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Tim Mathieson chats to local reporters at the Narromine Men's Shed. Photo by Andrew Meares. |
Sydney Morning Herald
28 May 2011
Tim Mathieson is at ease with people on any level, but especially blokes in sheds, writes Tony Wright.
TIM MATHIESON, surrounded by mates from his school days in Shepparton, is having a beer in a cabin at Kidman's Camp out beyond Bourke on a near-freezing never-never night, talking about meeting the Queen a few weeks ago.
He and Julia, which is to say, Mathieson's partner, the Prime Minister, were required to walk down a long hall in Buckingham Palace known as the Queen's Corridor. There, at the end of the corridor, in a little office, sat the Queen, warming her feet with a two-bar electric heater.
Mathieson, it seems, got on famously with the Queen. A couple of days later, after the wedding of her grandson William to Kate Middleton, they met again outside the wedding reception for 600 at the palace.
''You again?'' Mathieson relates that he said to Her Majesty. ''Are you coping?' '
The Queen, he says, replied that she'd just been down to the disco where the younger guests were whooping it up, and ''I came out of there with my eyes rolling around my head''.
It is a slightly bizarre story in these surrounds. The State of Origin match is beaming fuzzily from a TV atop the fridge and Mathieson has just finished a steak and sausage on a plastic plate by a campfire. It gets weirder when, somewhere in the outback night, a car takes out a power pole and the lights and the TV blink out.
But there is a point to the story about the Queen.
Tim Mathieson, as the first male partner of an Australian prime minister, has been required to search for a purpose in what he admits is an odd situation.
''Once Julia became Prime Minister and I'd had to give up work, I felt I really needed a niche of some sort,'' he says.
In the 17 uncertain days between the election last year and the negotiated deal with the Greens and independents to form a Labor government, Mathieson had made dinner for Gillard every night to try to provide some sense of normality.
''I'd wake up at 2 o'clock in the morning, get out the iPad and check on what all the papers were saying, and I'd be at the newsagents at 5am,'' he says. ''During the day I'd walk around the lake worrying about what was going to happen. Julia was less stressed than I was. I don't know how she coped.''
Suddenly, the deal was done and Mathieson was in limbo.
Now he has found his purpose - in a shed. More correctly, 550 of them, with more springing up every week.
He is the patron of the Australian Men's Shed Association, a movement that grants a special place for men who otherwise wouldn't have much to do.
In country towns and cities, old halls and disused sheds are being converted to hives of activity where men - a lot of them retired or lacking social outlets for one reason or another - congregate around wood-working equipment, welding gear and lathes, there to tinker and share stories and a cup of tea, fire up barbecues and mess around with computers.
The sheds - with $3.3 million of federal money over three years, but mostly local funding - are credited with more than getting men out of their houses. The movement's research suggests they are saving 1500 lonely men each year from resorting to suicide. At Narromine, where the scout hall built in 1929 now has no Scouts, one of the men nods towards an old fellow and relates that he had lost his sight and, unable to read, the days had become unbearably long.
The elderly man's wife had become worried that he was losing his will to live. He wouldn't get out of bed. He was introduced to the men's shed at the scout hall and now he is up before dawn on shed days, Tuesdays and Thursdays, hardly able to wait to get down there with his mates.
Mathieson has a plan to focus national and international attention on the men's sheds movement.
The Queen is expected to attend the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth in October and he wants to persuade her to visit a shed that will be built in Kings Park in the city. No point, he seems to suggest, in having friends in the highest places without introducing them to other parts of his world.
Travelling with Mathieson and his mates around the outback this week, it became clear he is a chameleon.
One of his friends said: ''Tim lives in the now''. Mathieson says: ''I like the disparity of this life.''
He breezes through the vastly varied worlds that life has served him with an airy ease, as if it were all one. Blessed with a near photographic memory, he devours media for political insights and can recite almost any detail, just as he can name every motorbike he has owned since childhood. Julia is ''PM27'' (the 27th prime minister), George Bush jnr was ''President43''.
It wasn't always so. ''I first met Julia in 2004. She was a client at a salon called Heading Out in St Kilda where I was head stylist,'' Mathieson says. ''It took me a while to ask whether she was a state or federal member. I think she was slightly intrigued that I didn't know.''
It was a year before he bumped into her on a tram and suggested they might catch up.
''She was off to Vietnam and it was another month or so before I rang and asked her out to lunch.''
The relationship is so comfortable now he mentions he gets comfort from religion. He attends the Anglican church from time to time - despite Julia's atheism - and when a young man went every Sunday. ''Religion has never come up with Julia and me,'' he says. ''I don't think we've ever mentioned it.''
It's the sort of comfort he takes into daily life, wherever he goes.
In Bourke, he peels a yabbie with the deputy mayor. In the rough opal mining settlement of Lightning Ridge, he chuckles at stories from miners about how the town's population is officially 2000, but there are so many blokes who don't want to be found that the stores sell enough bread and groceries for 5000 or more. In the old gold town of Gulgong, he gets behind a hotel bar to pull a beer. And in Buckingham Palace, he says to the Queen: ''You again?''. Hardly surprising that he has been dubbed the First Bloke.
When he decided to do the men's shed tour, he phoned three friends from his Shepparton days: David McNamara, Mathieson's housemate before Julia, who works in the construction industry and is known as ''the King''; Malcolm ''Syd'' Grieves, a teacher from Warrnambool, and Peter ''Pothole'' Coulter, a film and television producer from Melbourne.
The former country boys, who once rode motorbikes together and spent long nights at the Dookie pub, joyfully piled into a camper van and filled the portable cooler to accompany their old buddy ''Matho''.
Coulter's task was to produce a video of the tour to promote men's sheds, but the real idea seems to have been a boys' road trip. ''Yes, it's a case of the good old boys getting together to visit the old boys,'' says Mathieson.
Leading the party is the Men's Shed Association's marketing and communications manager, Andrew Stark.
He was an agent in the Australian Federal Police for 21 years and managed security for the former foreign minister Alexander Downer and then for Gillard when she was the deputy prime minister. He left the force to become Gillard's adviser and made headlines for attending National Security Committee meetings of cabinet on her behalf. He still bridles at the controversy during last year's election campaign and says he felt like fodder in a dirty political war of leaks and counter-leaks.
A committed Christian, he studied theology some years ago with the idea of helping the disadvantaged. With the election over and the knowledge that political advising was no longer for him, he applied for the job with the shed association. Now he finds himself travelling with his old boss's partner, tending to a movement where men everywhere help themselves, no politics involved. Just sheds.
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