Brons Rain Drum
“My hands have gone numb. You can’t tune a drum with hands you can’t feel.” — Why a 64-year-old blacksmith in Tasmania is letting her last 185 hand-tuned rain drums go far below their worth.
Bronwyn Kelleher in the shed at Franklin where she has tuned rain drums for the last nine years.
Forty minutes south of Hobart, where the Huon River widens out past Franklin, there’s a corrugated-iron forge built onto the end of a weatherboard cottage. Bronwyn Kelleher is 64. She’s worked metal in that shed since 1989 — boat fittings first, then farm gates, weathervanes, verandah brackets. For the last nine years, only rain drums.
She doesn’t play them. She tunes them, sets them outside, and waits for the weather to do the rest.
There’s a final batch on the shelf above the bench. After that, she stops.
The Disc She Left Out by the Woodheap
The chopping block by the woodheap — where she put a failed commission down and forgot about it for two months.
In April 2015, Bron was working on a commission: a flat steel disc with seven cut tongues, ordered as a sun catcher for a gate up at Cygnet. It didn’t do what she wanted it to do. She put it down on the chopping block by the woodheap to think about it, a bigger job came in, and she forgot it was out there.
Two months later a southerly front came up the channel and sat over the valley for three days. She was at the anvil with the rain going on the tin roof the way it does down there — a flat roar you stop hearing after about ten minutes.
And then there was something inside the roar that wasn’t the roof.
She walked out. The forgotten disc was singing. Every drop that landed on a cut tongue came off it as a clear, pitched note. Seven notes, all clean, underneath a tin roof going flat out. The rain was playing the sculpture.
“I grew up under a tin roof. I’ve listened to rain my whole life and never once heard a note in it. That thing on the chopping block made seven.”
By August she’d finished a proper one — nine tongues, pentatonic, sitting on the same chopping block where it still sits today. By 2017 the forge made nothing else.
Nobody Believes It’s the Rain Doing That
A single drop produces a single note. Pentatonic tuning means it can’t land wrong.
A rain drum sounds nothing like what people expect. It isn’t a wind chime. Every drop is a single, clean note. Pentatonic, which means it can’t land wrong. A drop on the F tongue is an F. A drop on the C tongue is a C.
In light rain, three or four notes a minute, with long gaps between them. In steady rain, fifteen or twenty, never stacked on top of each other. In a proper storm, the weather sets the rhythm and the drum plays the notes.
“A piano needs somebody to sit at it. This one gets played by the sky, and the sky never gets bored.”
Two Minutes of It, If You’ve Got the Sound On
Out on the block — tap to hear the rain play it.
On the garden table — tap to listen.
The Window She Watches It From
“When the sky goes dark over the Hartz she puts the kettle on, leans on the windowsill and waits.”
Bron’s own drum has been on the same chopping block for eleven winters. It’s never come inside. When the sky goes dark over the Hartz she puts the kettle on, leans on the kitchen windowsill and waits.
What’s in the Apple Crate Above the Bench
A few hundred letters, in an apple crate on the shelf above the tuning bench.
Bron keeps the letters in an old wooden apple crate on the shelf above the tuning bench — HUON VALLEY stencilled down the side in faded black, the sort that used to leave this valley by the thousand. There are a few hundred of them: cards, notes, pages torn out of exercise books, the odd photograph. Most are short. She brought the crate down when I asked to see them.
“I don’t go through them often,” she said. “Every now and again, when there’s a tongue I can’t get right, I’ll have a look.”
She pulled out three.
The first was from a woman named Dianne at Warrnambool, on the Victorian coast, who’d put her drum on a fence post at the back of the block in May. The first real winter rain came through a fortnight later. Dianne wrote the whole thing out on the back of a shopping list and posted it. The last line was: “The backyard has started singing.”
“That one stays on top,” Bron said.
The second was from a bloke named Tony in Darwin, forty-seven. Third floor, drum wired to the balcony rail. He wrote about the first storm of the build-up catching it — half an inch in twenty minutes, eleven o’clock at night. He’d opened the sliding door and stood out in the whole thing.
“He’s watched the wet come in for eleven years from behind that glass. First year he went out to meet it.”
The third was a folded card from a woman named Bev, on a verandah at Bellingen. Bev had set her drum on the wide arm of a cane chair and hadn’t moved it since. One sentence on it, in blue biro:
“Everything else in this garden hates the rain. This one waits for it.”
Bron put the three cards back in the crate and slid it onto the shelf.
“That last one I think about when I’m tuning,” she said. “You can make things for thirty-odd years and not have anybody put it back to you that plainly.”
Five Things the Factory Ones Get Wrong
Nine tongues, tuned by hand and checked by ear against a bronze cleat from 1994.
Five details separate Bron’s drums from the machine-stamped ones sold cheap online.
Nine notes, all pentatonic. Every drop lands as a note that harmonises with every other note on the drum. There’s no wrong one. A rain drum without this is a piece of steel with rain falling on it.
Bron tunes every drum to A=432Hz rather than the standard A=440Hz. Eight cycles softer — the pitch monks and Tibetan bowl makers have used for centuries. It sits more easily in the open air.
Powder-coated carbon steel, sealed against rust and, more to the point in this country, against ultraviolet. As Bron puts it: it isn’t the rain that finishes things off outside down here, it’s the sun. Her own has been out on the block through eleven winters and eleven summers.
Every drum gets a final check against a small bronze cleat Bron cast in 1994 for a boat that was never finished. Tapped on the edge of the bench it rings a quarter-tone between F and F sharp. It lives in her apron pocket. She’s never found a tuner she trusts the way she trusts it.
Each drum goes out with a note from Bron in the cloth pouch. One sentence, chosen for that drum, that day, in biro on the back of an old apple label.
Why She’s Putting the Tuning Hammer Down
The final check — a bronze cleat she cast in 1994 for a boat that was never finished.
By the winter of 2025, Bron’s hands had started telling her something she’d been ignoring since 2023. Thirty-odd years of hammer, grinder and swage block have done what they do: the fingers go white and bloodless in the cold and stay that way for the best part of an hour.
She can still forge. She can still cut, and she can still weld a chainplate straighter than anyone in the valley. What she can’t do any more is feel.
“You can teach a hand to swing a hammer. You can’t teach one to feel.”
Tuning a tongue is done as much by feel as by ear — you’re taking a few thousandths off an edge and reading it back through your fingertips. A hand that’s gone numb reads nothing.
“My hands have gone numb. You can’t tune a drum with hands you can’t feel.”
She’s hand-tuned the last batch herself — 185 drums, one at a time, through the back end of last winter and this spring. After these, the hammer goes down.
A hand-tuned steel drum from an instrument maker runs to the better part of six hundred dollars. Bron is letting the final 185 go at cost. She’s knocked back a homewares chain in Melbourne that wanted the lot, and two collectors in Hobart.
“I don’t need the money. I need them out in the weather. One sitting on a shelf in somebody’s lounge room is a shut door.”
While the last of the batch is still on the shelf:
Check AvailabilityHand-tuned by Bron at Franklin, Tasmania — sealed in a cloth pouch with her handwritten note
What They Wrote Bron After Their First Proper Storm
★★★★★
“Put it on a stump out the back the day it turned up. Four days later we got the first decent storm since February. Every note was actual music. My husband and I sat at the kitchen window for forty minutes and neither of us said a word.”
★★★★★
“We get a fair bit of weather up here. It’s been on the verandah rail through two wet seasons now and it hasn’t marked at all. The build-up used to be the worst part of the year. It’s turned into the part I look forward to.”
★★★★★
“Sent one down to Mum at Port Fairy for her birthday. She’s had it on the front verandah ever since and she rings me every time it rains, which in Port Fairy is often.”
Three Honest Questions Before You Order
Where do I put it — and will it rust?
Outside, anywhere the rain can reach it. A stump, a fence post, a verandah rail, a balcony rail, the wide arm of a garden chair. It’s powder-coated carbon steel, sealed against rust and against UV, and built to live out there all year. Bron’s own has been on the same chopping block for eleven winters. Most people never bring theirs in.
What if I’m somewhere that barely rains?
A watering can poured slowly from about half a metre above it gives you a very respectable shower — it’s the same trick Bron uses to test them on the bench. A hose held just above the surface works too, and a sprinkler set on a slow pass will keep it going for as long as you like.
What if it turns up and I don’t love it?
30 days to send it back for a full refund, no questions asked. One email to the support team sorts it out.
The last of the batch is on the bench right now.
Check Availability185 hand-tuned drums out of Bron’s shed at Franklin — while they last