The building of Our house progressed rapidly our Australian friends were astonished how rapidly the Dutch moved. We finished the garage first. We had moved out of the caravan park into the garage on Braidwood Road which was now our new home, even though there was no running water and no toilet. It only took us a couple of days to construct a toilet and a shower block three metres away at the back of the garage. We used salvaged old wooden packing pallets and constructed a work of art; our Aussie friends said that we had the most stylish dunny (Australian for an outside toilet) in the street. Some people also call an outside toilet an outhouse; it was common in Australia to have an outside ‘bucket toilet’, which would be emptied once per week by the local Council Hygiene Department. There was no sewerage and no septic tank; besides, we could not afford such even if they were available. Every day before I went to school, I had to fetch six gallons of fresh clean water from the creek at the bottom of our street. Imagine how grateful I was when we had finished digging the water pipe trench to connect to the town water supply. The other unpleasant thing I had to do every week was to dig a deep hole to empty our toilet bucket, the once per week council collection was not enough; we filled our bucket very quickly.
Posted on: Wed, 03 Dec 2014 03:54:58 +0000
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