Support for this Australian life comes from the North Queensland Holden Ud Appreciation Society.

The best part of life, whatever comes your way, whether it's a crate of VB, a flytip sofa

that's probably still good, or a hop and dog that you hit on your way to the bottle shop,

is that you can throw it in the back of the yute and be good to go.

Welcome to this Australian life.

I'm Sheila Canig, and as autumn turns to winter, you might be asking

yourself, crikey, is it finally time to tinker about in the garage? Maybe build those shells

that bloody Sandra's been nagging you about for ages? You could do it with what you've got,

but the state of your toolkit is absolute cactus, so you pile into the yute and you burn it

to a bunnings for a stack of brackets and a wooden mallet.

You get to the car park, you find a spot and you're about to enter the store and struth it hits you, the smell of a perfectly cooked bunning snag.

What is it about a sausage served in sandwich bread that seems to go hand in hand with buying

lumber and nails? There's something ineffably Australian about perusing the

hinge aisle with a gob full of meat, like seeing the Southern Cross or having a dingo eat

your baby. Much ink and blood, frankly, has been spilled about Bunning's recent edict to banish

the fried onions to the depths below the sausage, but today I feel we should ask a deeper question.

Why do we do it? What about this big desert island in the

middle of the ocean makes us crave it so? I went down to my local bunnings to find out more.

Aussie rules football, V-neck t-shirts that bore at would blush at, the bloated carcasses of roadkill kangaroos on the

highway from Perth to Darwin. These are just a handful of the singularly Australian things for which

I find it's difficult to arrive at an explanation. They just are. We know them by sight and smell.

We feel a loss without them, and yet we seem to be the only nation on earth that has them.

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