Tinkering

Across Australia, many people are turning to hands-on making as a way to find stability and a sense of self, at a moment when paid work no longer offers either to so many. Repairing, crafting, inventing, building and improvising now happen in garden sheds, backyards, rural paddocks, kitchens and home workshops, and this activity is becoming a significant part of the informal economy and of community life. It also blurs familiar lines between labour and recreation, the skilled and the untrained, and making versus consuming.

Katherine Wilson draws on work by historians, sociologists, psychologists and economists, but approaches the subject with a journalist's eye for what is happening now. She argues that this everyday tinkering is an overlooked kind of hands-on scholarship, a source of social ties, a refuge for the mind and a form of political engagement. The book works both as a practical guide and as a heartfelt tribute, making a case for how much home-based making is worth in modern Australia.