Consider the
clothesline
Echo Publishing A division of The Five Mile Press 12 Northumberland Street, South Melbourne Victoria 3205 Australia www.echopublishing.com.au
Consider the
clothesline
Part of the Bonnier Publishing Group www.bonnierpublishing.com Photographs copyright © Frances Andrijich, 2016 Text copyright © Susan Maushart, 2016 All rights reserved. Echo Publishing thank you for buying an authorised edition of this book. In doing so, you are supporting writers and enabling Echo Publishing to publish more books and foster new talent. Thank you for complying with copyright laws by not using any part of this book without our prior written permission, including reproducing, storing in a retrieval system, transmitting in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or distributing. First published 2016
Vibrant Images of Laundry and Life
For my mother Jagoda, my aunty Teta Mira, my sister Mary and brother Gerry
Printed in China Cover and internal design by Tracy Loughlin National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Andrijich, Frances, author, photographer. Consider the clothesline / Frances Andrijich ; Susan Maushart. ISBN: 9781760069254 (hardback) Clotheslines : Vibrant Images of Laundry and Life--Australia--Pictorial works. Australia--Pictorial works. Maushart, Susan, author. 646.6
with love, Frances
Frances Andrijich
Text by Susan Maushart
Twitter/Instagram: @echo_publishing Facebook: facebook.com/echopublishingAU Front cover: Willing Workers on Organic Farms (WWOOF) caravan, Fair Harvest (Margaret River, South West) P4: Peg basket (South Fremantle, Perth) P6: Buoy peg holder, Boolardy Station (Murchison, Mid West) P7: Vintage Simpson wringer washing machine (Murchison Museum, Murchison Shire, Mid West) P8: Fence, swings, grass (Pemberton, South West) P9: Antique wooden mangle (Murchison Museum, Murchison Shire, Mid West)
A u s t r a l i a n
p h o t o g r a p h i c
Ga l l e r y
Consider the Clothesline For decades, it’s been standing unobtrusively in the far corner of our collective back garden, gathering rust. And now, suddenly – just when you thought it was as destined for extinction as a man who mows his own lawn – the clothesline is cool again. Proof? You’re holding it in your hands.
Well, that’s my own journey. But it also tells us something about the place of Hills Hoist (and its moral equivalents) in the national consciousness. It’s not for nothing this homely device was elevated to the status of icon in the Sydney Olympics 2000 opening ceremony.
Here in the sunburnt country, the home of the iconic Hills Hoist, where ninety percent of single-family homes are graced by some sort of washing line, our attachment to the clothesline has proved unusually resilient. Even those of us who mostly honour it in the breach have been known to grow positively misty-eyed recalling the ghosts of laundry baskets past.
Today, a more sophisticated wave of feminist thinking has allowed women – and men too – to reclaim the clothesline wholeheartedly. Today, it stands as a symbol of the integrity – not to mention the incalculable worth – of our unpaid labour in the home.
Yet for a while there, it looked as if feminism would finally hang the Hills Hoist out to dry – relegating it to the ragbag of history as a tattered emblem of women’s unpaid (and under-appreciated) domestic labour. I get that. In fact, if truth be told, as a migrant to Western Australia as a young bride in the 1980s, I would have happily taken an axe to the ancient model that dominated our scrubby, sun-scorched backyard. I found my Australian husband’s passion for line-drying a bit like his enthusiasm for Vegemite. Which is to say, inexplicable and faintly oppressive. I didn’t expect him to drive a horse and cart to work. Why did he expect me to peg out our socks and underwear? In time, I would come to appreciate both the clothesline and Vegemite ... and at the point that I did, you might say I achieved my cultural citizenship.
At the same time, environmental awareness has propelled the practice of air-drying from the forgotten back blocks to the front lines (as it were) of the alternative energy movement. Solar power? Wind energy? Re-used and recycled material? Zero greenhouse emissions? The rotary clothesline has been doing all that since the 1940s. And in these energy-conscious times, it’s become a backyard hero all over again. In the US, the UK and Canada, a grassroots Right to Dry movement has sprung up wherever local statutes forbid line-drying on ‘aesthetic’ grounds. Really, people? Clearly, beauty is in the eye – and by extension the photographic lens – of the beholder. When you really start to ‘consider the clothesline’, you realise there’s so much more to say. As the incredible images you are about to encounter attest, there is something deeply, madly and 5
insistently life-affirming in this humdrum business of hanging our washing out to dry. Let’s face it, doing the laundry is a universal human need, right up there with as food, shelter and wifi. Dumping a load of wet clothes into a dryer is convenient. But it inspires no poetry. It requires no skill. And it encourages no reverie. ‘Pegging out’, on the other hand, is an invitation to a gentler rhythm. We step over the threshold separating our human-made interiors from the unbounded natural world of air, sky and wind. And we are forced to reckon with this world beyond our direct control: to think about variables like humidity and temperature and the angle of the sun. We look up, even if only a little. We lift our arms up too. We may hear birdsong or notice clouds. We may smell rain. Inevitably, we are just a little more connected to our world. The innocent, grassy scent of line-dried cotton PJs. A row of spotless nappies, snapping in the sea breeze. Salt-stiffened beach towels dangling like holiday ornaments – and signalling sunsoaked lazy days ahead. And let’s not forget the ‘off label’ uses. Aussie kids have been swinging from Hills Hoists since Lancelot Hill reputedly cobbled the first one together back in 1945. Today, I am reliably informed, teenagers use them to play a drinking game called ‘Goon of Fortune’. (Don’t ask!) I was a late convert to the charms of the washing line. Not so my friend and favourite photographer Frances Andrijich, who has been hung up on collecting clothesline images for decades. 7
Her obsession, she once told me, began around the time she became a new mother. All Frances remembers is her determination to recreate an image from her own childhood: her grandmother standing in the sun, pegging out a line of very large, and very pink, nanna-knickers. Frances’s Croatian mother was mortified by the idea, and so a distant relative, dolled up in flannel slippers and slip, was prevailed upon to do the honours. And the rest – as you can see on page 49 – is photojournalistic history. Something about the image resonated. (And not just with the photographer. It has been reproduced widely, all over the world.) From that point on, wherever else Frances happened to be – on assignment shooting a profile or on location in one the remotest corners of her beloved Western Australia – she had clotheslines on her radar. How many subjects were bemused by her interest in their back gardens we will never know. What we do know is that Frances Andrijich’s unusual fascination with the clothesline has made the world just a little brighter. Some of the photographs you’re about to see will make you laugh. Others will make you think. Still others will inspire you to discover the extraordinary in places so ordinary you would never even have thought to look. By turns whimsical, meditative and transgressive, these images have all the intoxicating freshness of a basket of sun-dried sheets. Bury yourself in them for a moment, and breathe deep. Susan Maushart
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Left: Clothesline Encounters of the Third Kind This shot was created for a feature article in the Weekend West about Perth residents claiming to have had extraterrestrial experiences. Naturally, Frances took the opportunity to feature a you-know-what.
Above: Shadow play at dawn. Extra points for spotting the highway reflected in the mirror at far left (Naval Base Shacks, Henderson, Perth) 11
Above: If this majestic specimen of a Hills Hoist looks as big as a room at the Turkey Creek Motel … um, that’s because it is (Warmun, Turkey Creek, Kimberley) Opposite: Lighthouse keeper’s clothesline (Cape Naturaliste, South West) 12
In Scotland, a Hills Hoist is referred to as a Whirligig.
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Previous: Swinging times on the original multi-tasker: clothes dryer, play equipment and peeing post. Brewer, King Family (Broome, Kimberley) Left: Mulberry stains? No worries! That’s what the clothesline is all about (Swanbourne, Perth) Opposite: Adam and Elliot Sollis hanging out in their backyard, with dog Baxter panting for a go (Melville, Perth) 16
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