Shed the pretence. Australia’s lost a precious icon | Peter Goers

This will shock the young but most Aussie families were raised in homes with just one bathroom and one toilet out the back, writes Peter Goers.

• Proposed garage rule one step closer

We’re all at play in the fields of the Lord.

I often drive past the playing fields on Tapleys Hill Rd at West Beach in Adelaide and see kids merrily at sport with their parents watching from their cars. One day I counted 39 4WDs and just one ordinary sedan.

I felt so sorry for the kid whose parent didn’t have a 4WD. How embarrassing to be dropped off and picked up from school and carted about not in a 4WD.

We live in a landscape of suburban subdivision and Georgian neo-Tuscan Federation-style townhouses with feature garages.

You look at the front of the house with no eaves and all you see is the feature garage and a front door. At least the parents of that kid who don’t have a 4WD can park the sedan in the feature garage, unlike the parents with 4WDs.

On Friday, members of the SA Local Government Association agreed to lobby planning authorities for bigger carports and garages. This is because – obviously – modern garages are too small for monolithic 4WDs and those drivers park their 4WDs on the streets and we all have to manoeuvre through avenues of their parked vehicles clogging narrow suburban streets.

This will shock the young but most Australians families were raised in homes with just one bathroom and one toilet at the back of the house.

A generic photo of an Australian house. Picture: iStock

When Bob Hawke opined that “by 1990 no child will live in poverty in Australia” he really meant no child will live without an en suite, a 4WD and a TV screen the size of a drive-in screen. (Older readers please explain to the young what a drive-in was and tell the yarn about sneaking mates in – in the boot.)

Houses got bigger, blocks got smaller and the garage/shed moved from down the driveway to the front of the house.

The code for the size of garages was last amended in 1993 when the only people who drove 4WDs were the Leyland brothers.

Nowadays you want to drive your airconditioned car into your airconditioned garage and walk into your airconditioned family room which is all white with one painting that “pops”.

When blocks were subdivided Dad lost his shed, which was often the bit at the end of the garage.

That was the temple of the handyman and a place of contemplation and retreat from the clamour of family.

Former Prime Minister Bob Hawke with his treasurer Paul Keating. Picture: Steve Porritt

It used to be that a bloke had to have a shed and author/artist Mark Thomson has become the sage of the shed.

The garage/shed of blessed memory was a place of mystique and secret men’s business.

It held old wardrobes full of Christmas decorations, fishing tackle, camping gear, rifles and overhead racks bearing bits of old lumber and pipe.

There was a well-worn work bench, a vice, loads of tools (often heirloom) stored on a silhouetted peg board.

There were racks of old jars and tins of Dr Pat tobacco full of nuts, bolts, screws and nails. There were things waiting to be fixed or made.

There was an old paint-spattered transistor radio or an even older Bakelite radio waiting for a replacement valve.

Do-it-yourself and mend-and-make-do was the zeitgeist.

In our teetotal household my father kept a bottle of brandy and some very soft-porn Man Magazines in the garage.

Both were of great appeal to my teenage self, although the buxom models in the magazines bizarrely had their nipples and pudenda airbrushed out which gave me a very strange concept of the female form. No wonder I’m screwed up.

The garage/shed was a place for the work of hands – of love, care and enterprise. Microsoft and Apple were both founded in garages.

Nowadays the garage/shed is much less useful and generally full of crap waiting for a garage sale or hard rubbish collection. The car is on the street.

The man cave is both a stupid term and a stupid concept. It is another term for a bar and much less useful that the shed.

There are 26.6 million Australians and there are more than 20 million motor vehicles.

We have feature garages, the main feature of which is that the car won’t fit in it. Modern garages/sheds are as painful as the worst dad joke – and not as funny or as fond.

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Originally published as Shed the pretence. Australia’s lost a precious icon | Peter Goers