Outback Dunny -

“To go to the dunny, or the ‘dyke’ as we called it, you needed a cut lunch. It was up the paddock: a scrap-tin structure with a bag door that flapped all over you in winter. Newspaper cut up for wiping your bum, and a wooden seat with a rough hole cut into it and a kerosene tin underneath, and with all of us it filled up pretty quickly and had to be taken into the paddock to be emptied. It had a wire handle and we’d put a pole through that and two of us would carry it away. It was hell being the shortest with the bucket full to the brim, slopping everywhere and the bucket slowly making its way up to your end. The arm would be stretched up as far as it could go, walking on tiptoe to avoid being given a bath with the bucket’s stinking contents.

We got real pans later, and the dunny man came at any time to take it away, sometimes to your shame, running up the paddock with your trousers down around your ankles, bawling because Doug had seen your bum as he grabbed the pan from under you. If we’d known the exactly moment he would reach for the pan, we would have given him some of his own back!”

First cuts are the deepest. Pat Malcolm. Fremantle Arts Centre Press.

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