Indelible Adventures: Gag me now...

Come check out the Indelible Adventures website - new one day Photography tour dates (Toronto) will be available shortly. Stay tuned!

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Growing up I lived on a one-acre block of land at the edge of town in a very small and rural community in Victoria, Australia. Our block was covered with a myriad of fruit trees, which included apples, plums, nectarines, peaches, apricots, lemons and of course our beloved walnut and quince trees; in addition dad always had a large and abundant vegetable garden that he constantly tended (when he wasn't working his normal two jobs). Dad was notorious for giving away the vast majority of the veggies primarily because he always grew enough to feed an army, and which always and inevitably ripened all at once. J

There was definitely something about walking out into our backyard and pulling a ripe plum or nectarine off the tree and taking a big juicy bite. I swear you could almost taste the sun with each bite, the juices dripping from your chin and running down your hand like a torrent. OMG it makes my mouth water just thinking that delicious taste, they were so flavourful!

Sounds amazing I know, except for the one horrid blight on this idyllic scene. Strangely sitting in the middle of this paradise was our outhouse or as they'd say in Australia the “dunny”.

Typical Australian dunny...no
photos of ours remain

What is a dunny you may ask? As a kid growing up in rural Australia during the 1960’s it seemed completely normal that your toilet was in a separate little house well away from the house. Our house was originally a miners cottage built in the 1850's that had been added to over the years, but no room for an inside toilet. Clearly not a priority for the previous owners.

Each week we had a visit from the local “night cart”, which was a man employed by the local council to change out the pans brimming with bodily waste. After collecting his truck load he would drive up to the mine shafts that dotted out town and pour the contents into the deep mine shafts.

Why is it called a night cart even though he came at different times of the day or night?

Well, my theory is that, especially in the hot Australian summer heat the flies were as thick as a carpet on the waste, including in and around the outhouse and if he came at night to take the pan away the flies weren't as thick. It clearly was a crappy job (excuse the pun!) but I suppose it was a steady job albeit solitary work, and definitely not for those with a delicate disposition or queasy stomach. I remember holding my breath and breathing through my mouth whenever I had to use it.

Growing up in a household that sometimes struggled to make ends meet you learned at a very early age to finish everything on your plate no matter what. Even if mum cooked something completely unpalatable I sort of did the same thing as I did when I visited the dunny, breathed through my mouth and tried to ignore the taste. I found you could pretty much stomach anything after a while and at least it filled you up.

You might have to turn away from this next part of the story…just sayin!

My mum had a very, very short fuse...so could get riled up in a heartbeat and you crossed her or disobeyed her you did so at your own peril!

I remember one summer afternoon when I was about 6 or 7 years old mum gave me a dry Salada biscuit slathered in peanut butter for lunch. She had repeatedly warned us never to take food into the dunny because of the flies that carried all sorts of germs.

All well and good in theory, but to a little boy who was both hungry and desperate to go to the toilet I wasn't going to give up on my unfinished Salada no matter what. I had a brainwave – I’d just take it in with me and place it carefully on the bench next to me, and keep it clean by swatting the flies away with my free hand while I went to the toilet there'd be no germs for sure. What a great idea!

So I scurried in and carefully placed the partly eaten biscuit on the bench next to me (within swatting distance) and proceed to drop my pants and go to the toilet, smiling to myself as I confidently swatted fly after fly away from the delicious little biscuit sitting there staring at me. It wasn't until I was finished and wiping myself that I guess I turned too quickly and to my horror knocked the biscuit into the pan below which was a sea of smelly waste.

I was afraid that mum would see the partly submerged biscuit floating in the waste and know exactly what had happened and putting two and two together meant that I was going to be in big trouble with a capital T!

I remember feeling very frustrated and annoyed that I knocked the damn biscuit in the pan. There was only one thing for it. I lent over the pan, taking a deep breath and stuck my head and shoulder deep into the hole while holding on with my other hand for dear life so that I didn't tumble into the abyss. After retrieving the errant biscuit I then proceeded to wipe the visible waste from the exterior with my hand before then wiping it on the leg of my pants...okay but in my defence I was only 6 or 7.

Fearing that I'd be caught red handed I slowly opened the door and peeked out to see if anyone was in the vicinity. Nope not a soul - thank goodness i breathed!

Who knows what goes through the mind of 6 year old?

As I walked away from the dunny, I remember eyeing the Salada doubtfully…it didn't seem that bad I thought to myself…especially now that I had “cleaned it” off, I couldn't even tell the difference between the peanut butter from the pooh. It was at this point that I decided to eat the evidence…

To this day I still can't stomach the taste of peanut butter, the mere taste is enough to make my stomach turn and my mouth gag. Just the thought of peanut butter transports me back to that hot summers day in my childhood, and clearly one I'd rather forget. J

Prologue:

It was not until the summer of 1967 that dad decided to build a septic tank and move from pan to a flush toilet, even though it was still outside the house it was clearly a huge step up for us, much fewer flies around the house and far less smelly in the backyard which was a welcome change.

I still remember my older brother Laurie helping dad dig the hole (6’ wide x 10’ long x 6’ deep) in the back yard, forming it up to pour the concrete which included a secondary or overflow chamber and then the weeping pipes out into the back yard via a trench where it finally ended some 50 or 60 feet down by the fence line. Quite a lot of digging both for the tank itself but also for the pipes, which had to be at least three feet deep all the way out to the fence line.

Dad was a whiz when it came to building stuff, he so enjoyed working out how to make things work and then building it with second hand materials that had been reclaimed from wherever he could scrounge them. He was brought up during the great depression and so as you'd expect nothing was ever wasted...absolutely nothing!

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I hope you like this weeks photos of urban art/graffiti from Toronto's Kensington Market taken last weekend. Enjoy!