Tinkering

At a time when the labour-market is failing as a source of security and identity for many, domestic tinkering is emerging as a legitimate occupation in a way we have not seen since pre-industrial times. In Australia, practices of repair, invention, building, improvising and crafting, that take place in sheds, back-yards, paddocks, kitchens and home-workshops, are becoming an important part of the informal economy and social cohesion, complicating distinctions between work and leisure, amateur and professional, production and consumption. Building on the work of historians, sociologists, psychologists and economists, but with a journalists impulse for the currency of her story, Katherine Wilson documents domestic tinkering as an undervalued form of material creativity, social connection, psychological sanctuary, personal identity and even political activism. This book mounts a surprising case for the profound value of domestic tinkering in contemporary Australia.