A Line to the Past

A Line to the Past
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published: Saturday April 4, 2015

Kulin seems deserted this Sunday morning. The town’s womenfolk are sleeping-in after last night’s dinner dance. The kids on bikes yesterday must be watching TV. Two brown honeyeaters pirouette noisily overhead. They bank sharply before alighting unsteadily on a power line. Theirs is the only movement on Stewart Street.

My newly five-year-old daughter, keen to explore, kicks up a shower of red pebbles from the gravel footpath. We wander past a derelict shop. In the window is a faded sepia photograph of a swarthy bloke wearing a mug-shot smirk. His white shirt-sleeves are rolled up above his elbows, business-like. My pint-sized companion is captivated by his eyebrows, which sit on his jutting forehead like two hairy caterpillars. I read the caption:

Norm Tyley – the Red-Faced Crooked Butcher.

We turn the corner but the Woolshed Cafe is still shut – no caffeine heart-starter for me. We double-back along Day Street. That’s when I spot a long-forgotten friend. Its concrete roots are planted at the centre of a barren backyard. A galvanised trunk is poker-straight. From its branches, half a dozen frayed and flapping towels strain against their pegs.

This is the Hills Hoist of my childhood. There’s the winder with the black plastic knob. The four canopy arms are the same dull grey as the clouds scudding across the Wheatbelt sky. I can see, across the fences, that almost every backyard has a Hills Hoist. Some are bare skeletons; some are pinned with full loads, newly damp with autumn dew.

“What’s that?” asks my youngster, pointing to the steel tree I’d stopped to admire.

“That, honey, is a Hills Hoist!”

“What’s it for?”

“It’s a clothes line.”

Showing no interest in either clothes or line, she resumes scuffing pebbles with the now dusty red toe of her sneaker.

But I’m transported back to my childhood, growing up at Nan’s house, the only child of a working mother. Nan’s Hills Hoist had been planted into a carpet of matted buffalo. It stood sentinel between her outside washhouse and the magnolia tree that overlooked Mrs Anderson’s yard at No. 47.

Mrs Anderson’s Hills Hoist was a newer model and came with a trolley on wheels – Nan called it a jinka – that cradled her washing basket. On the east side at No. 43, the Fry family’s Hills Hoist had been planted so close to their sleepout that every time Mrs Fry swung it round to reach a new piece of line, its metal elbow scraped her guttering.

On slow Sunday afternoons, Mr Fry sat in his easy chair on his concrete patio, using the shade from his wife’s wet sheets to read his paper. Every half hour, the sun would find a gap to blind him, or the wind would conspire to rotate the Hills Hoist five degrees. Mr Fry would haul himself out of his chair, shuffle a few inches to the left, then settle himself down again in the shade of a flapping Bonds singlet, or his wife’s underpants. Mesmerised by the size of Lil Fry’s bloomers, I stickybeaked over the picket fence, watching each cotton leg billowing and deflating like an airport windsock.

Aged seven, my job was to lug Saturday morning’s wet washing to the Hills Hoist and hang it out. Mum would crank the handle until the lines dropped within reach, then I’d wipe them with a damp cloth. She’d unhook the wicker basket of wooden pegs and hang the holder at waist-height from the winder instead.

By the time I was ten, plastic pegs had arrived in a riot of colours. I amused myself by matching peg colour to sock colour. On bumper wash days, I created complementary colour arrangements for Mum’s secretarial wardrobe. A modern-day Van Gogh, I paired yellow pegs to Mum’s violet shirt, blue ones to her tangerine trousers. But I came unstuck if her pale-green tennis top was in the wash, seeing pegs never came in magenta.

Nan said to peg whites with whites, and to hang sheets and towels on the outside rungs, so visitors wouldn’t see our unmentionables. If she dashed to the shops, I used the Hills Hoist like a merry-go-round. Every kid did. Ours creaked and groaned and shuddered violently even under my flyweight. A garden tap staked in the lawn obstructed my flight path. I had to remember to jerk my legs up and over the tap, or it would smash into my knees. More than once the tap won, and Nan would arrive home to find me limping across the lawn. She never said anything. The deep blue bruises were enough punishment.

Back on Kulin’s Day Street, small daughter interrupts my reverie shouting: “Mum! There’s a kookaburra o n the Hills Hoist!” For several moments, I drink in the sight of bird on wire. I wonder how many more totems of my childhood are almost obsolete.

The Next Best Thing

The Next Best Thing
Ros Thomas
The Weekend West
Published Saturday June 1, 2013

Here’s my conspiracy theory: today’s gadgets are made to fail. And here’s my evidence: both the vacuum cleaner and my mobile phone have carked it just weeks out of warranty.

Last Sunday, the vacuum cleaner, my trusty servant, stopped dead. The two of us were having a lovely time sucking up all the bits of Lego left lying on the loungeroom floor. (We often play games, the vacuum cleaner and I, ferreting about under the sofa with the suction at warp speed. We try to guess from the rattle – rattle – clunk! what mystery object has shot up the hose.)

Always noisy and frolicsome, my appliance was suddenly still. All I could hear was a faint ticking. I rolled its body into the recovery position, ripped open the lid and shook the bag resting limply inside. I smacked the machine shut hoping to restore its noisy breath. Nothing. I squinted up the hose to see if its airway was blocked but I had an interrupted view of the front door. I emptied the dust filter and pumped the on/off switch with a firm but steady rhythm but by now its body was cold.

I had just enough time to race to the electrical shop before it closed. I burst through the door, my expensive Italian clutched in my arms, dribbling fine grey dust from its back end. The bloke behind the counter took one look and said: “We’ll have a crack, luv, but now that it’s out of warranty, the drop-off fee is $85 and we charge $65 an hour labour which doesn’t cover parts so it might be cheaper to buy a new one.”

I got the feeling he knew something I didn’t: my two-year-old vacuum cleaner was built notto last. It had what Choice Magazine calls “planned obsolescence.” I felt like a chump. Here I was thinking my vacuum and I had a future together, and it was secretly planning career suicide. I forgave the betrayal and begged the electrician: “I need to know what went wrong, if you can’t fix it, I want an autopsy.”

The very next day, my mobile phone crashed in sympathy. An inky blank screen stared back at me. Somewhere inside it were the phone numbers of everyone I know. I went to the Apple store, a place so technologically advanced the geeky staff look uber-cool in their coke-bottle glasses and identical blue polo shirts. Customers, depending on their age, look either confused or euphoric at the smorgasbord of technology laid out before them. At the door, the maitre d’Apple fiddled around with my phone for a minute then suggested: “Time for an upgrade?” I tried to look euphoric but he sensed my confusion.

“Did you back it up ma’am?” He already knew the answer so I replied guiltily: “Please tell me you can restore it? My social life lives inside that  phone.”

 “Well, if it can be fixed, it’ll take a couple of weeks. But your screen is cracked  and iPhone 4s are pretty outdated now….”

“Okay, okay” I interrupt, “I get your drift.”

Mobile phones aren’t meant to be repaired, they’re meant to be upgraded. Superseded by something a little thinner or a little longer so that the charger and the three covers you have at home no longer fit.

I can’t get used to the idea that TVs and computers and cameras that are working just fine should be replaced simply because a newer version comes along. It makes me feel gluttonous.

My mother had her Hecla toaster for nearly 30 years. It had doors that flipped down and it never complained no matter how thick the toast we stuffed in it. In Mum’s day, broken things were fixed by a generation of menders and make-doers with tweezers and soldering irons. My eldest, 12, is a whizz at building contraptions, but already, he loves to trade up his gear. How many pairs of headphones are enough? Will Playstation 3 be embarrassing once Playstation 4 arrives?  

There was nothing terribly wrong with my vacuum cleaner, as it happens, it just had a worn belt. The repair cost me $160 but we are reunited. Now  I know my two-year-old Italian is past its prime. 

My new phone, however, has been greeted with much excitement by the small members of the house. It’d be even more exciting if I knew the phone number of someone to call, but for now, the phone and I are just a lonely little twosome with lots of fancy icons. My iPhone 5 is so advanced it has a genie inside it called “Siri” who listens, comments and does whatever I say. “Call Chelsea Pizza” I demand, and she finds the number and dials it. “Siri, are you my friend”, I ask her, as the kids guffaw.

“I am not just your friend” she replies in her husky robotic voice, “I am your new “B-F-F.” The kids are now hysterical. I quietly explain to Siri that the vacuum cleaner and I were once “Best Friends Forever”, but we fell out over some Lego.