If there was a government portfolio for man caves, then Mick Gentleman would be logically the first chosen as its minister.
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Because, you see, one of the ACT's most senior politicians is secretly one of us.
Mick Gentleman is fascinated by functional devices that are purposefully designed and engineered, and which survive the march of time because of that quality.
Those of us who collect do so in a myriad of ways. Some of us want things to embrace the patina of time; a little surface rust here, a grease mark or discolouration there.
But that's not our local minister.
Everything in the Gentleman man cave shines with a lick and a rub; even his 69-year-old Holden FX four-door sedan, in its original anvil grey paintwork, gleams from a fresh buff.
The Gentleman man cave is tidy, clean and well-ordered. Everything has its place and there's a place for everything, from the tiny little steam engine he picked up at a swap meet to the row of screwdrivers hanging in sequence of length along the top of the workbench.
"I am a tidy person," he ruefully admitted.
"I like the idea of being able to walk over and quickly find the exact tool that I need to do something. And yes, I admit it can get just a little bit obsessive."
There's the strong likelihood that his strong desire for order - he is also the minister for police, after all - is drawn from his childhood.
His father, Walter, was a supervising technician with the old Post Master General's office within the old East Block government building, now the home of the National Archives. His mum was a telephonist at Braidwood.
Indeed, young Michael Gentleman may have absorbed his fascination for radio and wavelength through a form of nocturnal osmosis.
"As a boy, I used to go into work with Dad when he was on night shift and sleep under the workbench," he said.
"The technical equipment used back then was so different; they were all valves, manual relays, black and white TV sets and analogue equipment; it all needed tuning, skilled maintenance, fine timing and upkeep and there would be a crew of people working in there around the clock to keep it all humming.
"East Block was also one of the redundancy stations for the first TV pictures which came down from the 1969 moon landing, so that's from where I watched it as a kid."
Hence our man caves minister's appreciation of well-crafted machinery, tools and equipment from the pre-digital days.
It's well recorded that our minister has distinguished himself at a local and national level in motor rallying, finishing a creditable 24th in world-class company against factory teams in Perth.
He is a four-time ACT champion co-driver and a former NSW champion. He's also suffered the pain of some big and hard competition shunts including a 150km/h slam into a tree, which cracked his sternum and landed him a lengthy stint in hospital.
Rally co-driving is a skill that is poorly understood and appreciated. To succeed at the highest level the person needs to be to be extremely well-organised, have an iron gut (so as to read fast, head down, and avoid motion sickness), be completely unflappable, and do fast calculations on the run.
"I was into riding motorbikes when one of my mates said I should go along and see what these rally blokes were up to," Mr Gentleman said.
"I loved the sport straight away. Rallies were held at night back then and staged pretty close to Canberra; places which were bush tracks back then but where the suburbs of Richardson, Bonython and Macarthur are now.
"It's a sport with everything: the speed, the adrenaline rush, the spectacle and of course, the camaraderie."
At his workbench, atop the typed instructions, sits a finely machined and completely essential item from rallying's analogue days: the Halda Twinmaster.
Every Halda had a unique distance measurement gearing for the type of car in which you competed and it was always up to the navigator to set it up, pre-event, with complete accuracy. Without the Halda's faithfully accurate trip-distance measurement to guide the car, a rally crew was either slow, lost . . . or both.
It's a sport with everything: the speed, the adrenaline rush, the spectacle and of course, the camaraderie.
While some man-caves have a distinct theme, Mick Gentleman's leans toward cars and motorcycles but then veers wildly into transistor and citizen band (CB) radios, kerosene heaters, analogue measurement equipment, signal generators and even lawnmowers.
One of the most eclectic of the collection is a 1950s vintage Victa Toecutter, so named because it would smartly remove your furthest appendages if you failed to mow with sufficient care and attention.
The Toecutter, like everything in the man-cave, is beautifully restored.
Also in immaculate condition is the FX sedan with one-off ACT 48-215 rego plates, a red MGA sports car, and five motorcycles: a Steve McQueen-style '68 Triumph Trophy twin, a '69 Honda CL450 Scrambler, '74 Yamaha DT175 road-trail bike, a Honda 90 step-thru, and a late model BMW retro style "naked" bike.
All the machines are given a regular run and the minister loves to tinker and fine-tune them on weekends.
"I'm lucky in that over the years I've come into contact with a lot of people from all walks of life so if I can't fix something myself I know someone who can, or someone who knows someone who can," Mick Gentleman said.
