Why buying second-hand is the best thing ever
It was my 31st birthday, I was wearing new shoes, and standing at The Gap looking at a lone yacht bobbing around on the soupy water.
I was working as a court reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald, a dream really. A Supreme Court case had been moved to the cliffs in the eastern suburbs so the judge could look at the place where someone had died many years before.
Courts can be formal places with pomp and ceremony and silk and fur and fear. But as the court adjourned to the seaside, the judge wore her Ray-Bans, and a senior barrister swapped his horsehair wig for a baseball cap with the ESPN logo. Journalists — who are usually safely separated from the judge by a lofty wooden bench — huddled in close to hear her over the wind and the waves.
Like a lot of moments in journalism, I knew I was watching a little piece of history on that overcast Sydney morning.
A couple of days earlier, I bought a pair of black and white creepers at St Vincent’s de Paul in Newtown for $30. I didn’t advertise my birthday at work; wearing the shoes that day at The Gap felt like a little private recognition of where I’d been and where I’d come.
And someone else had walked in them before me.
The thought of wearing someone’s old clothes or shoes or jewellery or eating off someone else’s old plate is gross to some. But that’s exactly why I love op-shopping. When I buy something second-hand, I get to have little life stories on my feet, wrapped around my shoulders, hanging on my wall, or sitting on my dinner table.
When I was little, I worked as a “runner” for my stock and station agent dad at clearing sales. A clearing sale is a great country tradition where farming families take all of the stuff out of their shed, sort it into bundles in a paddock, and auction it off. My dad was the auctioneer and I would do odd jobs for him, like writing down winning bids, sprinting to deliver paperwork, and fetching him water when his mouth got dry from all the bellowing.
I loved watching my dad put on a show in the dirt and dust – his signature move was to throw his Akubra down when someone made a terrible offer. There were always bidding wars between two clapped out old blokes over buckets of old tools or tractors or weird antiques or working dog puppies. There was usually a little canteen set up by a local community group, which served icy cans of soft drink and sausage sandwiches. Dad would let me put whatever I wanted “on the slate” for my trouble.
At the end of 2019, I went with dad to a clearing sale for the first time in two decades. It was exactly as I remembered: old doors, bits of barbed wire, horse carts, antiques, paintings, vintage signs, rusted tools, and a mint green Valiant were all lined up for sale.
When I saw a set of flying ceramic ducks on a table, next to a family of little stone cats, I knew I had to bid for the first time ever. When I won the whole lot I felt like the little kid with the ice cold Coke.
The Christmas before I turned 21, my mum bought me a set of three pink melamine mixing bowls. I took them with me when I moved to the city to start my career in journalism.
They were the perfect gift, my first proper kitchenware and a symbol of my independence. I made countless biscuits and slices and cakes to pack for my morning tea at work, sometimes eaten in the gutter at a crime scene. Perpetually homesick in the city, I would think of my mum whenever I used them.
By my late 20s, I had two children. At some stage during their toddler years, one of them broke the small bowl, then the other broke the medium bowl. I was quietly devastated in the way you have to be when you’re an adult and an inanimate object is smashed. The bowls were no longer for sale anywhere.
During the summer holidays this year, I was browsing Green Point Salvos on the Central Coast and saw the same style of mixing bowls, one medium, one small. I leapt at the shelf and embraced them, as though they were the shattered originals.
All I could think about was how someone had given away two pink mixing bowls, not knowing they were all I needed.
There is also the apple fruit bowl which everyone says is a tomato. From Orange Salvos
A porcelain hand I didn’t know I needed. Also from Orange Salvos. Plus the little cat family from the clearing sale.
A 1979 Wedgewood plate from The Rustic Flamingo vintage shop in Carcoar.
My giant pink lobster mould, which everyone mistakes for a … giant pink lobster. Why? What do you think it looks like? From the East Orange Public School fete.
A carpet jacket from Brookvale Salvos. Worn here at the Trump ice rink in Central Park in New York City when Donald Trump was just a mildly perplexing real estate guy.
