Small Gods of the Suburbs: Part III

The Backyard Sentinels

This is the final part of Small Gods of the Suburbs, a three-part walk through the overlooked presences of suburban life. This one leaves the street and heads out the back, into the territory of grass, sheds, washing lines, rust, possums, and damp feet.

The small Gods are often practical

The street side of the suburb is about public theatre, appearances, and boundary management. Backyards are a whole other thing. Its where the neighbourhood drops its mask and relaxes a little. The front yard is for neighbours and the curious. The backyard is where people stash parts of their life: broken lawnmowers, half-empty bags of potting mix, cracked plastic pots, old dog toys, sagging outdoor chairs, and the private exhaustion of Sunday afternoon. Backyards aren’t jittery like the internet box, skeptical like the letterbox, or brash like the storm drain. They’re more intimate and weathered, embedded in routine rather than display. Because of all this, the back block just feels different.

To finish the round for the week, I stepped off the asphalt entirely and entered the territory of grass, slab, washing line, and back gate.

The Sovereignty of the Rotary Line

In the centre of the backyard stood the absolute monarch of the Australian lawn: the Hills Hoist. Ours was an older model, heavy and galvanised, with rust on the wires and a mast that had survived three house renovations, two generations of children swinging from its arms, and at least one catastrophic windstorm.

It didn’t grow or bloom, but it always dominated the local airspace like an industrial weather vane. Whole backyards are planned around Hills Hoist royalty, where sun and breeze would reach, small paths created, and head clearance space honoured. As well as the backyard monarch, the Hills Hoist is also an eminently practical solar presence. It converts light, wind, and patience into the smell of clean laundry.

I walked out onto the damp grass at midnight carrying no water, sand, or lavender.

The Hoist held decoration in disdain. Use was its currency. So I reached up, took hold of one of the cold metal arms, and gave the whole apparatus a gentle push. The central mechanism answered with a sharp metallic creeeeeak that parted the silence of the dark yard and bounced off the paling fences.

It was a sound every person raised in this country knows somewhere in their body. I watched the arms spin, silhouette of the arms blocking out the stars. Despite its initial aged protest, the Hoist was solid, nostalgically stable with a slow, centrifugal pull. The feeling of the backyard through the clothes line was deep, anchored into old concrete, hardened soil and rock. It reminded me of sun-baked denim and cotton sheets.

The rotary line was completely unbothered by the digital age.It didn’t care about fibre-optic cables, smart home integration, or whatever app was supposed to optimise domestic life this week. It operated on evaporation, gravity, weather, and the turning of a handle.

By spinning it in the dark, I paid homage to its downtime, acknowledging its solid presence, and importance amongst the ever-present urban chore list.

That mattered to me. Most household things are only noticed when they are useful, broken, or in the way. The Hoist was usually loaded, spun, cursed at, adjusted, or ignored. But there it was at midnight, unloaded and moving slowly toward stillness, holding its structure in the damp air.

I stood until the rotation slowed. The whole contraption made a faint clicking sound as it settled. For a moment, the whole backyard seemed to turn around that metal centre: fence, grass, laundry door, shed, stars, damp earth, sleeping house.

Then the Hoist stopped and I moved on.

The Tenant of the Corrugated Tin

To finish the evening, I bypassed the back gate, patting it gently on the way past. Boundary guardians are always worth the time to greet. I walked to the furthest, darkest corner of the lawn, where the grass gives way to a patch of sour mud and a row of slightly overgrown feijoa trees. There sits the holder of a gardener’s joy, a three-by-three block of zinc-alloy corrugated tin that slowly reveals oxidisation the colour of sunset in a wet winter sky.

If the Hills Hoist is the solar monarch of the yard, the shed is the chthonic record-keeper. It houses things bought with grand intentions and partially abandoned by autumn alongside rust, half-empty rock-hard bags of blood-and-bone fertilizer, and spiders that have lived undisturbed since the turn of the century.

My offering here was simple. I didn’t use the lavender or water. Instead, I took a small piece of twine from my pocket, a bit of rough hemp jute, and tied it loosely around the padlock hasp. A bit of unworked fibre for a space defined by rigid sheets of metal.

I gently rested the palm of my hand against the ribbed, cold tin wall. Rarely were these structures touched, except upon entry, and sometimes a light touch held more depth than some shallow, muttered words. It wasn’t cold. The thin metal still held a little of the day’s warmth and felt thin, its structure held together by tension, rivets, and prayers against the westerly winds.

Past that, I could sense the hollow, metallic, and echoey interior, dry and dark where other things lived. Its daily job was to hold a myriad of things which we’d reach for or clumsily stuff back into a semi-available space. In the back corners, six months of stagnant air and the faint smell of cobwebs and old two-stroke fuel lurked.

The presence here isn’t the tin itself, but the enclosure, a spirit of space that has been rigorously held apart out of open air and tasked to keep things dry. It felt stoic, but slightly resentful around the rust. Rust in the back corner where the water seeps, rust currently eating away at the garden shears, and holding space for the slow decay of more wild practical ambitions.

As I stood there, a possum moved through the branches of the feijoa tree above, not noticing me leaning weirdly against the tin. The possum was a regular visitor to our yard, it seemed to like perching on the back fence. Tonight, perhaps innocently, it dropped a feijoa fruit onto the tin roof with a loud BANG that reverberated right through my hand.

The metal shivered under my skin, a long, vibrating hum that took several seconds to die down into the dark. Another several seconds passed while I thanked the small gods of the garden for not shitting my pants. The shed hadn’t made an angry sound, it was just the tin doing what it was built to do, deflecting the weight of the overhead world.

I stood straight, winced as my back complained, and patted the shed corner once, feeling the rough bite of a slightly rusted rivet, and turned back toward the house.

The Closed Ledger

Walking back inside, I left wet grass tracks on the laundry lino. The week’s round of acknowledgement was complete.

From the silted crack of the driveway, the green plastic box on the nature strip, to the letterbox, storm drain and the galvanised crown in the backyard, the block had been walked, greeted, and listened to.

Not mastered or mapped in any final way. Just attended to.

The suburbs are a quiet, dense ecology of minor presences and hard-working objects. Some are infrastructure. Some are domestic. Some are old ground wearing new arrangements. Some are probably just plastic bins until one night, under the streetlight, they are not.

The small gods keep ordinary posts. In cracks, on poles, beneath gutters, beside driveways, holding the ordinary world together while we look past them.

And sometimes, if you walk slowly enough, craftily enough with lavender in your pocket and rainwater in a thermos, the suburb stops being background.

It looks back.

This is Part III of Small Gods of the Suburbs.

Part I began at the edges of the street. Part II moved through features of the nature strip. Part III ends out the back, where the suburb drops its public face and the domestic sentinels keep their posts.

Esoteric Potato explores urban animism — the practice of building relationships with the places, structures, and ecosystems that make up our cities.

If this piece resonated, you might also enjoy my ongoing field notes and essays exploring urban animism, attention, and the strange behaviour of place on Substack at https://esotericpotato.substack.com