My adult life seems to have been devoted to getting the washing done. Not for me the predictability of a washing machine in a convenient laundry with a permanent water supply and a handy clothes line. The adventure of my life has been defined by the variety of washing day, ranging from the desert to the ocean and now to the canals of Europe.

My Washing Ancestry

My Aunt, Sister Joan Jurd, has reminded me that  Getting the Washing Donehas been an important part of the lives of my family- or at least the female members of it!  She has written:
"Memories of my mother and laundry go back about 90 years. At that time we had no laundry and mother did the washing in the back yard, lighting up the fire for the copper, wringing everything by hand (a mangle came later) and hanging out on clothes wires slung between house and fence posts. A vivid memory from our year in Toowomba in 1917 has never left me (I was 2 to 3 that year). All the laundry, sheets, clothes and nappies for 4 children and Dad and Mum's clothes were bravely blowing in a strong breeze when a vital prop or props collapsed and everything fell into the red dirt so that Mum must have had to do the washing all over again. And Mother didn't swear or cry! I did the latter, realising in my babyish way what a catastrophe it was for her."

My own childhood

I was almost nine years old before my mother first had a washing machine. Its arrival in 1954 coincided with the birth of her sixth child so for all my early life, and for my mother's first five children, washing involved coppers, large cement tubs and mangles as well as washboards made of corrugated glass and framed in timber. In fact, I still have my doll- sized wash board carefully put away. I remember scrubbing my doll's clothes and when they were dry, ironing them with my toy iron. Perhaps I was not then aware of my mother's chapped hands and the burden of washing by hand for a family of seven. The laundry was away from the house across a small lawn area, in a fibro building especially constructed for the purpose.

The machine which entered our lives in 1954 was a "Lightburn", made by a company whose main product was cement mixers. It seems that they used the same style features for their washing machine. It was a twin-tub affair so still involved a high level of participation by the laundress but was reliable and effective, a great improvement on washing by hand.