By STEVE GRAY
SOME of these country blokes can turn their hand to anything.
Hugh Tindall is one.
At 87, Mr Tindall spends most of his days in a workshop at Regency Park, a retirement village in Warwick.
“I just love working, that’s all, I just work every day,” he said.
He makes things, repairs things, welds things, fixes things, thinks of new, quirky things to create.
Other residents leave things needing repair on his work bench.
“Every day I come down here and there’s something left out here,” he says, turning over a pair of gardening shears in need of a sharpening.
He’s mostly been a sheep man, but has been roo shooting, wild dog trapping, shearing, mustering, droving, fencing and building tennis courts.
Mr Tindall has toured with his world’s best collection of shearing equipment and gave up demonstration shearing at the tender age of 84.
It’s not all work and no play. He retired from tennis in October with a torn ligament.
“They could fix it, but it’s ridiculous going to the doctor and saying: I want that arm fixed at 87 so I can go and play tennis. They’d say it’s your head that wants fixin’.”
Mr Tindall said he likes all types of activity, but not gardening.
That’s ironic, because his sculptures adorn many of the well-kept gardens at Regency Park.
Naturally talented as he is, Mr Tindall said his sandstone sculptures started when he just drew a kangaroo on a piece of sandstone and decided he could carve it into the rock. A sculptor was born.
An emu and a Maltese Cross soon followed, completing a coat of arms near the entrance to the community that is Regency Park.
Several of the themed gardens now have his sandstone works in them – a lion, a dog, a chookhouse complete with hens, eggs and a fox slyly staring in.
Some of the sculpted sandstone comes from construction work on the very ground he’s standing on, larger pieces are brought in.
So which is his favourite sculpture?
“I don’t know, they’re all just fun with me,” he said.
That pretty much seems to sum up Mr Tindall’s philosophy – work is play, life should be fun.
