Monday Washing Lines...

As I’ve started following Jude of the Travel Talk UK blog via email, today a new post popped up in my Inbox entitled ‘Monday Washing Lines’ which Jude was linking up with this theme on Andrew of Have Bag, Will Travel Blog. I just read the synopsis without opening Jude’s actual post and decided I’d look for clothesline photos I might have. I had great fun, even finding a photo that dated back to 1953! A lot of the photos were from my children’s childhood days and of course more recent photos taken in the backyard of my present home. 

Then after I had this lovely time of finding photos, I then read both Jude and Andrew’s posts fully. 

Jude ‘s post Andrew ‘s post here. 

Hmmm...I should have realised from the names of their respective blogs to realise they would be featuring more exotic locations of clotheslines than suburban backyards in Australia, duh! 😜

It’s a weekly feature on Andrew’s blog and 2 of the posts that I checked out showed washing hung up in Villajoysa in Spain and Kotor in Montenegro. Jude’s post showed laundry hung up rather creatively on a balcony in Malta. So all in all, my collection is rather pedestrian. But I’m still going to write a post about washing lines that have featured in my life. 

Perhaps one of the most significant clotheslines in my life’s journey, I have no photographic record of. It was in the backyard of a house I rented from 2000 till 2002 after I escaped a domestic violence situation. The house was 1930s vintage, shabby on the outside but freshly painted inside. The laundry was in a bit of a ‘lean to’ structure beside the back steps. The rotary clothesline had seen better days. The memory that stands out was a Saturday morning about 2 months after I started living in this house, and I was sitting on the back steps, gazing at the line full of washing that I’d just pegged out. A feeling of contentment came over me as I watched the items moving in the breeze and I knew I was going to be alright. 

So...now some clothesline pics.

1953 Paddington, Brisbane. The back yard of the block of flats where my parents rented the ground floor flat. 

Dad and I are standing under the clothesline...it’s one of those awful old clotheslines where the lines were strung between posts in a T configuration and props were used to hold the lines up so large items wouldn’t drag on the ground. Here’s a pic I found on Pinterest showing a line loaded up with washing. 

When my parents bought a house in the mid 1950s this was the sort of clothesline that my mother had. She used that old thing until the early 1970s when she bought the rotary clothesline she’d always dreamed of. My father was of the opinion that if his mother didn’t have an item when he was growing up in rural Sicily, why should he buy such an item for my mother? That was completely disregarding the fact that his mother died in 1914 when he was 6 and let’s face it, labour saving devices tended not to have been invented when his mum was alive. After he died in 1967, mum bought a lovely new stove, an electric mixer, vacuum cleaner but didn’t get the clothes line or washing machine until later. 

In early 1972, my first husband and I moved into our own home which was 20 years old and you wouldn’t believe it...it had the old post and prop line. Our block was long and narrow and luckily the Hills Hoist people had rotary lines of various diameters so we got one to suit the narrowness of the yard. 

A corner of our Hills Hoist can be seen in this photo and the woman in the photo is my dear mother in law, Elsie. She would come up from Melbourne for a visit and would insist on helping around the house, including hanging out the washing like she is here. The toddler is DD2. 

In this photo the girls are riding around under the clothesline. For some reason, DD1 is riding her old pink trike which she had as a toddler! It was that same trike that years earlier she had ridden down the external back stairs on a 2 storey house and suffered no injuries thank goodness! 


Here’s DD1 sitting on the back deck doing some painting. That clothesline is minus any washing though and on the right of the photo are those stairs that she rode down as a toddler. 


Now for more recent washing lines/clothesline photos. 

When I moved to this house to be with DH he had a very battered rotary clothesline which had been the victim of children and teenagers repeatedly swinging on said line. But pretty soon it would suffer even more indignity. My stepdaughters had a party and they placed a tarp over the line to make a covered area. They left the line covered after the party and went to bed with the idea of getting their dad’s help taking it off next day. It rained heavily in the early hours and the weight of the water in the tarp bent parts of the clothesline down to the ground. It couldn’t be saved so a new line was bought and installed. 

Our granddaughters love to play in our backyard and at this stage have not tried to swing on the line. 

Holly likes to help get the washing from the line; grandpa unpegs the items and she puts the pegs in their basket and puts the towels in the laundry basket. 

Even the birds like the clothesline; it makes a good perch...nighttime 

And daytime...not a very good photo but it’s a kookaburra sitting on the clothesline and he/she was enjoying the ride as the wind was causing the clothesline to spin around. 


So that’s my interpretation of ‘washing lines’.