Face the facts, an Australian icon is under threat

2 hours ago 2

Opinion

September 20, 2025 — 5.30am

“The Hills Hoist is a New Zealand invention.” That’s what they said on a recent episode of a favourite podcast of mine, What Did You Do Yesterday?. Naturally, I wanted to send a sternly worded email: “Not theirs. Ours.”

There was no excuse for the error. One of the presenters is Max Rushden. He’s English but lives in Melbourne. The other is David O’Doherty. He’s Irish but is a regular at the Melbourne Comedy Festival. Their guest was the wonderful Sara Pascoe, English but married to an Australian and mother to two half-Australian children.

You can read all about the Hills Hoist, and more, in the ANU’s funding-threatened Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Rushden, clearly, should have his visa revoked. No punishment is too severe. O’Doherty needs to make a full apology. And Pascoe, having made the sensible choice of a handsome Australian husband, needs to better study the deep achievements of the culture from which he hails.

There is “we”. And then there is “Kiwi”. Together we have a shared history of tussling over things. The origins of the pavlova have long been a source of friction, as with the lamington. There’s the ongoing stoush about the Anzac biscuit, as well as about the flat white with which you may wish to wash it down. Then the question of who gets to claim Russell Crowe, Rebecca Gibney, Jane Campion, John Clarke and – oh, the important one – Phar Lap.

But never in this history of disputation has the Hills Hoist been called into question. Credit goes, and should go, to South Australia’s Lance Hill. The Hills Hoist, in fact, is a great Australian story – one that starts with a fast-growing orchard in suburban Adelaide but also somehow includes the World War II effort to protect Sydney from attack by Japanese submarines.

What? Come again?

The tale is told in Hill’s entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB) – an engrossing resource, open to all Australians, currently threatened by the funding cuts and managerial chaos engulfing the Australian National University.

According to the ADB entry on Hill, the idea came to him on his return from active duty: “After his discharge from the army in August 1945, his wife complained that citrus trees in their backyard had grown so much that there was no room to hang out the washing on their single-wire clothesline. To solve the problem, he built a rotary hoist, using scrap metal and oxyacetylene equipment. After family and neighbours admired the result and placed orders, he decided to earn his living making hoists.”

The ADB explains there were earlier attempts at making a rotary clothesline, but some were made from wood and didn’t last, while others couldn’t be raised and lowered; you needed a stepping box to put out the washing. Lance Hill’s invention had none of these problems: it went up and down and was built from sturdy steel. His problem was sourcing the steel.

Bingo. There was post-war scrap. Damaged military aeroplanes became the main source of wire for his hoists, and anti-submarine mesh, installed in Sydney Harbour to repeal the Japanese subs, provided the stay rods.

I love the way this icon of the Australian backyard – the Hills Hoist – and the terrifying 1942 submarine attacks on Sydney both find a home in the story of Lance Hill. The Australian Dictionary of Biography told me that tale. I hope all Australians will pray for its reprieve.

Of course, the ADB’s entry hasn’t space to cover the Hoist’s ongoing cultural impact. For a start, there’s its role in the drinking game Goon of Fortune, in which a wine box’s bladder is pegged to a Hills Hoist, spun around, offering a drink to whoever’s lips are closest when it stops.

Or there’s the way it marks that briefest time in an Australian childhood, when you are old enough to grab hold of its sturdy beams, spinning yourself like crazy through a too-blue sky, but not heavy enough to be banned because you’ll “bugger the thing”.

Or a third point of cultural significance: it provided the means for the World War II generation to get its own back on the pampered folks that followed. Back in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, those tough men and women of World War II dug a million holes, in the centre of a million Australian backyards, and filled each with a ball of concrete so large it defies description. It was there to support the Hoist.

From the 1980s onwards, fashions changed. People hated the idea of a backyard dominated by washing. They’d rather put a clothesline down the side – you know, in that area where the sun never shines and so the washing never dries.

This is why a million young Australians, their soft hands uncalloused, their hearts (mostly) unbroken by war, were sent into the backyard to dismantle the Hoist, and then dig up the monstrous booby-trap of concrete left by their parents’ generation. This is not the place to tell their story, but many a young man was broken on the anvil of that experience. Reader, I was one of them.

Anyway, What Did you Do Yesterday? is a great source of fun, stories and discoveries. But so is the Australian Dictionary of Biography. I do so hope it survives.