Stuck on you David Astle 21/11/2004 Sun Herald Magnets, photos, shopping lists, kids' drawings, bad poetry - the stuff on your refrigerator door says so much about you, says David Astle. Pub crawl time, said the magnetic letters on the fridge. The Kelvinator had spoken. The five girls put on their drinking clothes and hit the street, a 12-bar marathon all the way down Sydney Road, Brunswick, a bleary tradition among uni pals to toast a new lease, a new household. They started with cocktails and ended up with cheeseburgers a mile from home. "We weren't too smart about it," says Jane Warren, 22, a politics/law major at La Trobe University in Melbourne. "We should have started from the last pub and worked our way back here." "Here" is a two-storey terrace with five bedrooms, a rented washing machine, an overloaded clothes horse and the oracular fridge. Its magnetic message changes every week, as if by the hand of God. The girls use the letters to pass on gossip, cook up nonsense or report a lack of muesli. Mind you, with only 26 letters, the text can be limited. Over the course of the year the letters have said: IM WATCHEN YOU; THIS DUMP ROX; BUY FRESH MILK; JANE SUX. This last message was from Justin, a geology student who dates Fee, a conservation major who owns the meerkat magnet. Justin uses the magnets to get on Jane's goat. The day she saw the taunt, Jane didn't miss a beat. She put down her cereal to toy with the letters: CRABS INFEKT JUZY. The fridge is the focal point of the Australian home, as much aide-memoire or tool of expression as cooler. We are what we stick - cartoons, recipes - and what we stick them with. Census workers need only glance at a Whirlpool frost-free to learn who occupies the home and how they live. In Jane's case, her magnet medley holds up a chores roster, with the token boy (Damo) assigned the garbage. "Unless you're one of the six people who bought an internet fridge," says David Chalke, a director of market-research company AustraliaSCAN, "then you have an area of huge white space in the centre of your house that happens to be magnetic. It's the perfect village noticeboard." Chalke, who has his 17-year-old daughter's birthday wish list - Jet T-shirt and an electric guitar - on his fridge, believes the societal snapshot such flotsam provides would make an intriguing survey. "You'd go from the pursed-lip minimalist with nothing on their fridge - and nothing in their lives - through to the share-house fridge with its snotty messages. And then the young homemaker with tradesmen's names and discount vouchers for Freedom Furniture." Next, he predicts, you'd have "the middle family with nothing but school niceties and 'I ran in a race' stickers. Then in the older families, it's the schedules of soccer training, music and Scouts meetings." Dale Ferguson is a 41-year-old Melbourne set designer who understands what fridges reveal. "As soon as you see a crayon drawing on a fridge, it doesn't just say family, it says the family wants to promote their connection to the child," he says. The last fridge-centric play for which Ferguson designed a set was True West, the Sam Shepard psychodrama in which David Wenham relied on the icebox for Budweisers. In Act Three, the cowboy's own mother, played by Julia Blake, appeared from the fridge like a showgirl from a cake. As Ferguson says, "All shrinks ever do is listen to people and they can do the same thing in a kitchen. One's a verbal way of communicating, the other is visual." One empathetic, the other magnetic. Meredith Masterman is the self-described Wonder Woman of Aussie Magnets, which manufactures these little suckers. By Masterman's reckoning, nine in 10 Australian fridges are blistered with magnets. From John Howard's terrorism tag to dress-up Kaths and Kims, our trinkets may mark Australia as the epicentre of the fridge-magnet world. FACT IS WE LUV M. Aussie Magnets specialises in flatbacks, those skinny magnets famed for flogging plumbers and pizzerias. "The little guys," says Masterman, "people like gardeners, sports therapists, hairdressers. We're very big on vets at the moment." Her steel showroom in Camberwell displays a thousand little ads. "One client is a group of ladies who do home-sell lingerie parties. They have a fridge magnet. What do you do if you need a new bra? You go to the fridge..." Masterman kept a tally on her fridge to see how often her family opened its door. Over several weeks, her husband and two young kids made an average of 37 raids a day. "It's obviously more with adolescents. At our place we pull out the milk, the jam, the butter at once, whereas a teen would make three visits." Stick-on ads are only a fraction of the stuff our Fisher & Paykels are wearing. Megan Basser, 39, is a part-time curator, her gallery being a two-door, 820-litre Maytag and her chief contributing artists her five-year-old triplets, Harry, Charlie and Joe. "The pictures get replaced every time there's a leap forward in artistic ability," says Basser, a Hawthorn housewife with a publishing background. Ted, her fourth boy, is too young at 18 months to draw rhinos or rainbow fish so he earns a portrait snap in the mix. Among the possum-catcher's magnet and a snap of Louey the dog is a photo of Frederick, a Tanzanian boy whom Megan and her husband, Ian, sponsor through World Vision. "When the boys don't eat their dinner, we remind them that Frederick would eat it." And then you have the magnet collectors. Pam Symington, 64, lost her passion for commemorative teaspoons a decade ago. After dabbling with cake forks, the pull of the fridge magnet proved too strong. "They remind me of the special places," says the medical receptionist, sitting in her Keilor East kitchen in outer Melbourne. "I was getting sick of people giving me spoons from these places I'd never visited. And spoons are much more difficult to display..." A 1995 trip to Darwin saw the Top End become her Westinghouse Freezamate's top end. Lower down, near Disneyland, is Alcatraz, a place her husband, Max, 72, a former prison supervisor, just had to visit. Symington is a magnet purist. No photos pollute her expo - no dockets or gas bills. She taps her temple. "Shopping lists and garbage days are in here." Via magnets, we spend an hour touring from Kakadu to Corfu via New York. I notice a faux wooden shingle saying Amish Country. "It's like everything else," says Pam. "The Amish people might not believe in magnets themselves but it's the money." With magnets, money doesn't last too long in Anna Guthrie's hands. "I always tell people I'm going to be a millionaire when I'm 90, with my valuable collection of junk." A single gal in a St Kilda flat, working in admin at Blockbuster Video, Guthrie, 32, has more magnets than fridge space. Her Westinghouse Compact Deluxe 293 is buried under Rembrandt magnets, frogs, ladybirds, Bruiser (the canine star of Legally Blonde) and anyone who is anyone in The Simpsons. "I was an au pair in Chicago in 1997. I worked in Wheaton, which has the highest number of churches per square mile in the world: a pretty dreary place." Magnets were Guthrie's diversion, a kitsch form of retail therapy. "After a year I came home dirt-poor." But 300 magnets richer, all the more to pin down photos of her niece, her party invites and a clipping of Will, her jazz-drumming brother. Not that Guthrie rivals Louise Greenfarb of Las Vegas, the fridge fetish queen with 26,500 magnets. Greenfarb holds the world record and longs to be buried in a fridge barnacled in bric-a-brac. Forget psychotherapy - the next time you need to look inward, go to your fridge. Freud would turn in his casket if he could see your Nemo frame and the picture it holds. Fridges reveal us, our sense of self, our daily chaos. Just as Seinfeld's Superman magnet tells you too much about Jerry, so will your fridge-door regalia expose you, the owner. That and your caramel Space Food Sticks stashed in the butter compartment. Kitchen shrink... What does your fridge flotsam say about you? - Magazine recipes: aspirational epicure - Takeaway menus: cash-rich, time-poor - Kids' party invites: methodical parent - Kids' party invites (expired): asleep at the wheel - Media Watch magnet: diehard - Tradesmen's ads: un-handyperson - Kids' photos/art: loud and proud - Friends' postcards: vicarious traveller - Political cartoon: barrow pusher - Leunig cartoon: velvet revolutionary - Dress-up Kath and Kim: trendoid - Cinema schedule: aspirational buff - Alert Not Alarmed: ironist - Monthly heartworm reminder: dog's best friend - Shopping list: where's all the romance gone? - No flotsam: aspirational nudist (or you have a stainless-steel fridge)