OLD Tom Perry was driving through town one day in the 1920s when his big jalopy - one of the few cars around those days - suffered a flat tyre.
A scuffle of street boys congregated around the vehicle and volunteered to change Mr Perry's wheel.
Narromine locals enjoy a gathering at the Men's Shed.Credit: Andrew Meares
No one called the wealthy grazier by his Christian name. He lived in that stratosphere where almost everyone deferred to him: he was Mr Perry, and even his closest friends allowed themselves no more intimacy than to address him as T. E., his initials.
Mr T. E. Perry watched approvingly as the boys jacked up his car and managed to remove the wheel and replace it with the spare.
''Well, boys,'' he said at length. ''You've done me a good turn. If you could have anything in this town, what would it be?''
One of the lads, the story goes, piped up with a hankering for a Scout hall. Mr Perry boarded his machine and ground away.
Pretty soon, builders arrived at an empty plot of land right on the main street and set to constructing a handsome red-brick edifice with gables.
When it was finished, raised lettering on the facade's render announced: 1929 1st Narromine Group Scout Headquarters.
The headquarters stands there still in the town, west of Dubbo, testament to the genteel generosity of a gruff and tough station owner, long gone now. He dealt in sheep on a vast scale out there on Narromine Station, which hovers towards the edge of the NSW outback, and there are those who remember that if you turned up five minutes late to inspect a mob of his sheep, he'd have opened the gate and turned the flock free, declaring he wouldn't deal with anyone who wasn't punctual.
Yet he had a soft spot for kids on the street. Once during the Depression he noticed urchins kicking around a tightly bound bundle of rags. Half an hour later, he motored by and without stopping, tossed a brand-new football out the window. When the town needed an airport, he handed over his lucerne paddock; another paddock became the Narromine golf course.
Random acts of generosity are easier when you're wealthy, of course, but they tend to last as a reminder that goodness resides in the most unexpected heart.
Indeed, old T. E. Perry's gift of a Scout hall keeps on giving, though these days there are not enough boys left in Narromine, population a bit over 3500, interested in forming a pack of Cubs or a Scout troop. Instead, the town's long-ago boys who are now old men - the youngest is about 60, the oldest 92 -use the place as their shed.
The Scout headquarters has become one of the 550 Men's Sheds dotted around Australia to grant men who might otherwise become housebound or depressed the chance to stretch the days of their lives, to socialise and to feel useful. There is likely to be one in a town or suburb near you, though it's unlikely to have quite the same backstory as the one out there on the flatlands of Narromine.
Some of the old boys who wander down the street to the Scout hall on Tuesdays and Thursdays were Scouts and Cubs themselves, or attended boys' club evenings at the hall during World War II. Soldiers sent out to Narromine to supervise Italian prisoners of war who worked on farms thereabouts set up their headquarters in the hall and filled in their evenings organising boys' club activities.
The men of the district, retired from their farms or their town jobs, have, like men everywhere, built up many lifetimes of skills that might have gone to waste without the stimulus of the shed. A lot of them can turn their hand to just about anything. They renovate old furniture, build models of this and that, swap yarns, fire up the barbecue.
Oh, yes, and out the back they're re-building an aeroplane. There are fellows who can weld, blokes who can work out which wire should connect with what control, others who know how to re-fashion rotted struts.
It's a pretty special plane to a lot of these men; the first one they ever saw in the sky. It's a Corben Super Ace, built by a local, Jack Coomber, and it first flew in 1938. It disappeared for years - a farmer from Gunnedah bought it for a song at a clearing sale in 1965, planning to do something with it, but it sat in his shed until 2009. When the fellows from Narromine heard where it was, they had a bit of a chat to the farmer, Tony Foran, and he agreed it should go home to Narromine. And there it sits, the men of the Men's Shed putting it back together, piece by piece, proud of their work and happy to be doing something worthwhile. Why, the work plugs them right into the heart of their community - aviation has long been important to this far-flung district, and on the shire's coat of arms there's a picture of an exact replica of the Wright Brothers Flyer, built by a local father and son.
One of the keenest members of the shed has lost much of his sight. Unable to read, his days grew intolerably long. His wife was distressed to see him become unwilling to get out of bed in the mornings. He was losing the desire to live. One day, a few of the blokes from the shed came and levered him into a car and brought him down to the old Scout hall. Now, Tuesdays and Thursdays, he's up before dawn, impatient to get to the shed.
Old Mr T. E. Perry could scarcely have imagined the unending treasure he was bestowing on his town when he decided to give a blush of boys a Scout hall more than 80 years ago.
It's worth knowing, though, in those times when rotten news seems to subsume just about everything, that one good deed can turn into another, and that from there, it can ricochet in all sorts of unexpected and happy ways, far down the years.