Blokes, Sheds and Rare Trades, the books and the Exhibition: In the Adelaide City region of South Australia
The shed looms large in our heritage. The giant sheep station shearing sheds, for instance, are the shelf of poems and paintings, telling their stories of backbreaking labour and pastoral fortunes. The buildings in this yarn are far more modest, because of their very nature - they are backyard sheds. One South Australian observer, however, has opened a nation’s eyes to their meanings, rules, secrets and ties that bind blokes and sheds. In the Adelaide Hills, on a shed amongst the backyard gums, we found the title “The Australasian Institute of Backyard Studies.”
The cluttered interior is the hub of the whimsical world of its self-proclaimed Research Director, whose book Blokes and Sheds has sold an incredible 80,000 copies round Australia. Mark Thomson tells it this way.
“Well, I went to art school, became a graphic designer and began taking photos that recorded interesting phenomena like sheds that seemed to be disappearing as backyards changed. The project became a book that’s sold very well… I’m still flabbergasted by it.”
Perhaps it is because he tapped into a stream of thinking - and doing - in blokes like the ones portrayed throughout the bestseller. As Mark observed, it is a stream that runs hidden from the official chroniclers’ gaze.
“It was an almost spiritual thing for some people. There was a place where they developed their own identity… a calm spot, isolated from the rest of the world”
“Do sheds have to be tidy?” I inquired.
“Some were so clean that you could eat your dinner off the floor”, he recalled, “but others were basically bedlam”.
Dozens of unfinished shed projects went on hold as another successful book naturally followed, and now Rare Trades has been shaped into a travelling exhibition for the National Museum of Australia, with Mark Thomson as co-curator. A special video for the exhibition helps preserve mysterious and outmoded crafts, like wooden-bridge building and spoked-wheel-making. The exhibition opens shortly in the national capital and travels to Adelaide in December 2003.
“It is actually still possible to find trades that stretch back 2000 years”, Mark noted. “But this is the last generation of them. If we look again in 20 or 30 years you won’t find them as a continuous heritage”.
Mark is not sentimental, however. He writes that the past was a grim place. On the other hand, he marvels at the insights of these masters.
“They’re really interesting. They said they were often denigrated for working with their hands, but all of them said they didn’t. Their work came from their hands and eyes and brains and their whole self”.
Back in the Adelaide suburbs, a backyard structure unites Mark Thomson’s themes - rare trades and blokes and sheds. Some shed!
“What’s your favourite hammer?” Mark asked of its owner as they contemplated a wall display of dozens of them.
“I think it would be that old French cobbler’s hammer, with its sweeping lines”, responded Dave Whyte, who buys, restores and sells tools, many of them antiques.
“Now I’ve got to the stage where I like to keep a variety of them”, he explained. “It’s good to show people what was going on in days gone by”.
Drawers and shelves overflow with mystifying devices and paraphernalia from an era when time was measured in days rather than minutes. Some pieces gain pride of place above Dave’s workbench.
“Up there on the left is a short shipwright’s masting axe, then there are various carpenter’s side-axes and the long blade on the bottom of a handle is a frow, used for splitting shingles”.
Tools of the past are very much carved into Dave’s future. He sells them through his shop “Rock’N’Rustic”, a 1950’s time-wrap at 187 Magill Road. It is also why, possibly, he’s talked himself into a shed that is big enough to be the shed of a bloke’s dreams - both ordered and chaotic, for work and for entertainment, and definitely for doing something with your hands.
Perhaps the real lesson, then, at the Institute for Backyard Studies is that there could be a treasure just out your backdoor or just down the road. Mark Thomson has opened our eyes to an ever-evolving Aussie phenomenon - the backyard shed.
Details
“Blokes and Sheds”
“Rare Trades”
Mark Thomson
Available at all good bookshops“Rare Trades” Exhibition
(National Museum of Australia)
S.A. Maritime Museum
Lipson Street
Port Adelaide, South Australia
Opens Dec 12, 2003.
