Sixteen years, one very narrow road, and several quietly skeptical dinner parties later: Michael aboard Archimedes.
There’s a question that creeps up on people somewhere in their sixties and seventies. It arrives quietly and starts sitting in the room. What do you want this stretch of life to be for? Some people decide the answer is rest. Some chase the places they never got to. Some pour themselves into grandchildren, or a garden, or finally restoring the car that’s been under a tarp for twenty years. And a stubborn, wonderful few decide that what they want is to build something enormous and improbable with their own two hands, just to prove it can be done.
Michael is one of those few.
On the side of Saddleback Mountain, at Jamberoo, he set out to build an ocean-going catamaran. A self-designed, eighteen-and-a-half-metre boat, built in his own backyard. He’d talk about it with this great, infectious enthusiasm: the big idea, the plan, the vision of it finished and on the water. And beside him, as she always is, his gorgeous wife Susie would sit and smile. What a woman she is.
He’d bring it up at dinner parties, the way other people mention a renovation or a recent trip, and around the table you’d see the same look settle on every face. We were all thinking something. We were each, I suspect, thinking something completely different. Somewhere in that circle was jealousy, and amazement, and flat incredulity, quietly calculating the boat’s chances against a road that accommodates cows and precisely one car at a time. We’d nod warmly and pass the wine. Then we’d go home to our perfectly normal backyards, containing no catamaran whatsoever.
How on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?
When he started, I doubt Michael imagined it would take sixteen years. The big idea rarely comes with the small print attached. Somewhere along the way there was even talk that the ABC might make a documentary of it, that the grand finale would see the boat lifted out by helicopter, surely the only sensible way to get a thing that size off a mountain. Anyone who knew the narrow road he lived on was asking the same question we all were: how on earth are you ever going to get it out of here?
The helicopter stayed on the ground and the documentary went unmade. What happened instead was better: the boat was cut into pieces and crawled down a narrow road, metre by metre, over the better part of a week. The polished launch footage you can find online skips all of that and shows the dream going into the water, clean and triumphant, with the difficult and stubborn and real parts left on the cutting-room floor. Watching it, knowing what it actually took, I find myself quietly amused. That’s a long way from how it looked coming down the hill.
The building is the thing. Some people garden. Some people restore cars. Michael and Susie built an ocean-going boat by hand, for sixteen years.
Where they take it, and whether they take it anywhere at all, almost feels secondary to having proved it could be done.
Michael built something else, long before the boat, and I have carried it for twenty years.
When I started out in agricultural advocacy, I was wrestling with the question the whole industry wrestles with. How do you get people to value farmers when most of them will never set foot on a farm? The standard answer then, and the standard answer now, is to teach people how food is produced, on the theory that understanding leads to appreciation.
Michael, over the side fence, put it differently. You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it. He pointed at the mobile phone. Almost nobody can explain what happens inside one, and almost nobody would give theirs up. Appreciation grows from knowing the people, admiring what they made, and feeling some tie to the place it came from. The mechanism barely comes into it.
You don’t need to know how it works to appreciate it.
That sentence changed how I built every project after it. I stopped explaining the supply chain and started introducing people to the makers. A child who meets the man who turned a tiny valley factory into a national champion, or spends a day on a farm with a young dairy farmer who loves the life, comes away admiring them. The admiration is the appreciation. How the milk gets processed can come later, or never, and it holds either way.
It is the same thing I felt watching Archimedes come down the mountain. I could not tell you how Michael engineered an eighteen-and-a-half-metre catamaran in a backyard, and I do not need to. I appreciate the sixteen years and the four hands. The building is the thing, and the builder is who you come to admire.
That is what I want for farmers: a nation that admires the people who feed it. Whether they can explain how it is done matters far less. Michael handed me the key to that twenty years ago, over the fence, and then he spent sixteen years on the side of a mountain proving it.
The launch video carries a line as its title: to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. It’s the closing line of Tennyson’s Ulysses, a poem about old age and the refusal to stop. Whoever chose it understood exactly what this was: a way of answering that quiet question that arrives in your sixties and never quite leaves.
What do you want to do with the years you’ve got left?
Michael and Susie answered it on the side of a mountain, one piece of fibreglass at a time. And the boat is finally on the water.
Want to hear more from Michael and learn what does it take to pull off an incredible Project like ” Archimedes” ?
