In our time: Grateful for automatic washing machines

The boiler fire ought to be laid the night before washing-day, so that you may only have to light it next morning. Before beginning to lay the fire, take great care that all the old cinders and ashes are raked out.

From The art of laundry work: practically demonstrated for use in homes and schools By Florence B. Jack, Head teacher of laundry work, Edinburgh school of Domestic economy. 2nd ed. Edinburgh 1896

In my first year at boarding school I was confronted with doing my own washing for the first time. Despite being 1980 our laundry was an austere room with concrete wash-troughs and two old twin tub washing machines (one of which worked). Laundry was a dreaded task and many a hand was burnt lifting clothes from the washing part to the spinning part.

But of course, we had it easy. My counterparts earlier in the century were boiling clothes in a copper. The very thought of lighting a copper and swishing clothes around with a big stick is a reminder to us how much easier laundry is today.

And even they had it easy. Imagine dragging your clothes down to a river and bashing them with a rock. It’s not as far gone as you might imagine.

Check out this video taken in China in 2006.



So as much as I complain about doing the laundry I declare that beating ones clothes with a rock or boiling them in a copper can stay before our time. I can’t do without my automatic washing machine. If only it could wash, spin and hang the clothes out as well.

Trading the Victa for a Hoover*

Before our time, the Great Aussie Backyard looked something like this photo taken in the early 1970s in suburban Perth. A huge expanse of lawn (often spiky buffalo), a concrete path and a Hills Hoist. Litres of water were poured onto the lawn via sprinklers, with the water sometimes originating from a bore in your own backyard. A hose could be used to water the lawn, wash the car, clean out the rubbish bins (as above), water the pot plants and cool off hot children.

With the tragic events of the past weeks, I think most of the world is now aware that parts of Australia are in severe drought (and have been for some time). With this drought comes stringent water restrictions which completely prohibit the watering of lawns in any way, shape or form.

So, most lawns around here now look like this:

But not the lawn in my new backyard (we moved house last week). It is lush and green. It has no dead patches. It provides an even texture with little maintenance.

Because it's fake.

At first I was appalled by the idea of having a synthetic back lawn. It seemed almost un-Australian. But I have to say, after living with it for a week or so, it's growing on me. (Not literally, obviously.)

There are distinct advantages of an artificial lawn - it requires no watering, or fertilising. It doesn't need to be mowed. It lasts up to 20 years without fading, and it always looks green.

After putting up with dustbowls for playgrounds for the past few years, many of the schools around our area are also turfing their outdoor areas with synthetic lawn. The children's clothing stays cleaner, they have a soft, 'green' surface to play on and the overall appearance of the school is improved.

A new house in our neighbourhood has gone one step further than just artificially turfing their own front/backyard, they have also done the 'nature strip' (the piece of ground in front of each house between the street and the footpath/pavement/sidewalk). As you look along the street it is brown, dead, crunchy, patchy, lush green, brown, dead, crunchy... Could this be the end of the nature strip as we know it? Soon to be the un-nature strip?

In places where you are permitted to water lawns, it is estimated up to 80 percent of a household's water use will go onto a lawn. Replacing dead, brown lawns and dusty ovals with synthetic turf seems like a simple solution to the watering issue, when we don't have the water to use. However like all things in life, nothing is simple. In researching this post, I discovered the down-side to the artificial acres of verdant lushness.

Synthetic turf is, quite obviously a man-made product, made of polyethylene or a combination of polyethylene and nylon, sewn into a rubberized plastic mat or a netted backing. So, in manufacturing the turf, carbon emissions are created. And then, the artificial lawn itself replaces a living (sometimes), breathing real lawn, which in normal circumstances would be sequestering carbon and producing oxygen.

In order to make the individual blades of synthetic grass stand up, the lawn is in-filled with granules of a variety of substances (sometimes granulated rubber) and there are concerns about whether toxic substances leach out of these granules and into the ground water.

This article at the Sustainable Gardening Australia website contains an excellent summary of the points for and against real and fake lawns. Who knew grass could have so many issues?

Where do you stand on the lawn? Real or fake?

* You wouldn't really vacuum an artificial lawn - you need to sweep it. But 'Trading the Victa for a Broom' just didn't have the same ring to it.

Dish-washing by hand to improve family communication

Does dish-washing by hand improve family communication? It certainly does according to my friend Jane* who has noticed that she and her tween-age children talk more about their day since their automatic dishwasher broke down a week ago. The repair man is coming today but she’s considering not telling her children that the dishwasher is fixed.

In 2008 45% of Australian households owned a dishwasher, up from 25% in 1994. Of these 29% use their dishwasher daily. Daily dishwasher usage has decreased from 37% since 2002, however the number of people per household has also dropped in this time.

You will certainly find that almost all homes with large families would have a dishwasher and that following breakfast and the evening meal the dishwasher would be stacked and turned on before the children retire to bed. But what if instead of turning on the dishwasher the children stood in the kitchen with you and helped wash the dishes. I’m not talking about the children doing it by themselves but it being a social activity that ends the evening meal.

My friend Jane has been doing this for the last week and reports that social tension in her house has reduced. Instead of rushing to get the kids to bed after dinner she hands them a tea-towel each. On the first night she showed them good dish-drying technique that she explained was ‘handed down from her grandmother to her mother and from her mother to her’ and then they chatted as they dried the dishes.

Jane found that after a few minutes one child would fill the silence with a story from school, or from an after school activity, perhaps a worry, or perhaps just a comment. Once the wash up was done they saw the satisfaction of a job completed, of a kitchen in ‘default mode’ ready for the next morning and they were much calmer at bedtime and fell asleep more easily having discussed the issues of the day.

While dishwashers have been readily available to households since the 1920s they really only began to take off in the 1970s. So before our time, hand-washing was, for most, the only option. The time together at the sink that would have been a normal part of the day has largely disappeared along with eating together at the kitchen table.

There is a story of a couple who when asked the secret of their 60 year marriage replied “washing the dishes together every night”. This was the time they talked about their day or the issue of the moment or simply connected on whatever level they needed to that night (I wonder how different the relationship would’ve been if the dish-washing was seen as the job of one person to do on their own).

I have read many articles which declare that dishwashers are more environmentally friendly than hand-washing because they use less water and less detergent.** However, this argument doesn’t consider the cost to society of removing the natural points in the day when people come together to build social cohesion.

Now I know that many people loathe dish-washing but should we make a paradigm shift away from hand-washing as a chore to hand-washing as a way to relax after dinner? Take a leaf from great parties – we know one best parts of a party is when we gather in the kitchen to chat and debrief as we help the host wash up after the event.

Perhaps there really is something to family dish-washing. I may convince our family to give it a go. How about you?

*not her real name.

**look at example articles here and here. The arguments for the environmental status of dishwashers vs hand-washing is a little like the disposable vs cloth nappy argument – lots of passionate arguments but no real answers.

PS. This is our 50th Post. Thank you loyal readers for sticking with us this far!

Ideas and Things that belong Before Our Time: Flat Smoothing Irons

Here at Before Our Time we often look back on skills, knowledge and equipment from before 1970 and think that perhaps we should re-introduce them to our daily lives. However, there are some things that we are grateful have moved into the history books. From time to time we will show them here.

First off our list is the flat smoothing iron that is powered by heating it on a hot plate, over a fire or by encasing a piece of hot coal or charcoal inside.

flat smoothing iron and mangle, powerhouse museum, Sydney

Oh my, ironing is such a detested chore with modern smoothing techniques, a padded ironing board and an electric steam iron. The thought of facing a pile of shirts with the implements above is just too much.

While I could never advocate that the knowledge of how to smooth clothes by old means is lost (such knowledge may be useful one day), I'm certainly glad that it is unlikely that I'll ever have to iron clothes the old way.

I wonder, however, have any of our readers ever had to iron this way? Are there places where ironing is still done like this?

Keep your cool

What temperature is it outside right now? If you live in the southern hemisphere the answer might be VERY HOT. Over the past two weeks some parts of Australia have been experiencing record-breaking heat spells with consecutive days of over 40 degrees (104F) and a temperature of nearly 47 degrees (116F) being experienced in the far Southern States. These are temperatures extreme for even our hot dry country and have recently resulted in our most devastating bush fires and loss of life in our history. We here at www.beforeourtime.com wish to convey our deepest sympathies to those who have lost so much.

If you are in Australia over the summer you might be thankful that you are in one of the 60%* of Australian homes with some form of air conditioning to beat the heat. But what if you don’t have an air conditioner? Or what if the extreme heat has severed your power supplies? How did those who lived before our time beat the heat and keep comfortable in hot conditions at home?

First, consider your notion of keeping comfortable. With air conditioning commonplace in cars and workplaces and, increasingly, in the home our idea of what is a comfortable heat may have changed over time. Instead of embracing warm weather by sitting on a shady verandah in light-coloured cotton clothing sipping a cool drink we have become accustomed to trying to bend nature to our needs rather than adapt with the seasons.

How soon do you turn on your air conditioner? Do you want a year-round temperature of 22 degrees or can you cope with a 25 degree room temperature in the summer?

Confused about celsius vs farenheit? Use our handy chart!

Our house in Sydney has no air conditioning and despite a week or two each year when the temperatures reach into the late 30s and early 40s we find that we can cope quite well without it. We are lucky to live in a house built in 1919 which was designed with the local climate in mind.
Our house is solid brick, two stories high with 3.3m ceilings and small windows to the west side of the house. The house stays relatively cool, even on the hottest day of the year – with a top internal temperature of around 27 degrees on those days.

We have found that the only areas of the house to cause heat build up are the parts that have been altered since it was built. The original design had two upstairs patio/verandahs – one off the south side of the house and one off the north. Both of these verandahs have been filled in (one is now my office, one a bathroom) and they are the hottest parts of the house. In the original design these rooms would’ve been open to the elements and provided shade and cooling breezes. Now, enclosed in glass, these rooms magnify the heat which then radiates to the nearby bedrooms.

We are not saints. On those 40 degree days we wish, along with the rest of Sydney, that we had on- demand air conditioning, but on the whole I prefer to live with the windows open rather than closed which would be the case with the refrigerated air-conditioning that is needed in our region.

We are fortunate to live in the house we do however many people live in hot boxes designed with economy or fashion in mind rather than suitability for the local climate. If you are in such a house without air conditioning or a well-designed house how do you cope? Here are some ideas from before our time:

Quick fixes – when electricity is down

- Keep your windows and doors closed, your blinds down and your lights and appliances off. The key is to prevent heat from entering your home and from the relative cool of the evening from escaping. Electrical appliances radiate heat and use should be kept to a minimum.
- Drink plenty of water
- Allow yourself to sweat – sweat is nature’s evaporative air conditioner
- Wear light colours, a hat, natural fibres, loose clothing.
- Fan yourself
- Dab water on your wrists and other pulse points
- Wet towels or sheets to lie on
- Get wet! Swim, take a cold shower or bath, play water games.
- If water restrictions allow – sprinklers on outside act as a natural air conditioner

Quick fixes - power available

-Get the air moving – ceiling fans, portable fans
-Get air moving over water – have fans operate over a tray of ice or water, or through a wet towel
-Use your freezer to make ice - for your drinks or as an icepack.

Longer term fixes – optimise your house design

- build verandahs and patios which act as a solar clock – shady areas at each point in the day
- build water features near the house (for evaporative air conditioning effect)
- plant shady trees under which seating can be placed for hot days
- have soft rather than hard landscaping near the house
- install smaller windows on the west side of the house
- create breezeways through the house
- install roof and wall insulation or build your house from naturally insulating materials such as mud brick.

What are your tips and tricks do you have from before our time for keeping your cool on the hottest days?

*Source: abs.gov.au

You’ve made your bed, now lie in it

In making the bed, she [the Lady’s maid] will study her lady’s wishes, whether it is to be hard or soft, sloping or straight, and see that it is done accordingly.

Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management, 1861
Chapter XLI.
Domestic Servants.
Accessed via: etext.library.adelaide.edu.au

When I first started boarding school back in the early 1980s, our list of requirements included “two blankets”. With these two blankets we were expected to make a neat bed each morning. The blankets were to be tucked in tightly together with the starched and wrinkle-free school-supplied white sheets (flat only, no fitted). The top sheet was to be folded back over the blankets and the whole thing topped off with a regulation blue and white heavy cotton quilt.

Before we left the boarding house for school each day we had to fold each of the sides of the quilt up onto the bed so that the cleaners could easily vacuum under the beds. They then pulled the sides down as they finished each dormitory. When we returned from school in the afternoon, we were expected to fold the quilt into a small square and put it on the top of our wardrobes, ready for the next morning.

Given no-one was actually allowed into the boarding house during the day, I could never quite see the point of all this quilt routine! However, it did instill in me a respect for the ritual of making a bed each morning and making it well.

At some point during my boarding school years, doonas (duvets, continental quilts, comforters) hit Australia. Suddenly there was a bedding option which didn’t require neat tucking in. You could simply pull up and smooth out…voila, a made bed! There was much debate among the boarding house powers-that-be about whether girls would be permitted to have doonas instead of blankets. Eventually the doonas were given the green light – provided they were tucked in all the way around and smoothed out to mimic the appearance of a blanket-made bed.

From that point on, the making of dormitory beds was never the same. By the time I left school, doonas were the rule rather than the exception, and due to a problem in supply of replacements for worn out ones, the quilts (and their associated folding rituals) were also abandoned.

Now I wish I could instill in my daughters that same respect for a neatly made bed. Although they both have doonas on their beds, they have sheets underneath and, call me old-fashioned, I like a neatly-tucked sheet rather than a hastily hidden mess of scrunched up linen.

There is only one way to achieve the neatness of tuck required and that is with the old-style hospital corner.

The practice of creating tight, origami-type folds of the bedding dates back to when hospital beds did not have safety rails. A firmly made bed could keep a drugged or injured patient in place, preventing any accidental rolls out of bed. Nurses through the ages have prided themselves on their ability to fold hospital corners, and those in the military forces aim for the legendary 'coin-bounce" degree of neatness in making their beds.

I tried to teach my five year old daughter the art of hospital corners in a step by step tutorial, but perhaps I was a little ambitious?

Step 1: smooth top sheet over the bed, tuck the foot of the sheet in.

Step 2: Holding the bottom edge of the sheet, pull it onto the bed to form a triangle.

Step 3: Tuck the remaining side of the sheet under the mattress

Step 4: Pull the triangle back across the side of the mattress

Step 5: Tuck the remaining sheet into the edge of the bed, creating a neat diagonal fold on the corner.

Step 6: Replace doona over top of sheet.

Step 7: Wonder why exactly you carried out steps 1-5, given that step 6 hides all previous handiwork.


Do you hospital corner your beds?