Stepping back a moment to general deliveries (C8), Kelvin Atkinson of Carlingford remarks, “I too remember the home delivery of milk and bread and pick-ups by ‘Dan Dan the dunny man’, as we used to call him. But does anyone else remember the Rawleigh man with his lotions and potions, and the AMP insurance salesman, who came every week to collect premiums?”
Jenny Atkins of Mosman remembers: “In the mid-1950s, my mother would sometimes allow me to stir the copper, a fiery metal cauldron with flames under it. I still have that stick. My father also remembered men on horseback bringing the cows in from pasture in Cammeray, along Wyong Road to the dairy in Beauty Point for milking.”
The dunnies (C8) continue with Warren Menteith of Nyatnyatan in Bali, who says, “At the end of the 1950s we lived in South Grafton. At the end of the street was vacant land known as the ‘Common’, the site of the treatment works. Periodically, the ‘sludge’ was cleaned out and spread. With time and some avian help, tomatoes and water and rockmelons grew prolifically.”
Another far-flung correspondent, Tim Ingall of Scottsdale (Arizona), remarks that “Mia David’s story about strawberries recalls how easy it was to grow anything around an outdoor dunny, leading to the saying that someone was so incompetent ‘they couldn’t grow a choko vine over an outdoor dunny’. There are other dunny-based sayings, including the invective, ‘I hope your chooks turn into emus and kick your dunny door down’.”
Sue Bradley in Eltham, Victoria, C8’s noted tuba player, reports, “I rented a house, with a very poorly lemon tree next to the outdoor loo. After consultation with the local garden store, I purchased a large bag of nails, distributed them under the lemon tree, and put a sign on the loo door, ‘Gentlemen, please assist the lemon tree’. Due to the resulting abundant growth I was able to pick lemons for 15 years from that tree. I do not know the function of the nails, but it worked.”
However, C8 hadn’t realised how recently dunnies were being used. Andrew Brown of Bowling Alley Point points out, “It wasn’t really all that long ago that the dunny man ceased his rounds in the Lake Macquarie region. At Dora Creek we had the pan man well into the late 1980s, and at Catherine Hill Bay it was the early 1990s.”
Column8@smh.com.au
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