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.