RENNIE gave me a lift from Miriam Vale, north of Bundaberg in Queensland, to Agnes Water, about 40 minutes away on the coast. Agnes Water is the last surf beach before the Great Barrier Reef.

It was a Saturday afternoon and Rennie told me he was going to throw himself in the sea. He had his surfboard stowed in the back of the ute. It sounded like there was something he needed to wash away.

He was 50 years old, with a heavy, but still-athletic build. He shifted constantly in his seat. There was a restlessness about him and the force of it engulfed the cab. He wore a shabby fedora-style hat and had a gap between his front teeth – the combination lent him the air of an old circus performer.

In fact, he was a shipwright by trade, a boat builder. At 14, during his school holidays, he began working as a deckhand on fishing trawlers. Then, at 16, he took three months off school and worked a stint as a cook at sea, and came back with ten grand for his troubles. School couldn’t keep him after that. He began his shipwright’s apprenticeship the next year.

I asked questions and Rennie’s tales tumbled out. He wasn’t a direct storyteller. “Bloomin” was his adjective of choice and he baited every line with it, twice over.

He’d worked on many famous boats and yachts built in this country: Australia II, Sydney-to-Hobart race winners, even Collins class submarines.

Some years ago he packed it in to start a business up north. “It was supposed to be about the simple life. I went to the Whitsundays with lots of money and left with none. It was the dengue. Nearly bloomin‘ killed me.”

Now he worked fixing up mining accommodation, moving from site to site and living each place a while. “All the ugliest places in the bloomin‘ country,” he said. “I never thought I’d be startin‘ again at 50.”

I mentioned that I wrote a column about sustainable housing and living.

“Don’t get me started on the building industry,” he said in a wild staccato, like I’d triggered an eruption, but his throat was too small a passageway for the flow of his mind. “The whole thing’s a bloomin‘ fraud. What’s wrong with this country is there’s too many rules and we’re too bloomin‘ comfortable.”

He told me that in north Queensland, all the coal money meant big, stupid houses. “In Gladstone, people are building garages with turntables in them, so when you drive in, it turns the car around for you.”

Rennie had chosen the timeless way instead. He had bought an expired mining lease on a hill overlooking the water near Gladstone, and was sculpting a small home into the rock, more than a kilometre through bush from the nearest car access. Sheer granite walls and benches.

“Gosh. Incredible!” I was the one gushing now. “I love hearing about handmade homes like that. Amazing. So how’d you do it? Can you just build anything you turn your hands to?”

“You could say that.”

He told me he’d carved a natural swimming pool deep in the rock behind the rest of the home, with a 40-metre skylight shaft. A few barramundi live in the pool. He used mirrors, like the Egyptians did, to shine light from the skylight throughout the other rooms.

He’d been working on the house for 16 years. “Started when my wife was alive. That’s the trouble with life, you know. You think you’ve got a plan and then your wife goes and bloomin‘ dies just to bugger it all up.”

The beach at Agnes Water

I STAYED a while at Crystal Waters, an ecovillage about half an hour from Maleny, on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. Over 200 people live on 85 one-acre lots, spread among bushland and fields. No cats or dogs are allowed, but kangaroos and wallabies abound.

On my first night I woke after only a few hours. I was the only guest in the bunkhouse. The room seemed particularly familiar. As I lay thinking, I realised the room was set out exactly same way as the bedroom of my childhood. The bunk bed, the door and the window: they all fitted precisely. I looked up at the slats above me, at one moment utterly disoriented, and the next, so vividly a child again. The timing was slightly unsettling – I turned 30 this week.

When eventually I slept again, I woke to a sunny, steamy morning. The evening before I’d met Les Bartlett, who bakes sourdough loaves twice a week in his small bakery on Crystal Waters, and sells only locally. Today was a baking day and he’d said I could pop in.

In the morning I watched Les and Penny mix their doughs: sourdough starter, organic stone-ground flour, water, salt. Penny is from Melbourne, but is staying here to learn the craft. I came back at lunchtime and watched them shape the loaves with Leslie (Les’s partner), then returned again in the evening to watch the baking in a wood-fired oven – each time staying an hour or two to talk (or eat pizza and sip beer).

When the baking was nearly done, two young children knocked on the door. The boy said his mum had sent him for a loaf. Penny put a still-hot Pain de Campagne in a paper bag, and told him to set it on a cooling rack when he got home.

As they left, Les said, “That’s something isn’t it? He’ll never forget it.”

It’ll be a fine memory one day: walking to the community baker with your kid sister, and returning for dinner with fresh hot bread from the wood-oven.

It was a day to remember for me too. A gleaming day, a day when people are so kind and welcoming that everything clicks, like a turn at Chinese checkers where you jump all the way home.

Half a dozen Japanese hippies had set up camp during the afternoon. Les gave me a fruit-and-nut loaf for them. It was warm from the oven. The Japanese didn’t speak much English, but some things I understood: the murmurs in appreciation of the smell, the extended silence as they chewed, and then the contented mooing – the sound of satisfaction from their bellies.

Finally, one guy, called Nobu, held the remainder of his portion aloft and said: “It’s like art.”

Left to right: Penny, Leslie and Les 

AFTER a day’s dirty work in the garden, or painting ceiling boards, it’s always nice to have a shower to wash the humidity away. It is, however, especially enjoyable to shower at Mel and Ant’s place. They have an outdoor shower (see the photos below).

The water comes from a spring on their property, and Ant has rigged up a greywater system from the shower that feeds a banana circle.

The greywater runs down to a circular trench and mound (or swale), around which the bananas are planted. Bananas need lots of nutrients. In the middle of the circle you can put compost scraps and cut vegetation. Ant explained to me that to productively manage the circle, you should have banana plants in threes – a grandma, a ma and a baby. Only the grandma of produces bananas. Eventually she’ll be cut and composted in the circle and replaced by the ma, and so on: the circle of life (banana edition).

The shower looks like this:

The view from the shower looks like this (gosh):

LAST Monday I picked garlic all day. For a couple of hours in the afternoon the smell was so pungent my eyes went cloudy.

I was staying on Homeland, an intentional community in Thora, about half an hour from Bellingen. Brian, one of the residents, has grown a big curly afro, a thick mo‘ and two healthy patches of organic garlic.

We began at eight o’clock. The task was simple: pull the bulbs out of the ground without breaking the stalks, and group them in two rough clumps – big and small.

As the hours went on I narrowed my preferred picking stances to two: sitting cross-legged and scooting forward, and standing and bending down. Both caused me considerable discomfort, but in different ways, so switching over was brief, blessed respite.

Every now and then I shifted my gaze from the bulbs at my feet to the lush field beyond, then to the orange grove and to the purple-blue hills in the distance. Suddenly the deep lungfuls of air I inhaled seemed to smell sweet again. By knock-off time at five-thirty my legs were shaking with fatigue, and I felt overjoyed to be sore and finished, not just sore. 

A few days later I got talking with an Englishman in a pub. He had a miserable face, the kind you’d cast as a depression-era tax collector: sallow cheeks, a long, pointy nose, and arched eyebrows. He was a heater salesman before he packed it in for a round the world trip. He had blown 40,000 pounds (AUD$67,000) in just over a year, mainly on booze. He’d comfortably drink 15 pints in a night, he said.

I told him I’d been garlic picking for a day and that it was damn hard work. And he said, “Nah, can’t be hard, you just reach up and take them off the tree.”

The garlic patch, from a safe distance.

THE cold weather slowed me down this month. I’ve been learning to bake sourdough bread. The house is small enough that the oven heats the whole place, so every fresh loaf warmed my insides and my outsides.

I’ve been pottering at odd jobs too. I have an old two-deck tape player I was given when I turned 13. Now it looks unaccountably bulky, but once I thought it sleek. It contained mysterious worlds. I remember listening to Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ and feeling entranced and uneasy.

For over a decade the volume control has been unreliable and the sound has rattled and risen like a coming train. No amount of adjustment could stop it.

Finally, I decided to find out why. I opened the shell of the tape player and cleaned the relevant parts with a cue-tip. That’s all. But now the radio glides quietly into the right station.

Confident of my newfound volume control expertise, I assured my friend Mischa that I could repair her over-loud alarm clock. I disassembled it and found a flimsy, broken plastic knob that could not be re-attached. Even so, I took pleasure in the discovery: at least we knew the problem. And the alarm clock still works. With a slender implement and a slice of dexterity, the volume can be adjusted. Right, Mischa?

Simple fixes. Maybe it’s beginner’s luck, but I’m convinced that adequate patches could be found for many malfunctioning gizmos just by taking a quick look inside.

A second small project:

Our house has a north-facing courtyard. On clear winter days, there is no better place to be than resting against the rear wall of the house, looking at the veggie patch, taking in the sun.

But the ground has a concrete lip that doesn’t suit a chair. So one afternoon I assembled a bench from reclaimed framing timber, according to a tried and tested Urban Bush Carpenter design: three parallel lengths to sit on, and x-crossed, reinforced legs below. I sawed the legs to match the awkward split-level concrete.

Maybe the bench accounts for my subsequent lack of practical work. I made my perfect sitting spot and then I sat there, reading, whenever the sun broke through the clouds.

And now I’ve left town. I’m on my way, slowly, to Cairns. I’ll be on the lookout for bush mechanics between here and there. 

FIXERS are everywhere I look. They’ve emerged from their cluttered workshops and entered my field of vision.

Tired of reading polemic non-fiction, I picked up a novel by Italian writer Primo Levi, called If Not Now, When? It is a story of a band of Jewish partisans in the second world war, a jumble of Russian and Polish Jews, men and women who fight against the Germans behind their lines. Sometimes the Red Army, other partisans and villagers support them; more often, they too persecute the Jews.

As I turned the second page, I discovered that the main protagonist, Mendel, is a watchmender.

Mendel is the book’s moral conscience and his trade is not a coincidence. He is a village craftsman: grounded and resourceful, but also compassionate and thoughtful. He is balanced and patient, like a clock. The novel is a meditation on the ethics of war, and Mendel is the melancholy pendulum, his mind rocking back and forth the atrocities they witness, and the violence they perpetrate.

Early in the book, he and Leonid, a young soldier from Moscow, seek respite in an encampment of Jews and other refugees in an old monastery hidden among the marshes. For food, the small community traps frogs and collects grasses, herbs and mushrooms. They tan hides using oak bark and make boots for partisans. The two newcomers meet Dov, the leader of the camp:

“Do you have a trade?” he asked, addressing Mendel.

“I’m a watchmender by trade, but I also worked as a mechanic in a kolkhoz.”

“Good. We’ll find work for you right away. What about you, Muscovite?”

“I studied to be a bookkeeper.”

“That’s a bit less useful, for us.” Dov laughed. “I’d like to keep accounts, but it’s impossible. We can’t even count the people who come and go.”

I think I know how he would have responded had one of them replied: “I’m a freelance journalist.” Thankfully, I am not in the war.

All this, however, brings me to my latest tussle with a toaster.

This time, armed with tamper proof screwdriver heads, I was able to remove the outer casing, then the second layer, to reveal the wires and the filaments. Using the multimeter, I slowly tracked the source of the broken circuit by testing the resistance between different points. One of the thin wires in the filament had snapped.

I searched a while on the internet and I don’t think it’s possible to buy replacement filaments. The toaster was not made to be mended. So I couldn’t fix it. But I still count my foray as a minor success: I identified the problem.

THE assembly is over. The courtyard studio lives!

One afternoon not long ago, Michael Kelly and I gathered what we had built over the last few months: five separate segments of the frame, ten panels of cladding and eight shutters for saloon-style swinging doors.

Michael had cleared a space inside his shop. He decided to display the little building there, for passers-by to see (and perhaps, order one of their own).

We began to assemble the pieces, inching the frames into contact with one another. Accurate measurements are particularly important for a modular building like ours. One length awry and a whole panel might not fit.

Hence, the carpenter’s maxim: ‘measure twice, cut once’. Michael stated his variation on the accepted wisdom while we slotted the panels together, as certain as jigsaw pieces. “Measure and re-measure, and check and re-check, over and over again,” he said.

And indeed he had. As we laid out each panel, he had measured, scribbled numbers on his hand, returned to the frame, then measured again and again; back and forth like a cook between pantry and pot.

I’ve just read a book by the American writer Michael Pollan, called A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams. It is his story of building a small, wooden hut on his property in Connecticut. While he learns to build, training his “radically” unhandy hands, Pollan ponders the nature of shelter and the history of architecture.

Although the hut appeared small and simple, the architect’s design was deeply considered and intricate. Pollan’s project took two-and-a-half years of Sundays to realise.

He built the frame from Douglas Fir, commonly known here as Oregon – the same timber we used for our studio. On the day they raised the roof’s ridge pole, Pollan recalled feeling abashed when he first saw the fir timbers he’d ordered; being, as they were, milled from hundred-year-old trees.

In the early years of the American colony, carpenters would mark the topping out of the frame by nailing a bough of a conifer to the highest beam of the structure. Pollan enacted the tradition, and speculated on its role in celebrating the new dwelling and the achievement of the workers, and also recognising the trees cut down for it.

“People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame, acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human – the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth.”

It seems to me that Pollan’s “heavy cost” of being human rises or falls according to the choices we make as individuals, and those of our societies as a whole. But he’s right: there is always a cost.

One of the rewards of working in the physical world could be a heightened appreciation of its materials, a better understanding of the composition of the things we use. The makers among us must be more aware of the stuff of life, and perhaps, too, the damaged goods discarded along the way.

We did not nail an evergreen bough to our studio. It is made from timber carefully reclaimed from demolition sites. Several decades sheltered us from the full force of the paradox.

For our ritual, we stood side-by-side, arms crossed, leaning back ever so slightly, and murmured the studio’s praise. “It’s one thing to have an idea, but another to put it into practice,” Michael said.