Today, its blue paint is peeling and the iron is rusting, but sixty years ago it had pride of place in a kitchen somewhere in Queensland. The house was poor, but what its owners lacked in wealth they made up for with ingenuity. Their 鈥渂ush pantry鈥� could have been mistaken for one of the newfangled Rotary Kitchen Canisters on sale in 1923 at Anthony Hordern, a department store in Sydney. But with a price tag of 拢10, the factory-made pantry cost more than most workers earned in a week. The battered blue pantry, now in the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, cost next to nothing. Created from little more than scrap-a 44-gallon oil drum, flattened kerosene cans and a piece of agricultural water pipe-it provides a lesson in the art of recycling.
HORDERN鈥檚 mail order catalogue was well thumbed and well out of date. It had taken a while to reach outback Queensland, where it was passed around, admired, and then handed on again. The catalogue was packed with the latest factory-made goods and furniture-all beyond the reach of most families in rural Australia.
If there was one thing life in the bush taught, it was how to make do, often with the most unlikely materials. 鈥淢aking do鈥� was a tradition that began with the first European settlers and it was still going strong well into the 20th century among the poor and on isolated farms and cattle stations. In 1925, one Queenslander decided that if anything like Hordern鈥檚 rotating pantry was ever going to grace his kitchen, he would have to create his own.
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The rotating canister pictured in Hordern鈥檚 mail order catalogue was an upmarket variation on the traditional food safe, ubiquitous in Australian homes at the time. Every home needed somewhere to keep food cool and out of the reach of insects and other pests. Without refrigeration, fresh food went off in hours. It lasted a bit longer if kept in a cupboard in which cool air circulated. The rotating canister had drawers for dry food in the upper half and a meat safe at the bottom. 鈥淓very receptacle is fly, ant and vermin proof,鈥� proclaimed the brochure.
With only the illustration to go on, the anonymous craftsman set about duplicating the expensive model from bits of metal that could be salvaged locally. The starting point was an oil drum, already the right size and shape. The hard part was fitting 15 smoothly sliding drawers and a cupboard into the hollow iron drum.
Whoever the man was, he clearly had a talent for design and well-honed metalworking skills. Taking some iron offcuts and steel from flattened kerosene cans, he cut, folded and crimped them into shape, holding the pieces together with metal pins. Then he fixed runners from a central tube-made from a length of water pipe-to the wall of the drum. The bottom third of the drum was fitted with a door with a wire mesh panel to allow cooling air to circulate around any fresh meat inside. The real thing was coated with hygienic white enamel. In the bush, blue paint had to do.
Bare essentials
Ever since the first Europeans settled in Sydney Cove in 1788, people had been forced to rely on local materials and ingenuity. The first fleet could carry only the barest essentials for survival. The pioneers that followed over the next century faced the same problems as they carved out farms in the middle of nowhere.
For all but a few, life on the frontier was hard. Most of the rural population was made up of poor farmers, prospectors and itinerant labourers. Even for those with a little money, conventional materials were hard to get and often outrageously expensive. People were expected to improvise. Immigrants were given manuals with advice on how to make furniture from packing cases, empty barrels and any number of other cast-off bits and pieces. Cotton reels, bottle tops, bits of broken machinery-you name it, it turned up in some piece of furniture somewhere.
The salvaging of second-hand materials reached its peak in the 1870s when kerosene began to replace whale oil as a fuel. Kerosene was cheap, it came in cans and the cans were packed and transported in substantial wooden crates. The crates were ideal for home furniture makers, who turned them into everything from wardrobes to commodes. The cans were even handier. There was almost nothing, it seemed, that you couldn鈥檛 make with empty kerosene cans.
Remove one end and you had a bucket. Two cans soldered together made a washtub. With half a dozen you could make a chest of drawers. And filled with mud and straw they made good, solid building blocks. People baked on them, punched holes in them to make shower heads and cheese graters, even cut them up to make parts for musical instruments.
鈥淎 kerosene tin makes an excellent stockpot,鈥� wrote Mrs Rawson in her Australian enquiry book published in 1894. 鈥淪ome of the best looking and tasting jelly I ever saw was made in a kerosene tin. But the most novel use I ever saw one of these tins put to was for baking scones . . .鈥� The upturned kero cans, with a few holes punched around them, were placed over hot ashes until they were hot enough to bake on. 鈥淭o my surprise they did beautifully, cooking in a very short time,鈥� wrote Mrs Rawson.
By the 1920s, most Australians were living in cities and furnished their homes with manufactured things. But in the country, little had changed. After the First World War, vast tracts of land were granted to a new generation of settlers and to soldiers returning from the fighting. Much of the land was poor, and many of the migrants had little or no experience of agriculture. While a throwaway society was developing elsewhere, country people continued to recycle just about everything. There was no such thing as junk. Abandoned cars, dumped fridges, stolen supermarket trolleys-all the things that litter the countryside in affluent areas these days-would have disappeared in minutes, soon to start a new life as something quite different.