There is a kind of cafe where the menu is not coffee but a second chance for your broken things. Repair cafes are free community events where volunteers with soldering irons, sewing needles and a lifetime of know how sit beside you and mend the toaster, the torn jeans, the jewellery, the bike, teaching you the trick of it as they go. The movement began in Amsterdam and has grown to more than three thousand cafes around the world. Australia's first opened in Sydney, and today more than one hundred are running across the country.
In the Hunter region of NSW the momentum is a joy to watch. Repair It Lake Mac has been mending things since 2018, a new monthly cafe opened this year at Clyde Street Arts in Hamilton North, and pop ups travel to festivals from Newcastle to Cessnock. Chairs arrive in numbers, expensive to replace and often loved well beyond their price, along with heirloom lamps and keepsakes nearly eighty years old. Everything is fixed for free, though coordinator Gabrielle Clappison and her volunteers ask one payment of every visitor: "smile at strangers for the rest of the day." Money saved, landfill spared, skills passed on, and neighbours talking again. Find a repair cafe near you, or be the person who starts one.
Our short take: the full story is by Olivia Arigho for the Newcastle Weekly.