Unsung icons: The shed A gardener’s best friend
COMEDIAN DAVID SMIEDT TAKES AN IRREVERENT, BUT APPRECIATIVE, LOOK AT THE CLASSIC THINGS THAT DEFINE YOU-BEAUT AUSSIE LIFE
BACK IN THE DAY, our lives were measured in quarter-acre blocks. Some ornamental greenery sitting out the front, blonde-brick freestanding in the middle, and garden out the back. While the latter certainly had its botanical features, it was a zone to be used as much as gazed at. Shorn kikuyu-ed expanses were pressed into service as footy fields, and loamy beds transformed into veggie patches. Such endeavours required time and tools – the first because we liked doing things in real life as opposed to validating them via social media, and the second because otherwise, the shed would be empty.
This corrugated sentinel stood silent, proud and available only in battleship grey or pine green. Much like a rugby league forward, it wasn’t there to look pretty. It was there to do a job: remain upright with minimal maintenance while protecting more valuable entities.
Inside the shed were decaying secateurs, loppers and shears with blades sharper than a drag queen’s tongue. Quite often, these stood serrated cheek by carving jowl with powered implements whose electronic componentry was never designed to be stored in such dank and damp conditions. Speaking of dangerous currents, many a shed was lit by a single bulb connected to the mains by a succession of extension cables or dodgy wiring that would short-circuit any decent electrician’s conscience – under which sat chemical pesticides that were the gardening equivalent of a Brazilian waxing. And did we also mention the demonic lawn mower and the litres of combustible petrol that were used to power it? What could possibly go right?
Sometimes there was a padlock on the door, but it was more to guard the contents against burglars than protect children from the contents. Considering that Bruce Willis could fashion an arsenal out of what lay inside your average garden shed – Die Hard With A Verbena – it was a zone best avoided by curious kids.
Yeah, right. You might as well have just called it The Totes Kool Forbidden Adventure Playground #Awesome. With its garlands of cobwebs and rust the colour of a dried nosebleed, garden sheds had a year-round Halloween vibe for any child who took an interest in things scary and forbidden. By which I mean Every Kid Ever.
But they never got into MY shed, you may think. Wrong. That is unless you kept the key on you at all times, and as every child learns, adults hate looking for these things so they store them all in the one place, at which point it simply becomes a matter of elimination. Ditto a combination lock, the key to which is always your dad’s birthday.
Having popped the lock, the door creaked open, sounding like the cross between a bagpipe solo and driving lesson No. 1 on a manual transmission. The first thing to hit you was the smell, a flinty must of mulch and pesticide with a top note of fuel. As your eyes adjusted to the darkness, shapes began to emerge and – depending on one’s level of pest control – scamper skittishly into the unseen recesses, all flashing black eyes, arachnid limbs or rodent tails.
All of which could be translated into that seminal childhood experience: the dare. Anxious to prove your mettle to a brother/ peer group/kid who just happened to be biking past your house on a boring afternoon, you’d volunteer to not only go in, but to stay there. For a whole minute. With the door closed. That 60 seconds felt like 600 as your mind dealt feverishly with thoughts of killer spiders, venomous snakes and that guy you saw on the TV last week who’d escaped from prison but hadn’t been caught yet. Alternatively, the shed could become an escape, a precious area of personal space in a world where you had to share everything with a sibling. It could also pull double duty as gang HQ, with ever-changing passwords and a strict no brother/sister/boys/girls/Year 4s admittance policy. This was the true beauty of the shed, a spartan utilitarian entity that could mean something different to many members of the family. Or, as they say in the world of slightly laboured puns, shed happens.
BRUCE WILLIS COULD FASHION an arsenal OUT OF WHAT LAY INSIDE YOUR AVERAGE garden shed – DIE HARD WITH A VERBENA