FINDERS KEEPERS: When second-hand shopping is more than just a hobby

Op-shopping is not just a woke way to shop, it’s totally addictive, writes Amanda Ducker.

OP-shopping is not a hobby. It is an ethically underpinned philosophy. It is intentional. It is woke. And, for me, it is addictive.

Most of Hobart’s charity shops have reopened following lockdown and I have been making up for lost time.

I missed my hunter-gatherer outings and my finders-keepers thrills.

Each year, the old books, leather bags and milk jugs I buy divert at least 1000 of the 600,000 tonnes of used goods and clothes nationwide from landfill.

Can you inherit an addiction? I think you can. Mum is famous for her finds, hauling them home like a super-trawler bottom-feeding for silk, linen and cashmere.

My daughters don’t rubbish tip shops – they scan them for vintage vinyl and Adidas.

We don’t love the smell of the stores, but the experience feels right.

Much as it’s a sustainable way to shop, I mentioned that aspect only for the chance to parody performative wokeness in my opening lines.

For many of us, op shopping is more than simply a diversion. Picture: Adam Smith

I’m not being facetious, though, when I say foraging runs deep. I feel it in my blood. When I’m on the lookout for loot, I am every woman who has ever lived and gathered; I am not just my grandmother strolling the paddocks with her dogs, hands clasped behind her back unless she is picking up a curl of old fencing wire or baling twine.

I once lost a beautiful garnet from a gold ring on a stony bank of the Kiewa River and I found it again, a little red jewel gleaming in the pebbles. Of course I did. We are made for this. For my colour vision, I can thank my female fruit-hunting ancestors.

Last weekend on North Bruny I hauled kelp up onto dry sand to find the right leathery blade for a basket. This felt right, too.

It’s all part of the same primitive thing, and it seems not to matter if the item is labelled or not, nor whether it is natural or manufactured.

Vinnies is the place for vintage vases. Picture: AAP/Mike Burton

Which reminds me, yet again, of the Rodd & Gunn cashmere and merino men’s V-neck jumper, $30, I resisted in a Red Cross shop two weeks ago. I grabbed its Navy twin on the day, but I still wish I’d bought the black as well.

Yesterday in Cygnet Vinnies, I consoled myself with a vintage Alfred Meakin milk jug, $2, and a bag of wooden pegs, $3. The juxtaposition of such random purchases at the counter always appeals to my sense of the ridiculous.

Don’t go thinking I’m a hoarder, though. I give as good as I get. All my life’s a circle.

The randomness of same-day purchases is just one delightful part of op-shopping.
Picture: AAP/Mike Burton

We disappeared Café Society, my previous column in the Mercury, when lockdown hit. Dubbed “ideas over a cuppa” in the strapline, my brief for that Thursday page was to interview leaders and thinkers on the future of Tasmania at a café of their choice.

With my blatant bias towards visionaries and practical dreamers with the courage of their convictions, I chose Bob Brown as my first guest and he chose Salamanca’s Retro Café for our chat.

I savoured that conversation and dozens more with other inspirational guests over the next two years.

Then we killed it in March and I was glad.

We ditched it not because every cafe was closed for sit-downs and not because our leaders and thinkers seemed mostly as rattled as me about the future.

The real reason Cafe Society died is that I couldn’t face the music again. And the rest of the frontal lobe-shriveling racket of most Hobart cafes, where acoustics are not even an afterthought let alone an integral design consideration.

I like to talk and write in peace. Precious me.

Yet here I sit on Friday morning at a noisy cafe waiting for a car repair. I have a prime window seat in the morning sun and my latte’s spot-on. The noise is starting to do my head in, but I’m good, having just spied Vinnies volunteers across the road open up shop.