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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