He held out a bag with a tumble of objects and I was briefly discombobulated. Is it snack time? “Netsuke” declared Rudi. No comprehension dawned but clearly nothing edible was being offered. “Toggles. They fasten on a cord. An accessory for a Japanese kimono.” I could see holes in the netsuke (pronounced net-skay). And I could see small carvings: a strange face; two salmon and a very nice bottom - female. Other bits too.

Netsuke carved in wood or bone became objects of fascination over a century ago. The human form was a popular subject - in aspect grotesque or comedic, but also erotic.

This and more I learned from Rudolphus Josephus Laurentius Mineur on a quiet Melbourne Sunday in his backyard shed entered via Middle Earth and a Tolkienesque garden. Rudi is no collector of netsuke. He is a maker. He has fashioned his collection of carvings from found objects - mulga, gidgee, gimlet, coolibah, bimble box and other timbers found as fragments in the inland of Australia. Weathered and obsidian dense but with a form and line that suggests a narrative or a mystery - delicately etched, then polished and finally told.

Rudi’s shed is approached through a tall glade of fan palms and eucalypts. This is a shed you would earn only by a pure life and a devotion to order. It seems church-like, confessional, a place of learning - questions and answers hanging like motes in the light from the dormer windows.

Rudi began travelling to inland Australia in the early 1970s. Toyota helped. His first ride was an early model Hi-Ace van, and then a 1970s Landcruiser, which he still drives today. Both vehicles carried many kilograms of wood, bone, fossil, rock and artefact on the homeward leg of these journeys. These and stone tools sourced at trash markets and from collectors, occupy the drawers and shelves in the Museum Shed of Natural History in Surrey Hills.

What is he? An autodidact certainly: A student of human industry and of natural history. Rudi’s own answer is that he is the sum of his experience: A taxidermist, a watercolourist, a graphic artist, a master carver. His work, interests and hobbies coincide - or collide and coalesce: anthropology, pre-industrial artefacts, hand-worked tools and utensils, geology, biology, botany, 

In a word, he is a naturalist. But finding his antecedents in this era of specialisation, you would have to go back more than a century - to the times of the European naturalist-voyagers who explored landings in the southern hemisphere. Von Humboldt, Banks, Solander, Wallace and Darwin. Having no cameras to record their discoveries, they were instead gifted with an eye for detail and the skill of fine drawing.

Rudi Mineur’s story too begins in Europe. Born in Rotterdam in 1945, he accompanied his family to rural Soost in Utrecht in his infant years - his parents numbed by the loss of their livelihood during the German bombing and feeling alienation in post-war urban Europe. In the late 1950s Rudi and his brother Ludo, four years his senior, were to hatch an audacious plot to run away from home. Rudi was inspired by youth and natural caprice and Ludo by a desire to avoid national service. Another brother had met an Australian girl - her stories vivid, free of care - and the promise of empty landscapes and unknown adventures beckoned. Their parents discovered the plot, spoiling the secret and its attendant drama by asking if they could come too. Well, what are you going to do? Tell them no? They’re your parents!

Tasmania came next - an exotic place of strange Hills hoists and custard with pud. They joined a small, established Dutch community near Launceston. Rudi, working as an apprentice carpenter, looked ever outwards to the wider community - not joining in much with the emigres. He does remember being recognised by a beautiful Dutch girl framed in a bus window. Blonde, blue-eyed, she waved at Rudi. It became a companion image for his lifetime. 

What drives him? “Insecurity,” he offers. ”If you feel alien in a new culture; lacking identity or personal history in a community, you try harder.” A bored schoolboy, yet Rudi found adult education at night in a foreign language no great challenge. But this early need to prove his worth abated and eventually passed. The thrill of discovery, the all-consuming inquiry, this became his driving force.

Rudi likes the stillness and order of his shed and is old enough to like his own company. Betsy calls by occasionally - and she does now, bringing us both tea and nibbles. “Betsy never stays in the shed,” says Rudi. ”She just visits.” To his recall, she is still a girl waving from a bus window. I nod with perfect understanding. We both know that women have no particular time for sheds.

....by Dave Hutchens, July 2005
 

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