By Helen Whitford · Moonta, South Australia

“Most wind chimes from the big shops don’t ring. They just rattle.” — Why a 74-year-old coppersmith from South Australia is selling his last hand-tuned copper wind chimes at cost, before his workshop closes for good.

Clem Pascoe at the door of the tin shed his great-grandfather opened in 1911.

Clem Pascoe hangs a wind chime from a big homewares shop on his back fence. He taps it with one knuckle. It goes clunk. He waits for the wind. Clunk, clank, clunk. “That,” he says, “is four bits of pipe arguing.”

Most people buy a wind chime for one reason. They want a calm sound on the veranda in the evening. Then they hang it up, and it clanks all night. A week later it is in a drawer.

Clem has worked copper for fifty-eight years. He knows why that happens. And he knows it has nothing to do with the wind.

Five Reasons Your Wind Chime Ends Up in a Drawer

Bright on the shelf. Peeling and clanking after one summer.

Clem has looked at hundreds of shop-bought chimes. He keeps finding the same five faults:

• “The Random Cut.” The tubes are cut to any old length, so they play four notes that don’t belong together. “That’s not a chime. That’s a cutlery drawer.”
• “The Tin-Can Tube.” Thin, cheap metal gives a thin, tinny sound, like a bicycle bell.
• “The Peeling Paint.” Shiny paint looks good in the shop. In sea air and Australian sun it flakes off within a summer.
• “The Bent Hook.” A soft hook rusts and bends, and one strong gust puts the whole chime on the ground.
• “The Shelf Test.” Nobody ever listened to it in the wind. It was only ever tested in a box.

“People think a wind chime is decoration,” Clem says. “It isn’t. It’s the sound you live with every evening. So it had better be a good one.”

Five Generations of Copper — And He Is the Last

The tin snips on the wall belonged to Clem’s great-grandfather.

Moonta sits on South Australia’s Copper Coast. People call it Little Cornwall. In 1863, Clem’s great-great-grandfather sailed out from Cornwall to dig copper in the mines here. The Pascoes have worked copper ever since.

In 1911, Clem’s great-grandfather opened a small tin shed two streets back from Moonta Bay. Clem started there at sixteen, next to his father. For forty-eight years he made copper gutters and rain heads for the old miners’ cottages. Half the heritage roofs on this coast have a bit of his copper on them.

When he closed the business, there was no one to hand it to. So he stayed in the shed and started making something new: copper wind chimes. He tunes each one by ear.

“Hear that?” he says, holding a freshly cut tube up to his ear. “Two millimetres too long. Sounds like it’s sulking.”

What Two Millimetres Do to a Note

The last fraction of a millimetre is where the note is made.

Clem’s chimes look simple. Four copper tubes, a copper cap with a small animal on top, a striker in the middle. But every part is there for the sound:

• “The Four-Tube Copper Chord.” Four tubes, four notes that belong together. When the wind moves them, you hear a soft chord, not a clatter.
• “The Warm-Copper Voice.” Copper is heavier and softer than aluminium. The sound is deeper and rounder. “Like a church organ from down the street,” Clem says.
• “The Living Patina.” There is no paint to peel. The copper slowly darkens in the sea air, just like the old gutters on the miners’ cottages.
• “The Mopoke Test.” Before any chime is packed, it hangs one night in the pepper tree in Clem’s yard. If it sounds wrong there, it goes back on the bench.

Turn Your Sound Up — This Is What a Tuned Copper Chime Sounds Like

No clanking, no rattle. Just four notes that belong together, carried on the wind. “That’s what I mean by honest,” Clem says.

The Tuning Fork in His Shirt Pocket

His mother’s tuning fork. He has carried it every day since 1966.

Clem’s mother played the organ at the big stone church at Moonta Mines for thirty-eight years. When he was fourteen, she gave him her old tuning fork. She said it might stop him dragging behind when he sang.

He has carried it in his shirt pocket ever since. Every tube of every chime is checked against it.

“Mum used to say a note is either honest or it isn’t,” he says. “I tap her fork on the bench and hold it next to the tube. If the two of them argue, the tube goes back in the box.”

The Animals Came From Around the Shed

Dolphin, owl, dragonfly, butterfly and sea turtle. Each one has a story.

Clem never planned to put animals on his chimes. They found their way in. The dolphins came first, after the pods that used to follow his little boat off the Moonta Bay jetty. The owl is the mopoke that calls from his pepper tree every night. The dragonfly and the butterfly come from his wife Jan’s garden.

The sea turtle was his grandson Jack’s idea, after a school trip to the turtle beach at Mon Repos in Queensland. “That’s the only one I’ve never seen with my own eyes,” Clem says.

The Hand That Won’t Hold the File

Clem can still cut a tube. He can no longer tune one.

Every morning for fifty-eight years, Clem has walked into the shed at half past five. The tin roof ticks as the sun warms it. The radio plays quietly. The first tap of copper rings out across the yard. That is the part he will miss most.

Clem’s right hand is slowly closing. A tight cord in his palm pulls his ring finger and little finger in towards his palm. He has had two operations in Adelaide. Both times, it came back.

“I can still cut a tube,” he says. “What I can’t do is hold it flat and take the last hair off with the file. And that last hair is the whole note.”

So the chimes hanging on the rack above his bench are the last. There will be no second batch.

All He Asks Is That Someone Listens

Where Clem hopes his chimes end up: on a veranda, heard every evening.

People in Moonta often tell Clem he should charge more for his chimes. He just shrugs. “I’ve had a good run,” he says. “Fifty-eight years doing the work I love. I don’t need to make money on the last few.”

So he sells his last chimes for the cost of the copper and the postage.

What matters to him is simple. He hopes each one ends up somewhere it gets heard: on a veranda in Ballarat, under a pergola in Hobart, by a back door where someone sits out with a cuppa in the evening. “A chime is made to be out in the wind,” he says. “If it makes somebody’s evening a bit nicer, that’s all I’m after.”

Clem doesn’t own a smartphone. His physio, Tegan, set up the online shop after she posted a short video of her own chime on Facebook and woke up to sixty-three messages. Clem still writes a card by hand for every order.

“It Rings Like a Church Bell From Down the Road” — What Australians Say About Clem’s Chimes

Sent in by a reader in Ballarat: “Hung it by the back door. Now I sit out every evening.”

• ★★★★★

  “My old chime from the shops went straight in the bin after this arrived. The sound is soft and deep. Even my husband, who hates wind chimes, says it’s lovely.”

  Kay W., Ballarat
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected, and the copper has already started to darken by the sea. It looks like it has always hung there.”

  Graham H., Victor Harbor
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the sea turtle for my mum’s eightieth. There was a handwritten card from Clem in the box. Mum read it twice and cried.”

  Leanne B., Toowoomba

Before You Order — What People Ask Clem Most

More From the Verandas They Landed On

• ★★★★★

  “I’ve had cheap chimes for years. This is the first one that actually sounds like music.”

  Peter D., Bendigo
• ★★★★★

  “The dolphin is beautifully made. You can tell a real person tuned it, not a machine.”

  Margaret S., Port Macquarie
• ★★★★★

  “It survived a proper southerly last week without a scratch. Still ringing beautifully.”

  Ross T., Hobart