‘Cleanliness is the outward sign of inward purity’, a guide to Australian etiquette advised upper-middle-class readers in 1885. ‘Cleanliness of the person is health, and health is beauty. The bath is consequently a very important means of preserving the health and enhancing the beauty. It is not to be supposed that we bathe simply to become clean, but because we wish to remain clean’ (Australian Etiquette 1980: 376–7). The Australian Housewives’ Guide (1885), published in the same year for respectable working-class readers, offered similar advice, though in a more down-to-earth fashion. ‘Personal cleanliness and neatness are the first requisites towards good housekeeping, and no woman who wishes to preserve her husband’s affections, or make him comfortable, should ever waver in those attentions to her own person which will preserve whatever share of beauty she has’ (Australian Housewives’ Guide 1885: 72). In Australia, it was argued, daily bathing in cold water was ‘a luxury all the year round’, and a duty no self-respecting woman need fear: ‘Have a good breakfast and you will be admirably strong enough to resist the slight shock of a cold shower bath’ (Ibid.: 77).

Advice manuals written by stern moralists and reforming doctors may be a treacherous guide to the behaviour of contemporary city-dwellers, most of whom lacked the facilities, let alone the moral resolve, for the daily cold shower. Bathing and showering, as contemporaries understood those words, seldom meant full immersion in a deep tub or under a running shower. Most authorities recommended a daily sponge or hip bath, using only the few quarts of water that could be conveniently carried from the tap to the bedroom, together with a weekly warm soapy tub in order to open up the pores of the body and cleanse it from the impurities believed to accumulate there. The morning shower or bath was designed to refresh and stimulate; the weekly bath, usually taken in the evening, was designed to relax and cleanse (Muskett 1987: 24–34; Australian Etiquette 1980: 376–7; Australian Housewives’ Manual 1885: 78; Wicken 1891: 194–7).

English visitors hailed the apparent superiority of Australian bathing arrangements. ‘There is hardly the smallest cottage without its bathroom’, Julian Thomas claimed in 1893 (Thomas in Dingle and Rasmussen: 29). He almost certainly exaggerated. In his fascinating account of Our Home in Australia (1860), the Adelaide artisan Joseph Elliott describes the contents of his house, minutely room by room. Only when he comes to the backyard, and mentions two washtubs stowed amidst hen coops and assorted rubbish, and characterises Saturday evening as ‘ablution night’, do we gain a glimpse of how the family performed what contemporaries called their ‘toilet’ (Elliott: 75–6, 78). Even in the 1880s many new houses designed for Australian workingmen had no bathroom. Those that had were tiny wooden enclosures tacked onto the back veranda, housing only a copper and a tin bath. A Queensland sanitary inspector considered the typical bathroom was ‘the dirtiest room in the house’ — sloppy, ill-lighted and smelling of urine, disgusting evidence that the bath doubled as a ‘slop-sink’; that is, as a place to empty chamber pots (Elkington 1911).

Bathrooms were more common in middle-class than in working-class homes, though one should beware of assuming that cleanliness was a matter of class. In working-class Richmond, historian Janet McCalman found that bathrooms were more the exception than the rule. Many families lacked internal water supplies and were obliged to heat their bathwater in a wood-fuelled copper in the backyard. That so many did so, against such odds, showed how far ideals of personal cleanliness had permeated the respectable working class (McCalman 1984: 44). In middle-class Surrey Hills, where Moira Lambert grew up in the 1920s and ’30s, the bathing arrangements were not much more advanced:

New technologies influenced the evolution of the Australian bathroom, although they were themselves shaped by shifts in people’s understandings of health, beauty, bodily comfort and pleasure. To understand them we need to appreciate how people felt, as well as what they thought, for the history of the twentieth-century bathroom is, above all, a history of the body and its senses, including that powerful stimulus to disgust, pleasure, arousal and nostalgia, the sense of smell.

In 1967 the artist Norman Lindsay, then approaching his ninetieth year, noticed a provocative article in the Bulletin magazine. The writer Sidney Baker had made the daring suggestion that the bushranger Ned Kelly may have been a homosexual, citing the fact that the famous outlaw was said to have used perfume and had danced with other men. Lindsay was indignant. ‘Nearly all men of that era, irrespective of class, used perfume. My father, an Irishman, a horse-and-buggy doctor, and as dominant a male as ever wore whiskers, always finished off his morning toilet by dabbing his handkerchief freely with perfume.’ Lindsay did not blame Baker for his ignorance of this fact, for he had ‘forgotten it myself till I called it back to memory’. It was one of those ‘trivialities which writers of the period rarely record, because they are conventions as understood by their readers’. In an era when open drains and reeking cesspools polluted the atmosphere, he explained, ‘men, hurrying about their affairs, had no other resource but to clap a handkerchief loaded with perfume to their noses’ (Lindsay 1990: 234–6).

People’s sensitivity to smell, good and bad, not only changed over time, it also varied from one contemporary society to another. In his fascinating book The Foul and the Fragrant, the historian Alain Corbin (1986) notes the contrasting sensibilities of the nineteenth-century French and English.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, Corbin observes, the ‘somatic culture’ was characterised by the progressive ‘deodorization of private space’. First in England, and later in France, the bathroom was being purged of unpleasant smells, and transformed into a ‘sensually neutral and innocent space’ (Corbin 1986: 175).

By the early twentieth century, Australians, too, had begun to transform the bathroom from a humble, often smelly, outhouse into a more ‘innocent space’ (Shove 2003: 94 and compare Lupton and Miller: 17–34). ‘A well-equipped bathroom as an essential to the Home Beautiful whether it be Mansion, Villa or Cottage’, advertisers assured readers of Australia’s leading home magazine in the mid-1920s (AHB 12 February 1926: 5, 9). From its old place, amidst the copper and the laundry tubs on the back veranda, the bathroom was promoted into the most private and intimate zone of family life. ‘The bathroom should be, as far as possible, close to the bedrooms, so that the occupants of the house do not have to undertake a lengthy pilgrimage in somewhat flimsy attire on a winter’s morning’, a Melbourne architect advised in 1925 (AHB 12 November 1925: 26; and compare Archer 1998: 116). In reinforcing a new sense of domestic privacy, the bathroom was, paradoxically, also becoming a mark of social status. ‘Is your bathroom attractive? Can you show it with as much pride as you can your other rooms?’ another advertiser inquired (AHB 12 February 1926: 9). Two themes dominate bathroom designs of the period: hygiene and comfort. Black and white tiles, enamel baths, pedestal basins and corrugated iron shower screens created an aura of antiseptic cleanliness, more akin to a laboratory than a boudoir. Yet the bathroom was also becoming ‘the room in which comfort and convenience count most’, especially to women whose image, often depicted in slinky satin dressing gowns, routinely accompanied advertisements for soap and bathroom fittings (AHB 1 December 1926: 10).

The pursuit of beauty and comfort, as much as the pursuit of health and cleanliness, gradually came to dominate contemporary attitudes to bathing. By the 1920s, the main dirt diseases, such as typhoid and dysentery, had been all but conquered (Cumpston 1927: 206–8). At the turn of the century advertisements for the most popular brands of bath soap, such as Lever Brothers’ Lifebuoy, promised health and safety; but 20 years later, newer brands, like Lux and Pears toilet soaps, were promoted primarily as aids to personal beauty (AHB 2 September 1929; 2 December 1929: 83). Preserving one’s complexion required a program of more frequent soapy baths. ‘Frequent warm baths, at least one or two a week, are a necessity, with the thorough washing of the skin with a good soap to remove oily secretions, perspiration, dirt, dried skin etc followed by a brisk rub of the towel to complete the cleansing and stimulating process’, a 1931 guide to housewifery recommended (Blackmore 1931: 6). ‘Beauty with Pears’ promised one advertisement, extolling the benefits of soap so pure you could almost see through it. From the 1930s Lux began a long tradition of advertising its product through endorsements by Hollywood movie stars. ‘Keep that Wedding Day Complexion’, promised Palmolive. Meanwhile, Lifebuoy reinvented itself by exploiting the fear of social ostracism and romantic failure associated with a dreaded new disease, ‘BO’ — or body odour.

The most serious obstacle to the frequent warm soapy baths recommended by these health and beauty experts was the lack in most homes of a copious supply of hot water. ‘Although the bath has always been acknowledged as an indispensable aid to health and beauty, the average home seldom has facilities for providing in sufficient quantity its necessary complement — Hot Water’, a Melbourne manufacturer noted in the late 1920s (Danks catalogue, nd). He was extolling the benefits of a new invention, the wood-chip or gas bath-heater, as a source of ‘instant hot water’. In practice, the hot water supplied by a bath-heater was rather less than instant or copious. In order to take a bath, one had to fill the heater, a metal cylinder containing sufficient water to half-fill the bath, light the gas-burner or wood-fire underneath, and wait 15 or 20 minutes until the clouds of steam issuing from the heater signified that all was ready. Turning on the hot and cold taps, the bather waited for the bath to fill before at last climbing in. The routine could be interrupted by exploding gas, wood-chips that failed to ignite, water that was either scalding hot or freezing cold, and impatient bangs on the bathroom door as other family members waited their turn. By the 1930s, a good chip bath-heater like the ‘Kangaroo’ (‘a few chips of light wood give sufficient water for a steaming hot bath’) sold for around £5. A superior brand, like the Braemar, which heated enough water for an eight-inch-deep bath in 25 minutes, cost around £10. The top of the range, the Triton Electric Bath Heater, costing up to £15, came closest to the Holy Grail of domestic comfort, instant hot water:

Full-scale domestic hot-water services, heating water centrally and piping it throughout the house, had been advertised since the 1920s, but by 1943, when Professor Wilfred Prest and a team of social researchers surveyed housing conditions in inner Melbourne, only 2 per cent of households had a hot-water service and more than a quarter of households were still heating their bathwater on the stove (Darian-Smith 1990: 98). From the late 1940s, however, there was a rapid increase in the number of houses installing gas or electric hot-water services. Since the 1930s, the primary costs of hot water systems had declined in real terms and the introduction of off-peak rates for electricity further boosted demand. According to market researchers, Australian housewives considered ‘continuous hot water’ no longer a luxury, but a necessity (AWW, 23 March 1946: 13). By the early 1960s most Australian families could simply turn a tap to obtain a copious supply of hot water for washing, bathing, cooking and cleaning (Webber 2000: 175). Probably no other single innovation in the history of Australian domestic water consumption had such large effects. It heralded the rapid decline of the traditional bath-night, for now people could bathe or shower when they liked, without the exasperating wait outside the bathroom door as each tub of water was heated and filled. It laid the foundation for the introduction of other household appliances such as the washing machine and, later, the dishwasher. By removing barriers of time and discomfort, it also ushered in a new era of more extravagant water-use.

By the 1960s, plans for new project houses often included separate shower recesses and, from the 1970s, sometimes an ensuite bathroom as well (Garden 1995: 146, 150–1). ‘There was a time when the bathroom was the worst decorated room in the house’, a 1978 renovation manual began. ‘No soft carpet here, no wallpaper, no daring colour scheme, no comfort; just a utilitarian, cold and sterile room where people washed’ (Masters 1978: 7). Now, however, the bathroom was undergoing a ‘revolution of thought. The bathroom has to have a touch of luxury, and why not?’ Vanity suites, carpets, coloured wallpapers, and occasionally saunas and spas, were ‘touches of luxury’ in bathrooms that as yet usually remained structurally unchanged. Only in the 1990s did the implications of this ‘revolution of thought’ become fully apparent. The bathroom had always been a mirror of changing attitudes to the care of the body. From preoccupations with health and safety it had evolved, first, towards ideals of beauty and comfort, and, more recently, to the pampering of the body and the recuperation of the private self. A recent architectural writer conceives it as ‘a haven for relaxation, grooming and total privacy’ (Hasanovic 2005). Contemporary house designs now often incorporate three or even four bathrooms. The largest of them — typically the ‘ensuite’ adjoining the master bedroom —may be as large as a small bedroom in the houses of a previous era. Designed to express ‘a sense of calm’ and ‘sensuous tactility’, it may look through plate-glass windows into an enclosed courtyard (Hasanovic 2005). Showering, a ritual usually performed at the beginning of the day, is designed to stimulate the body to wakefulness after rest and may take only a few minutes. The bathroom, however, has now become a place for pampering the body and soothing the ego. The indispensable agent of this healing process — whether in sunken tubs of almost-Roman opulence or in pools, showers, spas and saunas — is an abundant supply of warm water.

Much of this advertising is (and was) directed at women and it is likely, as contemporary investigators have shown, that bathing and showering habits vary widely across the population according to sex and age (Randolph and Troy 2007; Hand et al. 2003; Gramm-Hansen 2005).

Since 1900 the amount of water used by the average Australian for bathing and showering appears to have roughly doubled. At the turn of the century a sanitary inspector’s textbook noted that an average Sydney household consumed about 44 gallons of water per head per day. It reckoned ‘that from 9 to 12 gallons of water per head [was] a necessity for a fairly cleanly existence, and this would not allow for baths to the extent desirable in this climate, especially in summer time’ (Bruce and Kendall 1901: 55, 77). By the mid-1940s, per-capita consumption was approaching 70 gallons per head. Some of that increase was probably attributable to a modest increase in the frequency of bathing and showering, as advocated by health and beauty experts and made possible by the introduction of the bath-heaters. Only after the 1950s, however, when gas and electric hot-water services, and shower recesses, became standard fittings in most households, and the frequency of bathing and showering increased, did domestic water consumption rise to exceed 100 gallons a day. In the early 1950s, a family of two was reckoned to require about 20 gallons of water heated to 160 degrees Fahrenheit; a family of three, 28 gallons; a family of four, 35 gallons; and a family of five, 42 gallons, although some authorities recommended almost 50 per cent more (Complete Household Guide: 29; and compare Ramsay’s Architectural and Engineering Catalogue 1949). By the end of the century, Australian households were using on average over a hundred gallons of water a day, over 20 per cent of which was for showering and bathing. This appears to be about twice as much as the members of present-day English households, many of whom, influenced in part by climate, maintain the traditional routine of weekly baths and daily sponge washes (Shove and Medd 2006: 5; and compare Hand, Southerton and Shove 2003). Australian visitors have long despised the English aversion to daily showering. Entering a London pub, Barry Humphries’ caricature of the ugly Australian, Barry Mackenzie, exclaimed that he was ‘as dry as a Pommy’s towel’. But with the imminent onset of climate change, the Australian habit of the daily, or even twice-daily, shower may no longer be the virtue it once seemed to be.