These shifts in the ways that families used water inside their homes paled, however, beside the extravagant, and increasingly volatile, consumption of water outside the home. During the 1970s, Melbourne water authorities calculated that while the average consumption of water inside the house had increased over the decade by 15 per cent, usage outside the house — for such purposes as watering gardens, washing cars and filling swimming pools — had increased by 52 per cent (Dingle and Rasmussen: 368). This was an era of rapid suburbanisation, when the quarter-acre block, the triple-fronted brick-veneer house and the Holden station wagon came to define Australians’ conceptions of the good life (Davison, Dingle and O’Hanlon 1995: 2–17). The new suburbs of the 1950s and ’60s were different from the terrace suburbs of the 1880s, and even from the bungalow suburbs of the 1920s. They were not only more extensive, with larger lots and bigger gardens, but they embodied new patterns of domestic life (Neutze 1977: 28–9). Houses were usually set back further on the block, with larger ornamental front-gardens; but the most dramatic changes, with the greatest influence on domestic water consumption, occurred in the space that, until that era, had usually been known as the backyard.
George Seddon has vividly described the functions of the suburban backyard, as he remembered it, in the 1930s.
It had all or most of: a woodheap, often with a rickety woodshed with a low roof of galvanised iron and a fence for the back wall; a washhouse with two tubs and a copper, with a grate beneath it to heat the water and a wire rack to hold the Velvet soap and Reckitt’s Blue; a clothes line; one or more tanks on wooden tankstands, with mint or parsley under or near the dripping tap in a cut-down kerosene tin, a dunny against the back fence, so that the pan could be collected from the dunny lane through a trap-door; there might be a kennel for the dog, though he often slept under the verandah; there was often a crude incinerator; often an old oil drum, although the rubbish was also burnt in an open bonfire. There might be chooks, usually in a chook house along the back fence, and sometimes a sleep-out, usually a verandah enclosed with fly-wire, but often free-standing (Seddon 1997: 153).
The backyard, Seddon implies, was essentially a utilitarian space: it was a site for those essential domestic activities that could not be accommodated within the house itself — growing food, storing fuel, washing clothes, harvesting rainwater, disposing of waste, human and otherwise, housing animals (compare Gaynor 2006). Already, in some Australian capitals, some of these functions, such as water-supply and disposing of human waste, had been outsourced or brought under the roof of the house, freeing the backyard for other domestic functions, such as housing and maintaining motor cars. Others soon became redundant: the woodshed fell victim to the gas space-heater, the washhouse to the washing machine, and the vegetable garden to the refrigerator and the supermarket.
The backyard, or ‘back garden’ as it was increasingly known, meanwhile began to evolve into a new kind of private domestic space shaped by aesthetic and recreational, rather than simply utilitarian, values. ‘The backyard’, John Murphy notes in his study of domestic life in the 1950s, ‘was a place of pleasure, but also of retreat from the public world’ (Murphy 2000: 27). Contemporary garden manuals characterise it as a zone of domestic seclusion, where the family could relax free from the prying eyes of neighbours and the stresses of everyday life. ‘The back’, a popular household guide advised, ‘should be treated with the same care and thought as the front area. A pleasant garden in which to relax, or to be able to have one’s meals in privacy, means much to the whole family’ (Complete Household Guide: 60).
Modernist architects had begun to re-conceive the relationship between the suburban house and its surrounds. For more than a century, the architect and historian Robin Boyd observed, Australian houses had been designed ‘to fight the un-English qualities of the Australian environment. The sun was shunned’ (Boyd 1952: 93). From the late 1940s, however, modernist theory combined with a new appreciation of the environment to break down the old division between indoors and outdoors. In Homes in the Sun (1945), the architect Walter Bunning showed how suburban houses could be designed with L-shaped plans, large picture windows, deep eaves, stone-flagged terraces, pergolas and patios that brought the garden into the house. The ideal back garden should include both a ‘Secluded Garden’ for private relaxation and an ‘Entertainment and Sitting Out’ area, with a patio, barbecue or pool for social activity (Your New Home Garden: it's (sic) design, cultivation and planning, Lothian Publishing Company [1958]).
These changes implied a significant increase in the use of water for both irrigation and recreation. The most striking feature of the modern garden, consuming as much as 90 per cent of the water used for irrigation, was the lawn (Walsh 2004: 15). ‘This is the age of garden lawns and the smallest home gardener accepts the lawn with all its maintenance as an essential part of the layout’, Your New Home Garden proclaimed in 1958. Green grass had always been a desirable feature of Australian gardens, a nostalgic evocation of England and a symbol of the colonist’s success in taming the Australian climate. ‘Nothing can be prettier than an expanse of rich, green, close-mown lawn’, Coles’ Australasian Gardener noted in 1903. But without the services of a gardener to water and mow it, and a plentiful supply of water, the area of lawn that most householders could maintain was limited. The watering-can, aided by sparing use of the garden hose and sprinkler, and the push mower, were the suburban gardener’s standard tools (Yates’ Garden Guide 1918: 6–7; 1937: 7; 1941: 15). Typical suburban garden plans of the 1920s and ’30s devoted most space to garden beds, paths and utility areas; lawn was often confined to the front garden where a circle of buffalo grass, the hardiest variety, linked paths and garden beds (Pescott: 9). From the 1950s, however, garden manuals began to recommend the use of rye, fescue and other finer, more water-absorbent varieties of grass and to make extensive lawns, with islands of garden and patio, a feature of their designs. Two technological developments — the nylon hose and the cheap motor mower — eased the task of lawn maintenance. Rubber garden hoses first appeared on the Australian market in the early 1900s (Blainey 1993) but they were prone to breakage and not everyone could afford one. ‘A hose is a costly commodity, and the life of rubber is shortened considerably with ill-use’, a 1916 gardening manual warned (Searl’s Ke 1916: 24). The advent in 1945 of the Nylex plastic garden hose together with improved sprinklers and ‘soaker hoses’ offered suburban gardeners cheaper and more efficient methods of irrigation (Hewat 1983: 65–6). Even more momentous was the invention in 1952 by the Sydney engineer Merv Richardson of the Victa motor mower. This simple contraption, a two-stroke engine mounted on wheels and powering a rotary cutting blade, cost less than a quarter of the price of the older roller mowers. By 1961, Richardson had sold half-a-million machines and held 70 per cent of the market for motor mowers (Mason 2005). In less than an hour, the suburban householder could easily mow lawns that would have taken half a day, and considerable exertion, with an old push mower. The characteristic sounds of the post-war suburb were the drone of the motor mower by day and the steady beat of hoses and garden sprinklers, mingled with the shriek of children enjoying their cooling waters, on long summer evenings.
From the 1940s private swimming pools regularly appeared in articles on elite houses in the Australian Home Beautiful. They symbolised the life of luxury associated with Hollywood in the era of Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller. But few Australian families could afford the heavy costs of excavation, reinforced-concrete construction, tiling and filtering, chlorinating and pumping equipment required for a custom-built pool. The swimming heroes of the 1956 Olympics were products of the municipal baths rather than the private pool and during the 1950s and ’60s thousands of local councils, energised by learn-to-swim campaigns, ensured that hardly a town or suburb in the nation was without its own 50-metre pool. The public pool represented a relatively economical use of water: on hot summer days hundreds of children and adults gathered to share what would later, in private hands, offer recreation to no more than a few families. The first changes came in the 1960s, with the advent of the mechanical excavator, ready-mixed concrete and the pre-formed drop-in fibreglass pool. Even more significant was the appearance in the 1970s of the easily erected ‘above-ground’ pools marketed by the Clark Rubber Company. ‘A private swimming pool was once regarded as an expensive luxury seen only in the homes of the very wealthy’, Ian Wigney, author of a popular guide to pool maintenance, noted in 1977. Now, he explained, a private pool was ‘well within the reach of the average wage-earner’ (Wigney 1977: 7–8). Already there were an estimated 300 000 private pools in New South Wales alone. There are no comprehensive statistics of swimming pools or of associated water usage in this period, but it is fair assumption that the rapid proliferation of private swimming pools, spas and water features, along with more extensive irrigation of private gardens, contributed strongly to the 50 per cent increase in outdoor use observed by water authorities during the 1970s. Today in Perth, the only capital with official statistics, about one household in five has a swimming pool, a proportion unlikely to be exceeded in any other capital, except Brisbane (ABS 2004).
