Dunny days

 

Is it possible that toilet paper is the greatest invention of civilisation? Just think about it for a minute and imagine its predecessors. In Australia we know about cut up newspapers in the backyard dunny. For my overseas readers, the dunny was a freestanding small building in the back yard with a rudimentary toilet, the cut-up newspaper on a nail and red-backed spiders, one of our most poisonous species, lying in wait. I’ve never experienced one, I hasten to add, but the image is part of Australia’s mythology. Interestingly, in the first of Clive James autobiographies when he talks about his early years in Kogarah, a middle-class suburb, he records the dunny man coming to empty the septic tank/dunny. I’ve no idea what preceded the cut-up newspapers; perhaps in upper class environments it was cloth, in which case some lowly menial had to not only collect and empty the chamber pot from under the bed but wash the cloths as well!

I should, I know, give the “greatest invention” title to the wheel or the invention of writing in all its wondrous forms or, so much later, the printing press. I’ve recently learned things about two of these.

We have tended to label a culture without wheeled transport as “primitive” and marvel at, for example, the Inca who, despite huge achievements all around in every aspect of society apparently didn’t have the wheel. An article I read in preparation for this blog told me differently. Apparently they knew about the wheel – children played with wheeled carts – but chose not to use wheeled carts for transport. The author’s explanation is to point to the high Andes where the Inca lived and notes that like high mountain ranges elsewhere, the best method of transport is on foot for the people and on animals for the goods; in the case of the Inca it was llamas.

(“The one-l lama he’s a priest, the two-l llama he’s a beast and I will bet a silk pyjama there isn’t any three-l lllama”: with thanks to Ogden Nash.)

In thinking about the printing press, I viewed a first-rate documentary on Guttenberg’s invention with Stephen Fry as the narrator and enthusiast. I suppose there are some of you out there who don’t take to Stephen Fry but I think he’s utterly marvellous, across all genres. In this documentary (which I came across on YouTube) he not only tells Guttenberg’s history but encourages a craftsman to actually make a Guttenberg press, no easy thing as there’s no image of the beast other than a sketch from some time later. Fry also gets involved in making the moveable type in the precise type-face of Guttenberg’s civilisation-changing Bible and made rag paper in the traditional way to print it on (although some few of the Bibles were printed on vellum). And finally he was able literally to get his hands on one of the only 48 Guttenberg Bibles left in existence, only 21 complete.

I’ve read Fry’s marvellous books on Greek and Roman legends – Mythos and Heroes­ – and his equally marvellous Troy, and laughed out loud during episodes of QI. What a polymath; we could call him a true Renaissance man.

Now after that bit of eulogising, let’s return to Citius Altius Fortius or oldest, finest, best (English is such a difficult language – it should be bestest) and so on.

The Roman orator and moraliser Cicero once wrote that the Jews “were the only people to have contributed nothing to civilisation”. Pity he isn’t alive today so we could stuff those words back down his sanctimonious gullet. To be a little bit fair, he apparently said this in the white heat of a legal case he was arguing – but who wants to be fair.

Interestingly, someone has recently pointed out that the Jewish Bible has the precise instructions for coping with the spread of illness that we are now dealing with during COVID 19. In Exodus 30:18-21 the Lord tells Moses that Aaron, the high priest, and his sons “throughout their generations” must wash their hands with water “so that they may not die”; in Leviticus 13:4,5,46 it tells us that if we are infected with a “leprous disease” we must keep our distance, cover our mouths and avoid contact with others. And if we are infected, we must remain between seven and 14 days in quarantine!

Speaking of Jews, our greatest contribution to civilisation is possibly the latke. Latkes are grated potatoes mixed with grated or finely sliced onions and a little potato flour, salt and pepper then fried in a good bit of oil. The first one always falls apart (only sissies add an egg) but the rest are simply ambrosial. Mind you, they’re best straight out of the frying pan so line the family up in the kitchen. Other cuisines have potato pancakes – the Dutch and the Germans come to mind – but I can assure you nothing beats a latke.

 

Quote of the week from Chambers Dictionary of Modern Quotations:

J. Paul Getty: “If you can actually count your money you are not really rich.”