It’s possible that I have previously confessed in this place to being a collector of things.
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I have a collection of collections.
Cast iron advertising bottle openers, Australian pre-decimal coins, newspaper signs, typewriters, musical machines, vintage school equipment and some other items which should not be mentioned here.
People who know me well are occasional conspirators in this activity.
They’ll stumble across an odd shaped Chinese goldfields pot, or a nice pre-colonial thingummy with a twiddly bit on top and they’ll alert me to it.
This is not a recent occurrence.
I’ve had the habit for much of my adult life.
When my kids were little tackers they could detect an interesting piece of mid-19th century west coast Japanese porcelain from 50-metres with one eye shut.
People ask why.
Why is it satisfying to own about 250 cast iron bottle openers? Or to try to assemble a complete set of pre-decimal coins? Or old books?
And I would have said it was because it was fun.
It’s intriguing to get these snapshots into earlier times.
And if one snapshot is satisfying, surely a complete set is like an entire photo album?
Maybe. Maybe.
Some years ago for reasons now long lost, I was sitting next to Kim Beazley, the former political leader and diplomat.
He was regaling the table with stories of hunting and obtaining old religious icons, mainly Russian, Greek or eastern European.
There, bet you didn’t know that.
Aha! A collector. It didn’t matter that the rest of us wouldn’t have known an icon from an iPad, it was all about hunting and gathering.
He had a theory that men are more likely to be collectors than women and even now, years later, I don’t have any sense whether that is true.
Blokes tend to get very narrowly focussed, I suppose – a lack of multi-skilling some would say – so it could be right.
But get this, according to most sources I could find, maybe we collectors should be utterly ashamed and seek therapy.
British psychologist Christian Jarrett reckons about one third of people in the United Kingdom collect something.
Jarrett suggests the reasons are deep and furtive.
He said: “One psychoanalytical explanation for collecting is that unloved children learn to seek comfort in accumulating belongings; another is that collecting is motivated by existential anxieties – the collection, an extension of our identity, lives on, even though we do not. More recently, evolutionary theorists suggested that a collection was a way for a man to attract potential mates by signalling his ability to accumulate resources.”
Ahem. Mrs Whacked collects teapots, postcards with mad cats on them, Lego and yellow Mazdas. Who does this attract?
Jarrett argued that humans could only become collectors about 12,000 years ago after we gave up being nomads and settled in one place.
Imagine if they’d had eBay then. The internet is a collector’s Nirvana in one way.
Suddenly anything you can imagine – and many you couldn’t in your worst dreams – can be found, purchased and sent to your home. At the cost of a satisfying hunt.
But I don’t think I’ll mention this affliction ever again.
WAYNE GREGSON