Toileting may not be the most pleasant of topics from yesteryear.Today most people have the luxury of flush toilets. However, before this modernisation, pit toilets were the only type you had. At a homestead you would have a ‘dunny’ in the outhouse down the back. It would be a hole in the ground covered by a pan. At night you had to be careful when walking out there with a lantern. Very unpleasant during a storm or in the middle of winter. Blowflies would be a curse in summer! I’m reminded of the old song, ’There was a redback on the toilet seat when I was there last night’.. Toilet paper might consist of cut up newspapers. If you're lucky!

For me personally the only experience I had of pit toilets was when setting up camp in the bush. As a scout you had one as an essential item of a well set up camp. We had strict rules as to how far from the camp or a river it had to be.

Gerringong Public School 1935.

Which brings me to the toilets at school. Never the most pleasant place even today. However, the toilet blocks that students now use are a luxury compared to those of 100 years ago. Flush toilets were a dream of the future. No, there was great rejoicing if a pit toilet appeared in the playground 100 years ago.  

Here is a tale from Clive Emery of such an event at Foxground Public School and a subsequent incident. Anybody who says life at school was their best ever time has a very selective memory. Although Foxground was a ‘bush’ school, I imagine it was not any better in the inner city.

Now you also need to recognise that in one teacher schools there was often not a teacher on duty in the playground during breaks. The teacher usually lived in a house next door to the school and would go there to have lunch. Life for students in an unsupervised playground may not have always been pleasant.

In the tale below the names have been changed to protect the innocent -and the guilty!

Jackie down the Hole - by Clive Emery

Those who lived in Foxground at the time will remember the tide of progress which brought us a pair of pit toilets at the old roadside school in the late twenties.

Indeed, not even the pending Great Depression could hold back this wave of expenditure by the Education Department, for in the same year the one-roomed, one-teacher school was painted, and an extra water tank installed, and two, one-hole toilets erected.

Now the Foxground Primary school toilets were, to the little Valley community, a milestone which turned into a millstone as successive new seasons' hats disappeared down the holes, and culprits were made to stand out behind the weather-shed on Friday afternoons when the rest of the school had story-reading. Your scribe lost one, as did Esther

Cullen and a number of other pupils. Esthers was first chucked up in a gum-tree, but it blew down in the wind, only to descend to its inevitable lonely grave at playtime.

The fascination of a huge pit being dug was an absorbing event for the Foxground kids, as ’Kempy’(the teacher) appointed prefects in the playground each lunch hour to keep the little ones away. What the prefects got up to while Kempy was down at his home having lunch was another matter, for a Kangaroo Court procedure of the otherwise lawless groups elevated some of them to magisterial might, trying those accused of minor offences, and handing out instant sentences.

And so it came to pass that young Jacky, a habitual offender whose daily appearances for judgement taxed the imagination of even the Foxground school prefects, was given the ultimate sentence- and why hadn’t they thought of it before? … Jacky was to be lowered down the hole!

It was immediately questioned as to whether he would fit through the fixed seats, and would it be more punitive lowering him into the girl’s pit (as the boys had only just begun operating) and was more or less clear and brand new? Devious young minds posed the question, a couple ran up with a ruler and measured the hole and then across Jacky’s shoulders- Jacky standing calmly, not believing his fate.

Yes- he would fit alright…and Jacky froze on the spot!

The big boys grabbed him and took him into the tin enclosure while some of the bigger girls and a few boys started to have slight misgivings. What if he drowned in it? What if the rope broke? Suppose they couldn’t get him up again before Kempy got back?

No, they’d lower him till his feet touched IT, and then pull him up!

 The frightening sentence was carried out with sadistic shrieks from the executioners, but happily for this story, and young Jacky, the rope held; he was hauled to safety, and it was quite safe to assume that if ever Old Kempy heard of it, it would not be Jacky who told him!