Plumbing Through the Years

Wow! What changes there have been in plumbing arrangements over the years!

When my father first bought the dairy farm in 1953, there was no running water other than what we got from the tanks. In the words of Dolly Parton “We had running water when we’d run and get it.”

There was a tank outside the kitchen window with a tap on a long shank that gave us water for the kitchen. Another tank was situated at the end of the verandah near the laundry, but to service the bathroom and laundry, it was a bucket job.

There was another big tank at the dairy – again a bucket job – and a big low tank at the pig-sty that served a double purpose as water for the sties (via bucket) and overflow into a trough for the horses and calves.

There was an underground stream in the gully below the sty and sometime in the past somebody had sunk a well and equipped it with a stationary engine pump for emergencies.

For many years water was not a problem, but then a drought set in and as the tanks began to run low, we had to look for other alternatives for our water. There was a windmill up the paddock, but too far away to be of any use for the house and dairy, although it provided a good supply of water for the cattle via a long tree trunk that had been hollowed out, sealed with some evil looking concoction and placed on a bed of rocks for stability. With 44 gallon drums, my father and brothers would spend a day refilling the house tanks from the windmill – soft, sweet water also suitable for drinking.

The dairy and piggery tanks were filled from another well that was on the other side of the ridge, but the water from that well was not so sweet and was what my mother called ‘hard water’, unsuitable and unpalatable for household consumption but okay for the pigs and dairy clean-ups. The two big draft horses worked very hard on those days because the slide held 8 of the big drums, each of which was quite heavy even when empty. The water added an extra 440 pounds to each drum, (roughly 1600kg per load) quite a chore for the two horses even though the ground was pretty level. The hardest part of each trip was getting the slide moving again once it had been fully loaded. The two house tanks were each 1500 gallon capacity, so it meant quite a few trips for the horses before the job was complete. Filling and emptying the drums was not easy either – there were no battery operated pumps then, so it meant a hand operated pump which got very tiring. Invariably, each time the tanks were filled, rain would pelt down a few days later and my father would clutch his pipe stem to his chest and grumble about the wasted effort.

We operated in this way for many years, thinking nothing of looking for an easier way of doing things. There was always hot water from the kettles for washing up and since Saturday was bath day, there was always hot water from the copper which was boiled up for the washing and kept going for the baths. Because of the size of the bathtub, a huge cement monstrosity, baths were taken in order of cleanliness. Being a grotty child, I don’t ever remember getting first bath.

Eventually the idea came from somewhere to put running water into the bathtub. Since we had no water heater, it would, of necessity, be only cold running water, but my father had a plan. A very high tank stand was constructed from tree trunks on the ridge above the sweet-water well. The tank stand was about 25 feet high, suitably anchored deep in the ground and securely stayed, a tank was installed up on top (an operation akin, in those days, to the building of the pyramids some years earlier.) Then the piping had to be connected – long lengths of galvanised iron piping were connected from the tank, across the top of the ground, under the house and up through the floor to a tap and a shower head over the bathtub. Wonderful, we could now have a shower. We quickly learned to shower earlyish in the day - before the sun heated the water to almost boiling point in the pipe or lateish in the afternoon after it had cooled down a bit, otherwise the first few seconds of the shower were cold, then one was parboiled, then plunged into ice again as gravity pushed the cold water from the tank through.

We never did get a flushing toilet on the farm, but it didn’t really matter. Because we’d never had it, we never missed it. Besides, now that we had the shower, mishaps with emptying the can didn’t really matter as we could always have a quick shower to wash away the spillages when the can had passed its use-by date and gave way to the pressure of being hoisted up over the fence to be taken down the paddock and emptied.

Garden watering was left to the rain, or when that failed, the wash water was bucketed into a 44 gallon drum and a big galvanised watering can delivered it to the vegies.

In hindsight, those 44 gallon drums were among the handiest items on the farm being used for everything from drinking water, to tick spray, milk curds for the pigs, kerosene for the tractor and petrol for the car, wood heater for the milking yard (with axe holes in the sides). In later years, one was also cut in half lengthways welded onto pipe legs and, drafted into service as a BBQ complete with other side hammered flat for a cooking plate.

Nowadays I, as does everybody, take it for granted that when I turn on a tap, water will appear, but at times I wonder how my children, or more particularly my grandchildren, would cope with having to work for water the way I did as a child.