If you are an Australian, a 'Baby Boomer', grew up just about anywhere outside a large city, or even in one, or lived on 'the land', or worked in a 'shed', or in factory of some kind, the chances are that just about every roof that you've ever lived or worked under would have been corrugated iron. The water you drank as kid more than likely would have been collected on your roof and indeed you may well have been conceived under the the stuff. And, if you're were brought up as a Protestant Non-conformist there's a better than even chance that you've done some praying under corrugated iron ­ and just maybe you were married under it too.

To just such an 'Aussie' the very idea that this stuff was invented in England is almost unbelievable. It's said that corrugated iron is "about as Australian as eucalyptus oil." Well, that's what they say! And, if they do, "it couldn't really be English ­ could it?"

Antipodean disbelief might have something to do with Australia exporting corrugated iron to the UK from about WW2 on and it might also have something to do with the fact that corrugated iron is an omnipresent element in the landscapes of "home". Even if it's virtually invisible to unseeking eyes, corrugated iron gives Aussie places a vernacular placedness and that's an idea that's deeply embedded in the imagination of a great many Australians.

Still, if you're a Baby Boomer you're probably of 'colonial stock' and corrugated iron's Englishness sort of makes historical sense if your mind slips out of overdrive and you really get down to thinking things through. Then again, if you're part of the Australian multicultural community, or a part of this or that diaspora, corrugated iron will tell you different stories and carry quite different cultural memories ­ but certainly there will be some stories there to think about.

No matter what, corrugated iron roofs hold a special place in the cultural imagination of so many people in Australia. Not the least reason being that rather ethereal music rain makes upon your typical Aussie roof. In places where there is a lot of rain then the day upon day upon day of 'rain-music' can be quite soothing ­ mezzo piano/mezzo forte ­ even if "the wet" gets you down. You're never left in any sort of doubt that it's raining, or about its heaviness, or its gentleness, or the size of the drops, or the strength of the wind and so on. The 'music' often starts with a rising level of intermittent ­ staccato ­ pops and pings ­ allegro accelerando ­ that will grab your attention and take you to the window. And, almost always at the end there is this final phrase where the drips in the downpipe ring out then to fade away ­ diminuendo decrescendo. Or, sometimes the wind loosens the drops on the leaves in some nearby tree to detonate an abrupt climax ­ sforzando fortissimo ­ that affirms that the music's at its end ­ fortissimo fine! Or, just maybe the music will just start all over again ­ sostenuto andante. MORE ABOUT RAIN MUSIC

In the wet parts of Australia this roof music is accompanied by a "frog chorus" made up of countless singers revelling in the wet and singing a rainforest version of 'Musak'. But in those places where there is not so much rain, the 'roof-music' simply announces "better times" with enough water for those things like "a good soapy shower" that 'elsewhere-people' take so much for granted. Well, it will once the tank round the side ­ corrugated iron of course ­ and the dam up the back are both full ­ and "right up." After "a long dry" the music brings another promise too! That's the promise that the view out the window will change, turn green again for a while, perhaps, and hopefully that'll be sometime soon ­ and God willing the frogs will have something to sing about.

Then again there is another kind of music ­ soundscape may be a better way to describe it ­ that probably can only be heard in Australia on a tin roof. Throughout the day, even in 'tha-burbs',[1] lots of birds ­ peewees, kookaburras, currawongs, crows, doves, cockatoos, gulls, whatever ­ will alight upon your roof to sing their songs. They'll twitter away, coo, screech and squawk a little, scurry here and there, dance, chase this or that, fight, or clean their beaks by rattling them along 'the corrugations' ­ and sometimes they'll just poop. Maybe the sulphur crested cockatoos will even pull out a nail or two ­ just for fun ­ or possibly the neighbourhood butcherbird will tear its prey apart and thrash it on the ridge-capping. Or, those alien sparrows might just start building their nests under the edge somewhere ­ again!. After a while you get quite good at working out what it is that they're actually doing up there and then figuring out if you really need to go and do anything about it.

Then at night, just as you retire, your friendly resident possum ­ in reality they're pint sized tree climbing kangaroos ­ finds his/her way out from inside your roof somewhere to wend its way across the corrugations to whatever tree it is in the garden that's on the menu tonight ­ an apple maybe, or then again maybe it's some juicy leaf tips or eucalyptus blossom.

Every now and then 'your' possum, if it's a she-possum, will get a visit, with amorous intent, from the district's 'alpha-male'. They'll frolic about up there on the roof for ever such a long time, and if she is willing, it'll be a relatively sedate business. But, if she's not, well that's another story. On just such an evening you might well be forgiven for imagining that you have been teleported back into a Jurassic time warp and that a couple of fiendish brutes are running amuckup there on your roof ­ or just maybe they're simply playing 'silly buggers' [2]. When all the thumping, screaming, scratching and snarling inevitably reaches its fever pitch, and it will, you're left with a couple of choices. Firstly, there is the one of pulling up the bedclothes and pretending that it's just not happening and when that doesn't work, you might consider going out there to "hose the buggers down!" ­ but that's not an attractive proposition at 1am.

In Australia corrugated iron is a kind of surrogate bark. Consistent with the idea that Australia was empty, "terra nullius", a blank sheet, British colonisers typically took little time to seek advice from the land's Indigenous people. Except, they did use the bark of the Indigenes' eucalypts for some of their early shelters ­ well for a while. The bark worked as a kind thatching in much the same way as the Indigenes used it ­ well kind of. [3]

As colonial fortunes changed, bark roofs and walls gave way to this 'tin bark', On some urban fringes today, and even in the bush, 'humpies' ­ Aboriginal dwellings that were typically made of bark pre-contact ­ are more usually made of corrugated iron ­ this 'white-fella-ironbark' called corrugate iron. Once it was 'stringbark' of the vegetative kind now its 'ironbark' of the industrial kind. Paradoxically, Aboriginal people collect 'ironbark' when 'the country' [4] takes the settlers' shelters back through fire, storm, neglect, whatever. Anyway, all to often the trees are no longer there and if corrugated iron is nothing else, it's expedient!

One rather universal Australian 'bush fire' image is the one of the smouldering remains of a house, brick chimney standing rather lost and forlorn, tortured corrugated iron strewn about it and wisps of smoke curling upwards into the branches of scorched eucalypt trees. Against a clear blue sky, and within weeks, the trees will bristle with the verdant green shoots that'll pop out from under their black bark. And, the house's 'iron' will be whisked away to be straightened out a bit, to become a fence, to roof a 'chookhouse' [5] , to cover this or that and keep it dry, to make the kids a canoe [6] , to do, or become, a myriad of things. The stuff is just so forgiving and it never seems to give up its usefulness until it's gone to rust and ultimately turns to dust.

Unsurprisingly, you'll find old and left-over sheets of corrugated iron stacked "out the back somewhere" out of sight but not quite out of mind. Almost anywhere 'down under' it's waiting there behind the shed, or under the bushes, for that moment when the disbelievers are told "it'll be handy some day ­ mate!" As corrugated iron is used, and reused, its surface gathers, and somehow holds, layers of stories for those with the understanding to read them.

Australian Heritage architect, Anne Warr , tells her countrymen that:

"Within a few years of corrugated iron being invented and patented in Britain in 1829, it was appearing in Australia: firstly as verandahs (to protect the English style cottages from the sun) and then as whole buildings." [7]

The story goes that during the Gold Rush years of the 1850s, leaving as little as possible to chance, people would arrive in Australia with their intended houses packed away in the hold of their ship along with their other goods and chattels. Apparently vast numbers of portable houses arrived this way, as did "shops, hotels, villas, a theatre and three portable corrugated iron churches.." Some of these buildings survive to this day.[7]

Anne Warr has brought some statistics to light concerning all this so we now have some rather interesting facts to ponder in regard to corrugated iron, gold and the colonial enterprise in Australia, facts like:

"in 1853, 6,639 packages of iron worth £111, 380 were imported (remembering that a large building like a church could require up to 60 packages.) In 1854 a peak number of 30,329 packages worth £247,165 were imported, which dropped to £24,118 in 1855." [7]

But it was the corrugated iron that continued to arrive from Britain well into the 20thC, and the sheets that were later manufactured in Australia in immense quantities from the 1920s on, that slipped quietly into the Australian psyche and vernacular cultural imaginations. Curiously, not all of Australia's Corrugated iron was of British origin as it seems that between WW1 and WW2 some was imported from France but by the late 1930s Australia was exporting substantial quantities of corrugated iron into the UK market and wherever else a market could be found for the steel products of a more self confident nation.

In 19th C Australian settlements, large and small, corrugated iron lent a kind of authenticity to the colonial enterprise and particularly so in an Industrial Revolution context. There is a poignancy about the ways technologies seep their way, materially, into local imaginings of placedness. Similarly, despite and because of the political and cultural agendas of their time, technologies contribute new layers to the ways personal placedness and local sensibilities can be understood and constructed.

In 19th C Australia, larger towns were places where corrugated iron was well mannered in what was imagined to be a new and untamed land. But over the horizon, out in 'the bush' somewhere, and on the farm, it was less well behaved. 'Out there' corrugated iron was, and still is, used in rough and ready ways. "Out of town" you'll still find sheets of corrugated iron doing almost anything asked of them along with fencing wire and whatever else might come to hand.

In Australia corrugated iron has had a kind of elsewhereness attached to it and somehow it seems more so in those most distinctive of all Australian landscapes. Corrugated iron was, and by and large still is, the stuff that protects the farm machinery, that covers shearing sheds and haystacks, that mineheads are clad with, that sawmills are roofed with, that envelops warehouses and factories and whatever. In some ways its a kind of "elsewhere indicator." Very frequently that which is under it either came from, or is destined for, somewhere else. Once that would have been 'the motherland' and nowadays it's almost anywhere a long way away given the "new world order" Australia finds itself within.

With 20/20 21st C hindsight, corrugated iron's 19th C and 20th C industrial imperatives, the consequent cultural cargo to do with that, and the flow-on environmental impacts, somehow tarnishes the iron's virtue. In certain ways it seems so out of place yet landscapes are full of it, it's so accommodating and it's so utterly useful. A corrugated iron structure in a pristine landscape is all too often a visual siren telling you that all may not be well.

Nevertheless, as corrugated iron succumbs to the land, as it losses its shine and its ridges rust, as it wears and tears, as its paint weathers, peels and blisters under the sun, a kind of rightness about it emerges. Over time, and rather quietly, corrugated iron finds and settles into its place.

Of course none of this is exclusive to Australia. Even so, clearly there is a dialogue that goes on between materials, cultural endeavour, environments, geopolitics, history and the social enterprises attached to 'place' and the places people make. Inevitably corrugated iron gets caught up in those conversations.

Up close and personal where 'the iron' bumps into people's lives its lack of preciousness tells other stories but there is nothing particularly Australian about that either. Nonetheless, reading the stories, and in the materiality of 'the iron', on the walls of say a cluster of railway workshops ­ now a museum ­ or a shearing shed, or even in someone's shed out the back, there are distinctive, and very local, stories to be read. "WAZA WAZ ERE 1957", "RED PAINT SCREWS OIL", "DOWN WITH THE ARU [Australian Railway Union ­ presumably] UP WITH THE COMOS", "^JOK ­ L ­ AR", "69" and the "bounce-marks" a brush leaves when you clean it on the wall, and its corrugated, and rusty, and 'the boss' wasn't looking, all this tells stories that only a local could ever know and love. They're not stories that have got all that much to do with elsewhere and sometimes they might even be read as a kind of curse against elsewhereness ­ or something.

The ways old corrugated iron sheds get repaired makes them feel cosy and comfortable like some favourite 'old thing' with each patch holding a story of some kind. And, more than most materials corrugated iron lends itself to a kind of cumulative storytelling that might not be forgiven anywhere else.

In 21st C Australian urban landscapes corrugated iron is, arguably, even better mannered than it ever was in the 19th C. Nowadays corrugated iron is the trendy stuff of the 'smart Aussie vernacular' where the irreverence of its 'bush' context is celebrated, just a little, alongside colonial cum industrial sensibilities and "its inherent materiality" ­ at long last. And, it's done in ways that lend a little shameless Aussie placedness to suburban townhouses, beach shacks and bushland hideaways. Conversely, some would argue that all this is more 'Globally' inspired and coincidentally vernacular if it can be called vernacular at all.

Currently, Glen Murcutt [8] is probably Australia's most famous architect. Any doubt there may have been about Murcutt's international reputation was pretty much put to rest in 2002 when he won the International Pritzker Architecture Prize. Corrugated iron in his hands gradually took on a currency that celebrates Aussie placedness without conceding all that much to sensibilities rooted elsewhere. If Murcutt didn't lead the way he was "up the front somewhere" and he has at least granted permission to Australians to think somewhat differently about corrugated iron and the ways it might be used ­ and clearly it's being taken.

Murcutt insists that his buildings should "sit lightly" in their place, in their landscapes. In turn this suggests that when he uses corrugated iron he is celebrating the best of corrugated iron's materiality ­ its lightness and strength in concert with its vernacularity. At the same time he seems to be offering a critique to do with the careless and sometimes insensitive ways some corrugated iron structures impose themselves upon Australian landscapes. Any fault corrugated iron may have here is down to its users ­ it's not inherent. Murcutt, among others, makes that crystal clear as they grapple with, celebrate and overcome corrugated iron's so called 'down-sides' whatever they may be imagined to be.

Rosalie Gascoigne[9] ­ born New Zealand 1917, died Australia 1999 ­ was an 'Antipodean' artist who elevated discarded materials common-place in rural Australia ­ corrugated iron and the like ­ to a new kind of preciousness. She transformed this "stuff" into extraordinary manifestations of visual poetry. Even though she was a late starter ­ she was in her late 50s when she first exhibited ­ she was one of Australia's most lauded in the contemporary artists. She described herself as an "arranger," not a painter, or a sculptor or any other particular kind of artist yet she was a consummate composer.

Rosalie Gascoigne owed at least as much to ikebana ­ yes, Japanese flower arranging ­ as she did to contemporary arts practice. She was a one-off and one of those innovators who in their time quietly mark out their own territory. She did just that and in doing so she also changed the ways Australians might understand their placedness. [9]

Curiously, or perhaps not so, it wasn't Australia that was Rosalie Gascoigne's 'spiritual home'. New Zealand wasn't that much so either it seems, or not any more, but "The Monaro", Canberra's hinterlands, by all accounts was. The Monaro ­ that 'country' that surrounds Australia's inland capital ­ was her homeplace, or at least she felt very much at home there. It was where her family belonged, it was where a great many of her friends lived and it's where she gathered her materials and the stuff of her artmaking.

Rosalie Gascoigne is among a growing number of artists who Australians can look to and see 'homeness' in their artmaking. She found everything she ever needed in the landscape of her homeplace and on its rubbish dumps. As often as not it was corrugated iron that "had been somewhere and done something" ­ quoting Robert Rauschenberg as she did ­ that served her purpose best of all.

Close to unwittingly Rosalie Gascoigne alerted Antipodeans, Australians and New Zealanders too, to the distinctiveness of their homeplaces, the ways they had constructed and shaped them and the stories they have invested in them ­ their landscapes, their homeplaces. And, corrugated iron in her hands ­ along with discarded soft drink boxes, redundant road signage, old fencing wire, moulted swan feathers, chipped enamel kitchenware, chucked-out linoleum, sun bleached thistle stalks, etc. ­ won a newfound poignancy that left those who understood her, and their own, placedness with something considerably more than an aesthetic experience.

Lurking away in its materiality, wherever you are, corrugated iron is bound to have some subliminal stories and memories, and perhaps an odd sub-text or two, just waiting to be pondered upon.

However, if you're an Aussie, a Baby Boomer, and you've just discovered that corrugated iron was invented in England in 1829, and by Henry Robinson Palmer no less, you've only got to look around yourself a little to discover that we haven't really lost anything really important ­ well nothing as important as a cricket match. But, if you're a part of the Australian multicultural experience then corrugated iron is quite likely to carry some special personal cultural cargo and just as much so as it might for any 'ridgy-didge' [10]Aussie. Either way, because of the baggage corrugated iron inevitably carries it may just be the spark that allows you to picture yourself within a homeplace ­ here or elsewhere, wherever it is 'here' might be and however it is you understand home and your placedness.

Ray Norman is an Australian artist, cultural commentator and a sometimes cultural jammer who has lived in various parts of eastern Australia and currently lives and works in Launceston Tasmania.