IT was news of the opening near the end of the year of the Adelaide Hilton that set me thinking about renovating the fishing shack.
It usually happens this melancholy time of year: the hunt for furniture no longer needed in the real world: the collecting of half-empty paint pots the assembling of odd pieces of linoleum.
No man can call me handy but the fishing shack is one place where I can go with all my infinite inexpertise; with my pen chant for sloping shelves and strangely hammered hinges; with all the clutter of a man who cannot cope.
We should all have our refuges where we can be our shuddering, shameful selves; where nobody minds if our painting doesn’t match or where the crockery is chipped and chagrined: away from it all in the winter.
The sea is a little sad in winter. It sighs among its seaweed for old, drowned ships and fishing boats with deep keels and slow engines before the hit and-run of trailer boats.
Not for here, on the winter foreshore, the full-bodied bikini, the sand-castling and sunburning. Just the lonely shack owner with a run-down paintbrush startling the starlings under the eaves of his hermitage.
I cook stews when I am painting the fishing shack; it’s one thing I do nicely in the winter in my old saucepan which likes to see me and have a quiet boil with the carrots and sprouts.
There is no hammering of fair-weather garfishermen on my door for bait; they are long ago wrapped in their bunny rugs with their wives making civilised scones in their orderly suburban retreats.
I am alone with my paintbrush and an old fish head from the summer which I do not throw away but contemplate and whisper “Alas, poor Yorick. I caught you well.”
Even the seagulls are contemplative, fluffing their fidgety feathers in protest against the absence of take-aways that bring them on shrieking alert in the summer.
I really don’t paint very well. I have mixed several colours together and a fisherman told me my shack stands out as a navigation guide.
He came down to see me because he had never set eyes on painting like it. He couldn’t decide whether it leant more to Picasso or Salvador Dali.
Actually my fishing shack leans more to the north-east because of the prevailing winds. Winter howls around it, warning us we are both old and showing our years.
The louvred windows don’t open as well as they once did although I oil the brackets with margarine. It gives the shack a lived-in smell although more and more people are less and less inclined to live in it.
My chair collapses with me and I lie on the floor, noticing that the ceiling had unusual patterns from generations of over- boiled dishes. It is like a map of my stomach; here the marks of an eruption of boiling fats; there the one sad experiment with the pressure cooker.
Indelible marks and reminders that life here is rough yet honest. Not the Hilton mind you; no conference rooms, although I often lie on the old blankets and talk to myself.
Surprised
Recently I took my blankets out for an airing and I must say they seemed surprised. They kicked and clutched at the line amid the terrible and frightening onrush of fresh air.
I try to keep fresh air to a minimum. The wind tends to bluster and lose its head once it is inside my fishing shack. The faded curtains flap a mad mazurka and last year’s toilet roll suddenly unfurls a startling pennant.
We have not been noted by the Heritage Commission but other owners of equally disreputable shacks have come to admire the decor of dust and the old instant coffee.
It is an art to remain primitive; to repel the awful onset of modernity: to stay out of reach of the hustling hygiene of wives.
I take slow walks on the beach and elderly dogs come down shyly and walk with me.
Come summer and they will be fighting for their lives with guard dogs that everyone seems to have, or great water dogs that you see ravishing dog food on television.
This is the time when the sea and the sky commune and the salmon-hooking freaks are further south and the country cousins are wrestling with the climate and the tax assessment hasn’t yet surfaced.
Repaired
They will break no champagne bottles now my shack is painted and the old chair repaired; no public address system calls the name of some new rock group or a visiting Japanese tycoon looking at something up the gulf.
The gulf is there, outside my louvred window and it sings me to sleep with wordless sea shanties.
Max Fatchen