No Place Like Gnome

2 minute read
Michael Fitzgerald

Driving south from Port Augusta, travelers could be forgiven for missing the sign to Ray Myers’ hobby farm. On a sunny morning, the lead smelters of Port Pirie shimmer on the horizon to the south like an outback Venice, while to the north, the Flinders Ranges begin their majestic roll. They were partly what brought Sydney-born Myers, 64, to the area on holiday in 1966, and his love affair with the landscape has continued ever since. “Change color every hour,” he says.

Perhaps Myers’ sign should be bigger, maybe even in neon, since what he is farming is every bit as fantastical as the surrounds. Follow the driveway to the rear of his otherwise ordinary house, and the mountains form a natural amphitheater around what is pure show business. As a sign hanging by the door of an enormous shed reads: GNOME FARM, SOUND HORN FOR SERVICE. Spilling out from the shed is a chorus of concrete creatures which Myers makes, repairs and sells to the public. He characterizes the latter as “licorice all-sorts—anyone who doesn’t understand what the sign is. Locals, interstaters, people from overseas. Just never-ending.” So is his merchandise. There are ponies, toadstools, eagles, penguins and pink flamingos—”all sorts of bloody gear, mate.” But most of all there are gnomes.

Before buying the business three years ago, the gnome farmer’s most relevant experience was laying concrete paths. As Myers puts it, he was “bored of doing nothing.” But these days his hands are full. Once a figure is sold, he’ll make another by pouring concrete into one of the fiberglass molds in his Aladdin’s cave of a shed. People will also bring in broken statues. “This one here is unrepairable,” he says, lifting the head off a gnome that was recently retrieved from a garden. “He’s been knocked around—knocked around with a sledge hammer. Buggered him.”

Myers claims to be unsentimental when it comes to gnomes—”there’s just that many of them, so you don’t have favorites.” Hardest to make is an elegantly tapered, 1.2-m-tall painted emu, which carries the relatively steep price of $160. Which all helps to pay the rent. And, despite the distant noise of the highway, he couldn’t wish for a better place to farm gnomes. “A beautiful little spot,” he says. Enchanted, to be sure.

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com