Mighty oaks from little acorns grow. One mention of night soil men in yesterday’s C8 has brought forth a deluge of dunny stories that has obviously been backed up for years. Readers with delicate constitutions, or breakfast to hand, should probably leave now and rejoin us at the last paragraph.
Mark Fuller of Armidale reports, “In Clive James’ Unreliable Memoirs, he recalls as a youth leaving his bicycle carelessly at the side of the house, only for the unfortunate dunny cart man to trip over it on his return with a full pan. As a young boy, I recall the dunny cart man arriving once a week, and the outside toilet with no light, and spiders.”
From Dalmeny, Dennis Arnold says, “In the mid-’60s in north Brisbane, where backyard thunder boxes were still to be found, my dad and I were visiting a mate of his, who greeted us with wide eyes and the line, ‘I just saw the nightman [as they were politely known in some circles] wash his face in next-door’s pool’!”
Then the embarrassing moments. Richard Stewart of Pearl Beach says, “When first married in the 1960s, living in a one-room shack with an outside dunny, the regular Monday morning change over of pans unfortunately caught my young wife in place, but only once. Thereafter, the call came, ‘You in there, missus?’”
Bill White of Yamba’s was. “Visiting my great-aunt in the 1950s in Yamba I had a very early call of nature down to the backyard dunny. Nicely enthroned, I was startled by the back flap suddenly opening, the can wrenched from beneath me and a fresh can inserted and a cheery ‘Morning’ as the flap closed.”
Also from those more innocent times, Judy Archer of Nelson Bay says, “We, too, would hear the dunny carter in the early hours of the morning. My brother would say, ‘The dunny man’s cart is magic, it has four wheels and flies.’ We would roll on the floor laughing.”
Then back to the tales of knife-sharpening. Sarah Hammond of Surf Beach grew up in Mosman, where a man regularly bicycled around with his knife- and garden-tool-sharpening wheel behind him. “The story we were told was that he had been something big in commerce, but when he retired he got bored and started his sharpening business. I have no idea now if that was true.”
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