H for

Hills rotary clothes hoist. The perfect swing

H is for Hills Hoist

Memories, light the corners of my mind, misty water colour memories of the way we were ….

Never a truer word has been sung – every time I see one, the Hills Hoist brings back memories of being a child, in summer, swimming, Sooty - our black Labrador, frozen oranges and laughing until you were doubled over in pain.

The Hills Hoist is almost the very essence of Australia. Weird really as it is a clothes line. Yes you read right, a clothes line. Please, allow me to enlighten you about this marvelous bit of Aussie inventive thinking.

The Hills Hoist is a rotary clothes line invented in Australia by Gilbert Toyne in Geelong, Victoria. He patented the idea from 1911 – 1946. The entire clothes line was made of metal and featured an enclosed crown wheel-and-pinion winding mechanism that defined clothes hoist designs here and around the world for decades to follow.

Lance Hill from Adelaide, South Australia started manufacturing the 'Hills rotary Hoist' in 1945 in his backyard and was selling them to the Australian public in 1946 when Gilbert Toyne's patent lapsed.

The name Hills Hoist became a household name right around Australia and New Zealand and it would not be an exageration to say that every backyard featured one. The brilliance of it is that it spins around in the breeze so your clothes dry faster.

So entrenched in my life is the Hills Hoist, I recently rennovated my home and refused to update to a plastic and metal Hills Hoist as, I feel my old one drys the clothes much better.

Not only did our Hills Hoist dry our clothes better than anything else on the market it doubled as a frame for a cubby house, a swing, something to tie the dog to when you bathed him, a perfect place to tie up your younger siblings in a game of cowboys and Indians and a fantastic climbing frame.

Our yard was terraced when I was a kid, on the lower terrace we had an above ground swimming pool. We used to run at the HH, jump up and grab an arm and the momentum used to carry us round to the pool where we would let go and fall into the water. Our dog, who loved water, would use a towel hung on the line to dry to do the exact same thing. We would come home from school to find that he had been in and out of the pool for hours. On rainy days we would throw a tarpoline over the top and it would be like a huge umbrella, towels hung from the wire lines would make it into a great cubby.

Time has moved on from the days of my youth and although I can no longer swing from its metal branches I can sit underneath its wire canopy and remember the laughter and the delicious feeling of falling into a freezing pool of water to the dulcet tones of Babs singing her most famous song.