Primitive By Today’s Standards

Our Family Home at Kotara Hts,
on completion, c.1954.

Mum's 1950s laundry was primitive in more ways than one, a multi-purpose facility of no architectural merit and so very basic by today's standards. This little back room with its bare timber floor boasted a copper and exposed, galvanized piping with gun-metal taps hanging untidily over a pair of concrete tubs. The tubs are those you now see with goldfish, or with geraniums hanging over the edge in some where-it-landed-last backyard corner, having been purged from many a house. But even an old laundry can't be washed clean of a history of questionable and unlikely events.

Taking up almost the whole of the remaining floor area, or so it seemed to a little kid, was an (allegedly) state-of-the-art Lightburn washing machine. While the copper and tubs held their infamous place within the household’s culture of feasts and festivities, it was the washing machine that gripped this young lad’s delight.

A monstrous contraption, and leviathan of any era, the Lightburn had an inclined agitator and a vertical spin-drier. Into the agitator I would slide, from where I could spy on a small part of my world through the lid’s porthole. I could also grip the agitating lugs with my feet, press myself against the inside of the bowl, and spin myself silly -- round and round and round -- into a self-induced, childhood trance. It was great fun. Not sure if the cat agreed, though.


Mum's Laundry, c.1960s

If that wasn't enough there was also the spin drier. Although it was considerably smaller, I could stand up to my waist and fling myself wildly about, with a centrifuge effect: arms out; arms in; slower, faster. One day, the last day, I got completely stuck at the hips by the top flange of the bowl. With some difficulty Dad cut me out with tin-snips before the amused audience of siblings and peers. While this rescue left me embarrassed, bare bum and all, the bowl had to forever vicariously bear the scars of my misfortune and subsequent redemption. But, thankfully, I left Mum’s laundry in better condition than the poor, hapless chooks.

The laundry’s copper was where all the family whites where boiled. A portly device, it stood on a small, metal frame and came complete with lid and a timber copper-stick used for stirring the brew. While this proverbial cauldron often witnessed the major production of the calico-wrapped Christmas pudding, happily brooding away, it was the penultimate roasting place for many a chook.

In days long gone home-grown poultry was a culinary delight, to be sure. Mum couldn’t just go pick-up a conveniently processed and frozen, "Size 14" from the supermarket, like nowadays, where each hormonally-enriched ‘chicken’ is hermetically shrink-wrapped and untouched by human hands.

No! Our white pullets were free-range with real live blood in their veins, two clawed feet, one attached head, and each came wrapped in its own feathered flight-suit. Ours could be called ‘living chooks’, a real creature mostly unknown to kids these days. And we had a cage-full of them in our very own bush-built, smelly, backyard chook-house.

Memories do have a warped way of turning up, like now with visions of Dad down the backyard holding a cackling creature over the chopping block. With an elementary bluntness he unceremoniously lopped off its head, and hung the flinching, decapitated carcass on the fence with its legs between the palings. We of course stood back in fear and trepidation; with the phrase "you’re chicken" taking on a whole new meaning. Then it was up into the copper cauldron with the carcasses (yes, they were more of the family's whites), then over into the tubs to pluck the feathers.

Occasionally, before being laundered, one of the seemingly quick-witted yet headless would break free and run willy-nilly around the yard, emitting this hitherto unknown gurgling sound. This was matched only by the clackophonous commotion emanating from death row forlornly looking on from behind the wire.

Now there is absolutely no smell on earth to compare to Mum's laundry at chooking time. Intensified by the steam, the indelicate and foul, fowl odour could penetrate nostrils at a hundred paces. It is that sort of smell that haunts me forty years later. Simply put, it is totally disgusting, and the very reason my mother-in-law can't eat chicken to this day.

I would love to visit Mum’s laundry just once more, if that were possible, and you could join me. Maybe we should go and catch us a chook and ...... . No. Some memories are meant for the past, in their own unique way, living or dead. Besides, that would be an act all too primitive by today’s standards.