away from him, and he realises they’ve possibly become a touch elderly, and it’s time to find somewhere more suitable, something that doesn’t need constant maintenance, where a car can be an optional extra, being in walking distance of everything that 70-plus folks need.
They find a young-ish duplex that hasn’t been at all loved, and is crying out for their touch. It has good credentials and good neighbours, it’s in a quiet street a ten minute stroll from cafes, shops, body repair clinics, and best of all, the beach. So it ticks all the boxes. They sign everything in sight and set about turning it into their Last Home.
His shed is the back end of the garage again, but this one is a full-brick, all weather, under-roof job, with a flash zapper-driven roller door done out in a pastel shade called Antique White. And it comes with a set of cupboards built in along the back wall, festooned in an array of motor-parts stickers - NGK spark plugs, Koni shocks, Walker mufflers, Revmaster cams, Hella lamps, Shannon insurance.
And, like a bonus, it has a spacious loft over it, with a pull-down ladder and a 5-ply floor. This is a great garage that suits him just fine, even though he’d like it to be about half a metre wider, but tells himself it’s one of the few prices you pay with a duplex. He just shrugs and glues cork car-door banger-pads to the walls.
On about day ten he makes a workbench out of a door (all that was worth keeping of his old tool cupboard after the termites’ final sortie), faces it with Masonite, bolts on the vice, installs a cupboard at the end of it, fixes the bench grinder to it, changes the single power point to a 4-plugger, adds to the existing steel shelving. He sets about assigning places for his “everyday” jars of nails, screws, rawl plugs, dynabolts, picture hooks, pop rivets, nuts, bolts, washers, with all the heavy long-term stuff going up into the loft.
Starting to look like him already.
The next thing he does is buy a power saw, as the great toy-chest project put an end to long cuts with the hand rip-saw, and he’s wise enough now to know that. While old age may be a bit of a bastard, in a workshop Money beats Age every time. Nearly every time.
Into the cupboards go paints, solvents, glues, power tools, irrigation gear, and all those tins of weird bits collected over 60 years, bits that may yet be useful one day – rubber grommets, small roller bearings, springs, fuel line fittings, hose clips, brass shims, even a set of exhaust and inlet valve collets and keepers for a 1955 Holden. There is also the brand new Bosch dowelling and hole-saw kit given to him in the latter days of the old place by his dying neighbour, who never got to use it before the Motor Neurone Beast set in and carried away, by relentless degrees, an extremely good man.
And then there are those tools that are only used once in a blue moon - soldering iron, pop rivet gun, die stock, rubber mallet, bike pump, motorbike chain link splitter, the battery charger, and his Dad’s big tin-snips. And his toolbox of spanners, indestructible Sidchrome spanners and socket sets, all 1950s-made of Sheffield steel for Mechanics and sons of Mechanics. But they’re rarely used, as he hasn’t been under the bonnet of a car for 30 years – well, maybe he peeked in there once with each new one, out of curiosity, but recognised little except that they contain a modern mystery said to be solvable only with a lap-top computer, and the kind of science he no longer has. Or desires.
Under the work bench he puts his short timber, with all the long bits up on racks on the side walls, along with lengths of mouldings, pipes, and extrusions, some whose origins have long been forgotten. And also two salvaged telescopic aluminium mop handles. It’s an extremely eclectic mix, but no true shed is without it.
Next he makes a large work bench on the other wall, but designs it to fold up flush so the car still fits, makes it out of the Melamine panels left over from the total refit of the walk-in robe in the main bedroom. This bench is specifically for serious power saw usage, as a barbecue shack and racks of planter boxes are on the drawing board, along with the churning out of large lattice panels (to be finished in off-white with Heritage Green frames) to drape on the endless stretches of boring Good Neighbour fences, to give the back yard a cool Twenties effect.
You would have to say that this is a man who can’t wait to get stuck in, to reclaim his pelvic thrust of true masculine vitality.
© T. R. Edmonds 2025
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