At our family house, inner-city Perth, in the old garage – it has a smell you would know. Cut timber. Old grease. Dust warmed under a tin roof, something metallic underneath. Every garage of a certain age has it and nobody can quite describe it.

An old bench along the back wall made of jarrah, the same timber as the beams in the roof above it. Bolted to the bench is an Australian made vice, probably 100 years old and still turning smoothly. The tools still hung up on the walls – hand planes, a brace and bit, chisels, saws, not one of them needing to be plugged into anything.

It was my grandfather’s. The house has been ours for close to a hundred years – red brick and jarrah under corrugated iron, still standing, going nowhere.

I stood in there recently and understood, slowly, that every tool on that bench was a job my grandfather did with his own hands, because there was no one else to do it.

Like every man of his day he maintained his own house, because no one else would. He fixed the plumbing, patched the roof, re-hung doors, kept a car alive years past the point anyone now would bother. There was no alternative. Ringing someone, paying someone, waiting for someone – that barely existed. The house made him resourceful.

Today, I can call anyone. There is a device in my pocket that will summon a tradesman for any job in my house inside a day, and at no point am I ever required to know anything.

This looks like progress and mostly it is. I am not going to pretend we were better off when a man wired his own house, some of it badly, some of it dangerously. Specialists are better. That is the whole case for a service economy.

And yet. The service economy took something with it that it never charged us for.

We outsourced the labour of maintaining our own lives, and with it, the capability. And capability, unlike a service, does not come back when you need it. A man who has never fixed anything has not bought convenience. He has traded away the thing itself, and he will not notice until the day the app doesn’t work.

I saw the other side of this once. I spent a week teaching a pre-apprenticeship group at a regional TAFE in the Wheatbelt, WA. Farm boys. Fifteen, sixteen years of age. I was there for basic hand skills – setting out, concreting, a bit of bricklaying – and within a day it was clear the arrangement was backwards. They were teaching me.

They were from various farms one to two hours from town, where when something breaks you fix it or it stays broken. There is no one to ring who will come the same day. The header does not wait for a technician. So a sixteen-year-old out there can weld, keep a diesel alive, make a part that no longer exists – because the alternative has stood in front of him his whole life.

They were not more virtuous than a kid from the city suburbs. They had simply grown up somewhere that still asked the question, and answered it for them.

That is the thing. It is not character and it is not the past. Resourcefulness is a response to circumstance. Take away the option of calling someone and the capability appears in almost anyone, because it has to. Put that option on tap, for everything, and it quietly leaves – not because people got worse, but because nothing asked it of them.

The city only feels exempt because the tradesman does turn up and the tap does get fixed – until he doesn’t. The farm boy and the city man are the same man in two environments, and only one still asks anything of him. We have built, for most of the country, an environment that asks very little or nothing. And we are about to find out what that produces.

Here is the part that should stop this being a lament, because it is the opposite of one. There has never been a better time to be resourceful. My grandfather learned from his father, or the man next door. That was the whole library. Every skill he had, and a thousand he never dreamed of, waits for nothing on the screen in your hand.

You can watch a man rebuild a gearbox, tile a wet area, hang a door, find a fault in a circuit – filmed close, paused and repeated as often as you need. YouTube is the greatest practical school ever built, and it is free, and it is the only streaming anyone actually needs.

Unfortunately, we do not use it that way. We use the device for everything except the one thing it is best at. There are men who spend three hours a night in a group chat, fluent in every meme, briefed on every twist of politics, encyclopaedic on a football code they will never play – and who have not scratched the surface of the physical world they live inside. They can tell you what happened in a game on the other side of the country. They cannot re-seat a tap.

I am not having a go at leisure. A man is entitled to his football and his mates. The point is narrower: the knowledge is right there, in the same pocket, on the same device, and the only thing between most people and real capability is that they have never turned the thing toward it. Attention.

Which is oddly hopeful. The resourcefulness has not been lost. It has not gone anywhere. It is waiting, more available than it has ever been, for the moment someone decides to pick it up.

And it does not stop at the tap. Resourcefulness is a disposition toward your whole patch – can you cook what is in the house, keep the place in order, mend the thing before it has to be replaced. Not because you cannot afford otherwise, but because it is yours. A person who tends what is his is a different kind of citizen from one who waits for it to be tended.

Call it your station – your house, your street, the stretch of the world you actually touch. You attend to it, and because you attend to it, you notice when something is wrong.

The man who has never fixed anything, never taken responsibility for his own patch, is the same man who walks past the trolley on its side and the tag on the fence and thinks: not mine. A life in which everything is someone else’s job teaches him that nothing is his. Take care of your own station and that reverses – you start to see, everywhere, all the places where nobody is taking care of anything.

That is where standards begin. Not with a policy. With a person who has decided that the world within his reach is his to look after.

We forget what kind of country this is. We tell ourselves we are a service economy now – cafes and apps and someone else’s job. But it is not who we are and it is not how we got here.

Modern Australia is a miracle, and the miracle was built by resourceful people with no other option. Everything worth having here was made in its hardest moments, by people improvising with what they had, a long way from anyone who could help.

That is the DNA. Risk-takers and doers, resourceful under pressure, at our best when the situation demanded everything. It has not been bred out of us in a generation. It is sitting exactly where it always was, waiting for the one thing it has always waited for – a reason to appear.

The farm boys pick it up because they must. The rest of us have to choose to – and the tools have never been closer to hand.

The post Where did the resourceful Aussie spirit go? appeared first on The Spectator Australia.