Life was simpler when I was growing up in Penrith but our parents and other adults did it harder in many ways because many of the things that we possess today were not around and that made life harder for them. I have written about the ancient modes of communication but there are others that I will write about here. On the other hand, we did have products delivered to the home that now necessitate a trip to the shop, like milk and fruit and bread, so I suppose there is a balance.

Washing clothes and dishes

Washing machines did not arrive in Australia until 1950 and they were expensive, meaning that many women, and in those days they were the ones burdened with the chores of washing the family clothes, had to resort to more laborious methods. Most families had a specified washing day, probably more manageable than today because not all that many women had outside jobs.

These were the days of the copper – electric or heated by burning wood chips. A copper was a large cauldron of hot to boiling water in which clothes were put to soak, with something like Lux Flakes added to help the cleaning along. The water needed to be continually stirred by the washer person, usually with a large wooden pole called a Dolley. It was hard work. Sometimes, with white clothes, a knob or two of Reckitts Blue was added to help the whitening process. Reckitts Blue was also used as a salve for insect bites and other minor hurts but, apart from giving you a blue tinge, I don’t know if it had any true medical qualities. I am also reliably informed that it was used as a dyeing agent on heads of greying hair.

The size of the copper varied, depending upon the washing needs. When I lived above my father’s shop, the Nepean Cafe, we had a really big copper because it had to serve the laundry needs of both the family and the business.

If colours in the clothes being washed were likely to run, they had to be washed separately, usually by rubbing against a washing board. Water and Sunlight soap were the washing tools along with plenty of elbow grease.

After immersion for the appropriate time, they were taken out of the copper and rinsed, either under the tap or in a bucket of clean water that had to be continually changed. Once this was done, the clothes had to be wrung out, either by hand – hard work – or with the aid of a wringer or mangle, a device that squeezed the item of clothing between two rollers. These were turned by hand until electric wringers became available.

In the days before Hills Hoist, the drying apparatus was a clothesline, a piece of rope or wire strung tightly between two endpoints – a wall a fence, a tree. To prevent the line from sagging and trailing clothes onto the ground, a wooden stick or pole, sometimes two if the line was long, was used to prop the line up. It was a good idea to wash the line before hanging clothes on it to stop the dirt from getting on the clothes. Wooden pegs were the go. Peddlars would often come by houses selling clothesline props.

Another use for clotheslines was in the cleaning of rugs. The rug was stretched out on the line and thrashed with a carpet beater or a broom to get out the accumulated dust and dirt. Mr Miller, who lived next door to us when we lived in High Street, also made good use of the clothesline. He would hang blankets on their clothesline and practice his golf shots by driving golf balls into the blanket.

As far as dishwashing was concerned, it was a hands-on job. A common feature in homes was the old Dux Heater in place over the kitchen sink.

I don’t know when electric dishwashers became a staple in Australian households, but I never had one in any home I lived in until 1978.

Stoves

Cooking was done on electric stoves, gas stoves or wood-fired stoves. I don’t know the exact timing of the advent of different stoves into the home because, until 1953, I lived above my father’s business, the Nepean Cafe, and we had a huge wood-fired stove downstairs on which our meals were cooked. When we moved into our Evan Steet house, we had an electric one.

My Aunty Alma lived in Castlereagh Street and she had a wood stove for many years and that is my limited experience of them. Her stove was on most of the day in the cooler months because it also provided good warmth. I do remember that on hot Penrith days, the temperature in her kitchen would approximate that of Venus. The sensible thing of course would have been to prepare salads and other cold collations but working men expected their hot meals and Sunday roasts were the custom. So there’s that.

Electric stoves were fairly basic, as I remember. An oven, two or three rings and that was about it. Popular brands included the Kooka. almost always in a nauseating green hue, and Hotpoint. Still, they were a big step up from the fuel stove and kept the temperature in the kitchen down, which was good because nobody had air conditioners. Cooling was either leaving the doors and windows open in the hope of getting a breeze or by way of rudimentary electric fans. People had no fear of leaving their doors open because there was little risk of thieves or home invaders.

Of course, leaving doors and windows open was a welcome invitation for flies and mozzies, and the Penrith blowfly was a gross creature. Again, it was the 1950s before the first aerosol fly sprays came to Australia. Before that, we used flypaper – ghastly staff that attracted flies to its sticky surface, fly swatters and fly sprayers. The fly sprayer was a pump action device in which you poured some chemical like Mortein and sprayed the room by working the pump back and forth.

Heating and cooling

The multiple modern ways of heating a home were not then available. Schools and other institutions had coke burners, close to toxic if the windows were closed. Some people still had open fires – a lovely but very inefficient pollutive method of heating – and there were electric radiators, mostly of the bar type, oil-burning boilers (not common), and gas heaters if you had gas. If the house still had a fuel stove, you could always keep the stove going and hope that the heat went through the whole house. It often did because houses were a lot smaller then.

And there were the ever-popular and homicidal kerosene heaters (paraffin burners), such as the Fyreside. These eaters consisted of a console that contained a fuel tank and a burning element, fired by a wick. The flame, when lit, bounced heat onto a metal screen which then radiated the heat outwards. They weren’t all that efficient and you had to stay reasonably close to them to get any warmth. This meant that, unless a house had multiple heaters, it was often moved from room to room, raising the possibility of it overturning or being positioned to throw flame upon a flammable surface. They gave out unpleasant noxious fumes and you really needed to use them in a ventilated space to both lessen the smell and avoid asphyxiation. People would sometimes hang washed clothes near them to aid the drying process and this presented other dangers.

Such potential dangers meant that you had to be careful and there were frequent accidents, fires and deaths caused by lack of care. For example, a newspaper recorded two deaths on 6 September 1954 arising from the use of kerosene heaters. A man tripped over his heater in his shop and it caused a fire in which he was trapped and a woman in Kempsey died when her heater exploded and showered her with burning fuel.

I do wax on about how great it was to be a kid back then but there are many things now that make life more pleasant.

Ironing

I don’t remember when electric irons came in. I recall that we always had one but others may have different experiences. Clothes had to be ironed because drip-dry clothes were infrequently sold. At one stage, my mother bought a gadget known, I think, as a clothes press. It had a levered lid on top of an ironing board surface and you would put the garment (or garments depending upon their size) on the board part and close the lid. It gave off a loud steam noise and some steam and you then opened the lid and the clothes were pressed. Magic. It didn’t work all that well and after a few uses it was put away and never seen again.

Mowers

The standard mower was the old push mower. The Victa mower came out in, I think, 1953 and other models followed the Victa. They were too expensive at first for most families but gradually, as their prices came down and real wage growth took off, they became standard equipment. I never knew anyone with a ride-on mower in the time I lived in Penrith.

Other things that were not around

1 – The huge range of kitchen gadgets that we have now. There was the toaster, the jug and, if you were lucky, the Sunbeam Mixmaster.

2 – Diverse home entertainment devices. We had the wireless, the TV, increasingly from the late 1950s, and good conversation, which in our household, most likely ended up in arguments.

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Diseases and the vaccines that prevent them are a topical subject and this causes me to cast my mind back to what was happening when I was growing up in Penrith. I must confess I don’t know if we were better off then or now.

To start with, there were a lot more diseases that could cause death or severe illness and I have mentioned them briefly in past posts. There were diseases that are still around but controlled by mass vaccination, and there are diseases that just seem to have disappeared.

Diseases that have faded away

There are several medical ailments that were a big threat to us when we were kids but rarely rate a mention today. There was rheumatic fever, which started with a sore throat and eventually affected other organs, leaving many of those who survived with life long heart weaknesses; scarlet fever, another malady that started in the throat and caused bad rashes and organ damage; something called pink disease which apparently came about because of too much mercury in teething powders given to babies; nephritis, a disease of the kidneys which I contracted and put me in hospital for five months. And others.

There was also an ailment called quinsy, another throat thing, which really hurt, and there was rickets, which we now know as being caused by malnutrition or vitamin D deficiency. I am not sure how kids in that era were deficient in vitamin D because it primarily comes from sunshine and we were outside a lot more than kids of today. And the foods containing vitamin D – eggs, red meat, cereals – were in most diets. Maybe, we didn’t eat enough fish.

What caused these diseases to be prevalent and why have they all but disappeared? Perhaps it was a combination of factors – sanitary conditions not being as good as they are today like outside toilets and iceboxes instead of fridges; more relaxed government health regulations; build-up of immunity over the generations; changes in diets.  And perhaps, with the advent of antibiotics, early treatment of things like septic throat, prevented things from getting worse.

Diseases that are still around

Just about every child that I knew contracted either measles, mumps or whooping cough or all of them at one stage of their childhood. There were no vaccines but we got sick, missed some school and recovered. Generally, if one kid in the family got the disease, so did all the others, and their friends who failed to get away before the infection jumped to them.

More serious was tuberculosis (TB), a life-threatening disease and which was, in many cases, untreatable and could result in long stays in sanatoriums. The authorities were so concerned about TB that they would set up mobile x-ray stations in town to facilitate checkups and would send them to schools annuallyfor compulsory testing of students.

Diptheria was another killer and so was tetanus, always a risk in outdoor activities. Climbing through a barb wire fence could be risky. And of course, there was polio, which is the subject of a previous post.

Anyhow, these ailments are mainly preventable today with vaccines and, even if contracted are treatable with antibiotics. On the subject of antibiotics, they were generally not available until the late 1940s but sulphur drugs held the fort until penicillin and its offshoots came along.

Diet and exercise

I suppose that our diet then was both good and bad. On the good side, we ate lots of protein and the food was mainly fresh. Processed foods were rare – there was no Macdonalds, KFC, Pizza Hut or the like, although we might occasionally have the treat of chips from the fish and chips shop, or a hamburger. However meat pies, then as now, were always popular.

On the other hand, we ate a lot of starchy foods, and although meals always featured vegetables, any goodness in them disappeared because they were literally boiled to death. Frozen foods were sparse but tinned foodstuffs were available.

Our teeth were awful because the water was not fluorised and visits to the dentist were a necessity. The government organised dentists to visit schools to provide dental care for children whose parents could not afford regular visits.

We definitely had more exercise and time outside in the sun and fresh air than kids do today. It is not just because they have more indoor entertainment options than we had but there are just more indoor activities today, and that’s a good thing. Apart from the wireless, and later television (which anyhow in its early days did not really get going until late afternoon), the only real alternative for children to get together after school, and indeed before it, and on weekends, was to play outside. I think that we can all agree that that lifestyle was healthier.

Today’s maladies

There are conditions and syndromes around today that I do not remember as being around as much back then. First, there is asthma which seems a lot more prevalent. Sure, some kids had respiratory problems but not nearly as high a proportion as today. Perhaps it was because Penrith was semi-rural with little industry and surface and air pollution, perhaps it was because of more time spent outside – I do not know.

Then there are things like autism, ADHD and the like. Definitely, some children had difficulties keeping their attention span for long periods but they were never diagnosed as having any sort of illness or syndrome. The system shuffled them off into lower learning classes and never really attended to their difficulties, leaving them with life long learning gaps.

It was the same, I would imagine, with children who had dyslexia and other similar types of learning difficulties. They received little understanding and certainly no extra help. The attitude in the schools was treat them as dumb, put them in classes that served mainly to keep them off the street until they turned 14 or so, and then let them loose without any assistance. We are fortunate to now live in more enlightened times.

Autism is a difficult one. I do not recollect any child of my acquaintance, and I knew most of the kids in Penrith, who showed those signs of behaviour that today we recognise as the autism spectrum. Was this because autism is a recent development, or were children who had this difficulty, just kept out of sight?

So, as I wrote at the start of this post, in some ways we were better off back then, in other ways we were not. I do consider myself fortunate in that nobody in my family, and none of my childhood friends, died of a childhood disease. Many got sick, some severely, but we all made it.

 

I can start with a long list of things that we didn’t have, either as kids or adults:

• The internet and all the entertainment options that go with it – smartphones, tablets, gaming consoles;
• The information sources that come with the internet – search engines, smartwatches, fitbits, search engines;
• Today’s multiple ways in which to listen to music;
• television and the ways in which we can view content – free to air programming, streaming, the already obsolete DVDs and video cassettes.

What we had was the radio (or wireless as it was more commonly called), the picture show, record players, comics, games, and our own resources and imagination.

I will talk about the wireless in this post and look at other activities later.

 

Our entertainment

Somehow, night time entertainment was not as important to us as it is now. We played outside a lot, often until dark or until our mothers called us in either do our homework or to get ready for dinner. By the time that was all over, we only had to be entertained until we went to bed.

I suspect that our bedtimes were, on the average, earlier than they are for modern kids and probably our homework took longer as well. For example, if one was doing a project, there would be the visit to the library, copying words and pictures from an encyclopedia or other reference book, and then incorporating all this onto a physical page.

It must be much easier now to just Google what you want, cut and paste, and slap it all onto a computer file and then either to print it or deliver it electronically. And of course, with word processing programs, mistakes and revisions can be taken care of in a jiffy, instead of having to erase the problem, or, if that was not possible, to start all over again.

Wireless stations

After play and homework, we had the wireless. It was either a shelf top unit or a console, sometimes with a record player attached. If you were lucky there were two; the small one in the kitchen and the big one in the lounge room. Not many kids had one in their bedroom.

There were eight metropolitan stations, all AM, and the local station 2KA, which few of us listened to. The ABC had two of these stations. Running down the dial the stations were 2FC, 2BL (both owned by the ABC), 2GB, 2UE, 2KY, 2UW, 2CH, AND 2SM. All stations broadcast a mixture of programs but they focussed heavily on entertainment in the way of dramas and comedies (both in serial form and one-offs), quizzes and special programming. News and music were not nearly as prevalent as today.

The serials

There were serials for adults and serials for kids. 2UW, as I remember, had the bulk of adult serials, or at least serials of a type that the programmers imagined, with their minds founded in stereotypes, would appeal to women as they went about the housework because that was the primary task allocated to women in those unenlightened days.

Popular 2UW serials were Courtship and Marriage, Dr Paul, Martins Corner. Portia faces Life, When a  Girl Marries, Mary Livingstone MD, Dr Mac (‘aye it’s me, Doctor Mac’)and Mrs Iggs and Mrs ‘Arris. You can see what programmers imagined women to be interested in from the titles.  I don’t know whether poor Portia had medical problems or marriage problems, or maybe both.

2GB seemed to have a monopoly on serials for kids which were broadcast mainly in the afternoon and early evening. I particularly remember Superman (of course), Biggles, The Lone Ranger and The Shadow. There was also a classic children’s’ serial called The Serach for the Golden Boomerang, which almost uniquely had an Australian setting. Its theme was Waltz of the Flowers by Tchaikovsky and whenever I hear that piece I am reminded of my childhood.

The ABC also had an Argonauts Club for children, not a serial but a mixed program for younger children.

2UE had the night time serials carefully chosen to appeal to both children and adults. There was Inner Sanctum Mysteries, Dossier on Demetrios, I Hate Crime with Larry Kent and Night Beat (my name’s Randy Stone (‘I work the night beat for the daily’).

My particular favourite was one called Hagen’s Circus about ‘romance, excitement and mystery set against the colourful background of the big top’ (National Film and Radio Archive) with its hero Grant Andrews played by Guy Doleman who went on to have a successful film career.

There were the comedy serials too like Life with Dexter, Ada and Elsie, Mrs ‘Obbs, all on 2GB, and Yes What on 2CH. I would be willing to bet that if we heard these shows today, we would not think them all that funny with the possible exception of Yes What, a show about a school class of kids, presided over by a teacher played by Rex ‘Wacka’ Dawe. The kids – Greenbottle, a garrulous fool, Bottomley a cheeky rascal, a posh boy whose name I do not remember, and Stamford, who was a bit slow – always seemed to get the better of the teacher who gave them frequent canings, probably inspiring the teachers at Penrith High to do the same. 

For any reader who remembers these shows and wants to feel nostalgic, I have included some Web links to sample episodes at the end of this post.

Quiz shows

Quiz shows were very popular on the wireless and there was friendly or contrived competition between the two main hosts on rival stations. Jack Davey was a New Zealander with a ready wit and self-destructive social habits that got the constant attention of the daily rags, particularly the Daily Mirror, a sensation filled tabloid that has thankfully passed into history. Bob Dyer was originally a hillbilly guitar strummer who transformed into a successful quiz show host assisted by his ever simpering wife Dolly.

These two personalities over the years swapped radio stations, changed quiz formats, dabbled occasionally in variety shows, and traded friendly banter. The most successful of the quiz shows was Pick a Box.

When television came, both hoists made the jump from radio. Bob was a success, Jack Davey was not.

Amateur hours 

Another popular wireless format was the talent quest where amateur performers hopeful of making the big time or just impressing their friends would strut their wares on stage before a live audience. Again there were competing programs on rival stations such as The Amateur Hour and Australia’s Amateur Hour and rival hosts including Terry Dear, Dick Fair and Harry Dearth. These hosts generally spoke with a posh British accent, real or pretended, and were smooth, at times bordering on the unctuous.

As radio does not have visuals, the performers were mainly singers, musicians and the occasionally desperate stand up comic. If you have seen the quality shown on such current programs as The Voice and Australian Idol, you would see little resemblance to these talent quests of the 40s and 50s where the standard was probably inferior to that which you would see at a school musical performance these days.

Winners were determined by popular vote, phoned in by listeners.

Hit parades and teen shows

Various stations had their hit parades featuring the best selling records of the week usually ranging down from seven or eight to number one. There was certainly no top 40 or best 100 in those days and I have to say that music was pretty awful in the early 1950s until rock and roll began with Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel and Rock around the Clock in 1956. Two execrable songs that stick in my memory that made the hot parades back then were Shrimp Boats is A-coming by warbler Jo Stafford and Band of Gold by a second rate crooner called Don Cherry. Awful stuff.

There were two major radio shows aimed at teenagers. Rumpus Room was on 2UE and was compared by the incredibly smooth Howard Craven while Teen Time was broadcast on 2GB and presided over by an ex-vaudevillian named Keith Walsh. I cannot remember the format of these shows, so they obviously were not all that memorable.

Comedy and other programs

Comedy and variety programs were a staple of wireless fare. Variety shows contained a mixture of musical items, thankfully better than those on the amateur hour, and comedy sketches. Comedy shows were mostly just comedy sketches and a lot of advertising. Among the most listened to shows were Calling the Stars, the Cashmere-Bouquet Show, and Bonnington’s Bunkhouse Show. These shows presented new employment chances for ex-vaudeville performers.

The most famous comedian of them all was Roy Rene who had several shows in his alternate persona as Mo McKackie, a stereotyped Australian Jew with a host of offsiders such as Young Harry (‘Young Harry, cop this) and Spencer the Garbage Man. The humour was crude with lots of sly double entendre and by modern standards both racist and sexist. Mo would not be tolerated in today’s media.

Other shows

There were other shows too, most of them forgettable but not The Quiz Kids where a team of really smart kids were asked different questions by quizmaster John Dease and tried to answer them. One’s own cleverness was calculated by how many we could answer as compared to the smart kids.

Among the quiz kids who subsequently went on to better things were Prime Mimister John Howard, NSW Premier Neville Wran, and Barry Jones who won fame by scooping the pool on Pick  A Box before going into politics. Smarties!

And then came television

Television came to Australia in 1956 and although at first only the more prosperous families had a set, they became cheaper over the next few years and soon most families had one.

Programs in the first years began at 3.30 pm and ended at 11 pm with the playing of God Save the Queen against a patriotic backdrop. But the viewing day gradually increased and that spelled the end of the wireless as we then knew it. The serials, variety shows and quizzes transported to the new medium with some old shows making a successful transformation but others falling by the wayside and being replaced by newer and better ones. 

I think the thing that suffered most from television coming on stream was playing outside and even more so today where there are so many other electronic opportunities for children. And that’s a pity.

But we were lucky as kids in Penrith in the forties and fifties. Sure, we didn’t have many of the material things that children of today have but we had big backyards to play in, a safe environment for most of us, strong family ties, and pastimes that may have been simple but which gave us lots of pleasure. I am glad that I grew up where I did.

Web site references for some of the programs mentioned in this post

There are some sample episodes here which may jog your memory, sweep you in a wave of noistalgia or start you laughing.

Dr Mac: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajei9OESMDI

Australia’s Amateur Hour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrQ0zMLF1TE

The Search for the Golden Boomerang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIxyK9BGNLc

Night Beat: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=800Jw3AT66s

Hagen’s Circus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZq8Hoaa4lI

Yes What: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xbcido

Bonningtons Bunkhouse Show: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb7cOaW__Es

Mo McCackie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0rhAhtX1hg

The Quiz Kids: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9zpRW6O2nc

Previous post

Penrith characters: Essie Price

Many of the things that we enjoy today and that make our lives easier and more entertaining did not exist in Penrith when I was a child, at least amongst most families.

I cannot put a year on when a lot of things changed, and can only pinpoint them at about the time that my family moved from living above the shop in High Street to our house in Evan Street around about 1951. Maybe that was when things changed or maybe I just noticed them more because of the change of locale to a residential street.

Services and deliveries

There were many more home visits by vendors of goods and providers of services back then than there are today where almost every product is available in the shops or online and services have been streamlined and more automatised by technology.

I am told that several of the services that I will discuss in this post were done with the assistance of a horse and cart but I honestly do not remember this. I only recollect motorised transport. This may be because horse-driven services had more or less stopped by the time my memories start or because the delivery mode was different for houses than shops.

What I do remember is that there were horse troughs in the town for many years. There was one in High Steet almost outside the Federal Hotel and another near the railway station just down from the corner of Station Street and Belmore Street opposite the Red Cow.

The iceman

I definitely remember the iceman.

Although refrigerators were available from the thirties, they were expensive and didn’t really catch on in this country until the fifties. The alternative was the icebox which was a cabinet divided into three compartments. The ice went into the top section, the food went into the middle and the third was to catch the water from the melting ice.

I believe that the ice came from what was commonly called the Milk Factory (Nepean Cooperative Dairy Company) which was in Castlereagh Road. The milk factory was a cooperative with shares held by farmers and local businesses. When the factory was privatised, if that is the correct word, in later years the shareholders got a real windfall.

The ice was delivered to homes in big blocks by the iceman who carried it with huge tongs and placed it in the top compartment of the ice box for you. The blocks of ice were heavy and the ice man needed to have plenty of muscle.

As more and more people were able to buy fridges, the icebox fell out of favour and the iceman went on to other things. Another occupation lost to technology.

A very popular fridge in homes was the Silent Knight, manufactured by a company owned by Sir Edward Hallstrom, a leading philanthropist who contributed a lot of money to Tarango Park Zoo behind which he was a driving force for many years. These fridges originally ran on kerosene but were later converted to electricity. About the name – I get Silent (although the early models were not all that quiet) but I don’t understand the Knight part. Anyhow.

Most people also had a larder – a cool place in the home where you could keep goods that were best kept cool but did not require refrigeration. Food in the larder was often covered with a muslin cloth to ward off the flies in summer.

The garbo

There was no assortment of plastic bins – one for garden refuse, one for recyclables, one for ordinary garbage. There was only one – a cotrragated metal bin into which went everything.

The garbage truck was completely manual. One man drove the truck and two other men -‘garbos’ – either rode in the truck or stood on the running boards. The truck would stop outside a house, one of the garbos would alight, pick up the garbage bin, hoist it on his shoulder, empty it into the truck and them return it to its spot outside the house. Unlike today, the garbage bin was returned correct side up with the lid on rather than just thrown onto the footpath in a haphazard fashion.

The traditional garb of the garbo was a shirt (with jumper if it was winter), shorts and boots. As David Ellis has reminded me, Mr Roots was one of the local garbos.

The milko

And then there was the milkman. As I remember it, milk was not at first delivered in bottles. At night, people would  put a container – a billy, a pot, a jug or whatever – outside their front door with a note as to the quantity of milk required.  The milkman would come by in the early morning and fill the container from the big milk cans that he had with him on the truck. Payment was usually by way of a weekly account if credit was available, or the money was left with the container.

The mlkman for our area was Mr Love. Trust was big in those days and if, for any reason, there was going to be nobody at home when the milko arrived, the door would be left unlocked and a note left asking him to kindly put the milk in the icebox or fridge for you. This ensured that the milk did not go off when the day heated up.

Cream was delivered too, and sometimes the milk man also carried eggs, but there was no such thing as low fat milk, yoghurt in the many varieties around today, and other associated lines.

Then they started putting milk in glass bottles with an aluminium foil stopper and the need for the billy can disappeared, with the number of empty bottles put outside the door indicating how many were wanted. You were expected to wash out the bottles that you wanted replaced. As containerisation of dairy products improved, the packaging altered from glass to plastic and cardboard and the variety available widened.

With the advent of supermarkets and multiple other types of stores selling milk, the milko disappeared into history.

The dunny man

Much of Penrith was sewered although there were still pockets of houses that relied upon outside toilets.

For those who have no experience of the outside toilet, it was  a separate small building in the backyard, often roughly constructed. The waste was collected in a metal bin under the wooden seat (splinters in the posterior were a common occurrence) and was collected on a weekly basis by a dedicated worker, and exchanged for a fresh container. For those who have had no experience with outside toilets, this work was politely titled a ‘night soil’ worker but was affectionate;y known to all, children and adults alike, as the dunny man.

He needed to be always kept on side as you didn’t want to miss a dunny man visit. It was mandatory to present him with a dozen bottles of beer at Christmas to keep him happy. He was however fatally attractive to dogs and it was always necessary to keep the family cur tethered when the dunny man called to avoid an unseemly spill caused by an attacking or friendly hound. Garbos had the same appeal to dogs.

Even when sewerage was introduced to previously dry toilet areas, the outside toilet was often kept as a now sewered throne room either because people could not afford an expensive addition to their house to cater for a new toilet, or there was just not enough room. Almost everyone had chokoes growing along the side wall of the outside toilet. They flourished.

Toilet paper was primitive, generally consisting of cut out strips of newspaper placed on a nail in the toilet, a far cry from ‘what’s the gentlest tissue in the bathroom you can issue’ of today.

And then there were the insects. You can imagine that flies, including those enormous Penrith blowflies of summer, were highly attracted to the outside toilet and they were both a pest and a health hazard. The real problem is that the underneath and back areas of the toilet seat were a magnet for redback spiders. It was always good practice to check these areas before taking your seat. At night, carrying a torch was mandatory.

I have been told by Bill Joyner that his father recalls Barney Roots as being  the local night soil man. I and others recollect that Mr Roots was the garbage man so either he was doing double duty or there was more than one Roots helping Penrith get rid of its waste.

Bill’s father also recounts a story that the night soil truck lost a full can when it was turning into Station Street at Tatts Corner one day. As Barney Roots was shovelling the fallen contents off the road, Tatts drinkers enquired of him what he was doing. ‘Stock taking’ was the witty retort. A great story, thanks Bill.

Other deliveries

I understand that various other things were delivered too – bread, fish, meat and fruit and vegetables. I don’t recollect many of these but I do remember, even in the fifties, a man driving around in a horse and cart with rabbits for sale, and other one collecting old bottles. The Turnbull family at one stage had a fruit and vegetable delivery service in South Penrith.

David Charlton tells me that he remembers horse-drawn carts coming around the town: Woods Butchery had one delivering meat, and O’Farrels used one to deliver bread. Stan Price who later had an oil depot in High Street just up from the Catholic Church, was also a general carter and he too used a horse and cart.

I also recollect a man coming around from time to time in a horse and cart selling props for the clothes line. Before Hills Hoists, the clothesline generally consisted of a length of rope tethered to fence posts (almost always paling in the pre-colour bond era) and supported by a wooden stick or two called props to keep the clothes from weighing down the line. Another fun pastime for the family dog and a hindrance to outside games.

One thing about the coronavirus pandemic is that quite a few merchants have returned to home deliveries. A good thing, but I do not anticipate a return by the dunny man any time soon.