![]() ![]() I like to think it was me, but it was probably some older kid who spoke up out of the crowd of kids gathered around this exciting event: One day, after picking up our precious load and throwing it up on his truck, the Dunny Can Man drove off and around our pot holed corner and half a dozen full dunny cans spilled onto the roadway. Our childhood house in Moorabbin was on an uneven intersection of unmade road just behind what would later become the St. ![]() ![]() However the most vivid memory is of preparing yourself for the sprint back inside in the dark and the sterling job I did of pretending no boogie-man or slimy monster was chasing me as I fumbled with the back door of the house. The piercing stink of phenol still evokes memories as it clung to your clothes leaving no-one inside in any doubt who had just used the can! The Dunny Can man came around about once every two weeks to take away the full cans (what happened when the family reached the limit before Dunny Can Man day?) and leave us with an empty replacement which had been washed out with phenol. The long wait anticipating father’s strap on his return home followed. I have a surprisingly clear memory of my younger brother, aged maybe seven, attempting the three foot leap between the garage and the dunny during a feisty game of ‘cowdies and indians’ and crashing straight through the dunny roof …but luckily for him, not into the brimming can below. A nail on which to hang the dunny paper, which consisted of squares of torn up newspaper, completed the accoutrement. A good dunny usually had something interesting to read in it as well. The dunny was a humble wooden box with a door you shut by turning a wooden toggle, galvanised tin or cement sheet roofing, a wooden seat, a large tin can underneath and a hinged door at the back. Not happy with our perversion of ‘dunnekin’ into ‘dunny can’, we Australians also provide several other useful terms to describe this fine piece of Australian architecture – ie. Our 1950s euphemism apparently derives from the ancient term ‘dunnekin’ which means an ‘earth closet’ or ‘cesspit’. Growing up in the unsewered Melbourne suburbs of Bentleigh and later Moorabbin in the 1950s, I became accustomed to the delights of the outside lavatory – always known as the ‘dunny’. ![]()
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