Skip, Arborist & Collector, somewhere outside of Castlemaine, Dja Dja Wurrung Country

Skip grew up on King Island in the Bass Strait, before his family relocated to Maldon. At fifteen Skip ran away from home to hitchhike his way to music festivals in the late 70s. He spent a few years doing this before he decided it was time to get a job. He worked many different jobs; on an abalone boat, for a demo company, and for landscape gardeners. He’d come back to this area for brief stints and then take off on the road again.

Skip taught himself guitar, and learned to play American blues - he says that ‘poor peoples music’ was what he loved most, because they didn’t have the education to learn classical music, so they relied on folk traditions, and just played what sounded good to them. He spent ten years on the road touring with musicians who’d come over from the states - he’d be their driver and support act.

He met his partner and moved back to this area, into a strawbale house in the bush. He told me the reason he loves it out here is because there’s a certain kind of magic about the bush. It looks dry and scrappy - “the skeleton is close to the skin.” But once you’ve been here a while you can feel the energy of it, it’s a natural wonder in its own way.

Skip collects things - vintage instruments (mainly guitars, banjos and the like) and vintage chainsaws. He says he finds them interesting because of the stories they tell - every scratch and ding and nick tells a story. One of these stories he tells me about as he shows me an old guitar made in 1934. The guitar belonged to Greg Hilderbrand, who was employed by President Kennedy as part of a taskforce of young white folk who were sent down to Mississippi to help people of colour access voters rights. He’d bought the guitar secondhand in 1960, and brought it there with him. The guitar had been played at freedom marches and protests, and had seen so much history in its life.

Skip is semi-retired now, but works as an arborist. He says he doesn’t really need to work, but he loves it. He climbs a tree in his yard and tells me it’s partly the thrill that makes it so appealing, and partly the experience of being in the tree. “You can tell how the tree feels about you being in it when you are - whether it wants you in there or not.”