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Article Excerpt
In 2002, Dunnedoo, in New South Wales, by-passed the graceful imagery of the Aboriginal meaning of their home, 'Black Swan', to propose a giant 'dunny' as a tourist attraction for their town. (1) This study explores why Australians have a particular relationship to the dunny and, in doing so, attempts to merge some theoretical insights of oral historiography and symbolic anthropology.
The primary empirical data for this project arose out of a longer-term project considering bush-holiday-making and leisure between the two world wars in a small community in the foothills of the Dandenongs of outer Melbourne. (2) With the collection of oral history interviews, it seemed that everyone had a story about their outside 'dunny' or the night man, in relation to the period between the 1920s and 1950s. The catalyst for the paper was therefore empirically inductive.
Once the topic area was opened, other cultural manifestations of Australian interest in dunnies became immediately apparent, but a scholarly body of work on this specific issue did not appear to exist. Burgeoning theoretical interest in the symbolic meaning of water pointed to Mary Douglas's popular work on pollution as a useful starting point for considering the material. At the same time current critical thinking about memory and oral history suggested that memories of the past are mediated by concerns of the present, as well as by the influences of experiences in other time periods. This was seen as a second, productive starting point for analysis. Empirically, the use of interviews was therefore supplemented with discussion on novels, films and a book of photographic images. The analysis makes use, then, of critical oral historiography recognising the contextual nature of personal memory and the influence of the present and recent past in memory of the distant past: hence the title, 'looking backward and forward'. (3) Furthermore it makes use of Geertzian 'thick description (4)' in an attempt to 'explicate community memory' and unravel layers of meaning. The four layers revealed concern about, in order, the universal idea of pollution; the Australian tendency toward bush/egalitarian nostalgia; the Australian tradition of democratic humour; and Victor Turner's notion of 'the second world of the people' in that humour.
Linguistically, the term 'dunny' derives from British dialect and cant. It is a shortening of dunniken from danna, excrement, and ken, house. (5) Unlike the more contemporary terms 'toilet' and 'lavatory', the dunny is not defined in relation to water. Toilet is a room fitted with a water closet and means for washing hands, related to toilette--the process of dressing that includes washing. Lavatory derives from laver, to wash, and is a room fitted with a toilet/water closet.
This paper begins with an exposition of a series of memories concerning the dunnies constructed by bush-block-owning holiday-makers and the interactions between the permanent residents and the night man or 'dunny-can man'. Material was collected between 1993 and 1997 from Valinda and its environs through interviews, participation in a local history writing project, and access to previous audio, visual and written records collected by local historians. Nineteen of these interviews are drawn upon in this paper.
Holiday-makers, dunnies and one-holers
During the 1920s to 1940s, Valinda was very popular with Melbourne workers for weekend holidays. Bushland was subdivided into small bush blocks that even workers on a modest wage could afford to purchase. The working class were proud of their 'holiday homes' and 'country estates', which, in most cases, were extremely modest shacks, sometimes made of flattened kerosene tins. On long weekends dozens of relatives arrived by train and car to cram into small shacks and houses and a number of guest houses. Interviews with block holders revealed strong memories about the toilets, which the men dug for the households, surrounding them with a structure of tin, hessian sacking or timber, often supported by young saplings. Melbourne, by this time, had had sewerage for at least a generation and families would have been accustomed to a chain action water closet. (6)
Vic was one these working-class block-holders. He described how his family built a deep-holed toilet:
There was a toilet, a hole dug in the ground, quite deep. The men did that. You had a seat. There was a real building out of saplings or whatever and probably the kerosene tins making the walls. And there used to be a sign outside called 'The Waxworks'. (laughs). I don't know why they called it that.
Soon after one family obtained their block in 1928, a young man (Wal) and his neighbour (Harold) created a special ceremony to celebrate the construction of a new toilet. Wal's sister described the occasion:
Harold and Wal drove all around the town ringing a bell and speaking through an old fashioned megaphone inviting everyone to come to the Grand Opening at Billy Goat Hill. The Grand Opening was the new toilet, which they had just built which they named: The One Holer. Wal's brother had dressed as a parson, his hair as flat as a pancake and his shirt on back to front. He had the honour of carrying out the big opening. People came from all over Valinda. Many people trudged up the hill to see the opening. When Nance and Gwen (Wal's two younger sisters) saw the people coming they ran off to hide in embarrassment.
Doris and Lorna remembered their toilet:
One thing was, our toilet was good. My father built it. They pulled up bucket after bucket (of earth). Some people were afraid of falling in. It was all built nicely on top with a wooden seat. It was a real good toilet. It was a hole and it went down and down and down. It was lined with wood. Mum used to sprinkle from a packet of lime on it each time we left and it never gave any odour or anything. Aman came when they were building it and said, 'What are you doing here?' (When Dad replied) he answered something funny about 'shit' and 'it'll break up before it hits the bottom'.
The dunny-can man
Contemporaneously with the period when the holiday-makers were becoming reconciled by a variety of means to their new 'one holers', the permanent residents of the small community of modest means began to be serviced by the local night man. Except for a few households on parish borders who were required to bury their own cans (a task for 'the boys'), the deep one-holers were superseded when the Shire arranged sanitary collection by the night man, or dunny-can man, whom I shall refer to as Archie.
Anxieties over their relationship with the man who...
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