Night Soil: The Impact of the Indoor Toilet (Transcription)

[u]Danny[/u]: When sewerage was first introduced people weren't really all that willing to have it in the house because of their experience with outdoor dunny. They still had chamber pots, and that would go under the bed for night use and commodes chairs and those sorts of things, but having that sort of service in the house wasn't sort of seen as, until people I guess experienced how clean the indoor sewage was.   I guess these days it's not an issue because it just disappears and you don't have to deal with it and it's all very clean; however, it was a real problem for a very long time for humans.   In terms of the night soil a few generations now have never heard of it, are a bit horrified by the fact of how it was actually dealt with. But, in terms of the impact: grander houses like, in Ipswich, Gooloowan I know had an indoor toilet and shower and bathroom very early on.   Bathrooms were also external for a very long time, or they didn't exist.   It was just a bath that was brought out every so often, or it was in a closed room under the house those sorts of things.   When the sewerage was rolled out, and retrofitting them into the established suburbs, generally it wasn't put into where the house was, I mean the outhouse was at time, because they were sort of generally all over the shop.   The sewage lines were rationalized in lines so they were put closer to houses so that you could obviously have them close to the house. In high-set houses, lots of them were actually put in a sort of like you know the outhouse was moved under the house and the sewerage was put into a little room under the house who had an outhouse under the house.   In some instances, if there was another room, they they would put them upstairs, but generally, at that stage for the Victorian houses, they were under there. As it went on, in the Interwar houses, they were put generally beside a landing at the back door, and I think we're probably all familiar with those from grandparents houses and great-grandparents houses. That's sort of where they stayed, sort of being retrofitted into the buildings. There wasn't any real impact on the design of your ordinary house probably up until the end of World War II.   In the Post-War era in the 1950s, houses were still having the toilets sort of still attached to the house, but they were still outside, even in new builds. Then by the 1960s, they were all inside with new houses.   [i][u]Melanie[/u]: How were bathrooms being retrofitted into some of these houses?[/i] [u]Danny[/u]: Well, I think lots of the Interwar houses seem to have the bathroom upstairs in within the house already. I think the Victorian houses, which are the pre World War I houses, generally there was an area of the veranda, the rear veranda and a corner, that was enclosed to have an upstairs bathroom in there.   Previous to that, I think they had a wash house, which is probably the laundry, and then that's where the bath was. Now it's also became, the Post-War stuff, is all about selling things as products, building products and all that sort of new things, which had the biggest impact on the way people lived. It was sort of lifestyle oriented which wasn't previously. Things like bathrooms and kitchens became sort of status symbols for selling product. They're interesting little things, because they really have had a big impact on domestic architecture ...   [i] [u]Melanie[/u]: ... human history ...[/i] [u]Danny[/u]: ... yes, but now that all the nastiness has been taken away, literally, they're seen as status symbols, which is the sort of a funny thing. [i][u]Melanie[/u]: Bathrooms are getting bigger and bigger and flashier.[/i] [u]Danny[/u]: And the number of them you have is a selling point in your house and those sorts of things, whereas I'm sure that they didn't have, before places were sewered, going "an excellent outhouse, newly renovated". [Laughing] It's not what people did when the first thing when they moved in was to actually redo the outhouse, unlike these days we redo the bathroom.