Bathrooms, toilets & laundries

While there appears to have been a good deal of bathing along the NSW coast for the sake of coolness in summer, it seems few people bathed regularly until the late nineteenth century.

Long before it was standard practice to build bathrooms in private houses or provide them with piped water, public baths enabled their nineteenth century patrons to experience the rather novel sensation of having their skin cleansed all over. Most people living along the NSW coast in the nineteenth century had far better access to saltwater, than to adequate supplies of fresh water. Ocean baths and other tidal baths were quick and easy to construct and did not reduce the limited supplies of fresh water.

As in the UK, nineteenth century outbreaks of typhoid and other contagious diseases helped focus attention on the need to improve arrangements for disposing of human waste and providing facilities for public bathing. The increasing commitment to personal cleanliness in the late nineteenth century helped diminish disease and increase the demand for household water. Improving access to an adequate water supply became a key element in efforts to improve public health.

The development of both municipal and domestic baths reinforced the trend to cleanliness.  By end of the nineteenth century, Sydney's better residences and even most middle-class houses had a bathroom of some sort - perhaps combined with backyard laundry. Even so, good baths and piped hot water were a rarity. Freshwater showers were a popular feature of dressing sheds at nineteenth century and early twentieth century ocean baths in Newcastle and Kiama.

Running water combined with the use of gas and electricity for heating and lighting homes contributed to more frequent and enthusiastic bathing and showering. Even in houses with piped running water, bathing once a week on Saturday night remained more common than bathing every day. Into the 1920s, taking a bath in a miner's cottage in the Illawarra could still mean using a tub in front of the fire.

Toilets
By the 1880s, although many leading hotels, offices, clubs and homes of the rich had changed to earth closets, most ordinary dwellings still relied on the old cesspool or pan collection systems. By 1880s, some Sydney mansions had flush toilets, but until the 1890s few houses had an internal privy. Sewage systems were to become a significant source of pollution at ocean baths and beaches.

The septic tank system was invented in 1896 in the UK and the first commercial installation of a septic tank system in Australia came in 1899 in Sydney. Pollution from septic systems contaminated the ocean pool at Avoca Beach in the 1970s.

Dressing sheds at ocean baths included all varieties of toilets, including some that emptied directly into the ocean. Where waves could enter the dressing shed, use of pan toilets risked polluting the baths.

Laundries
The increasing use of boilable quick-drying fabrics like cotton in the nineteenth century helped improve public health. Even when an improved water supply made it easier to launder clothes,  rubbing, kneading and thumping clothing with or without soap inevitably shortened the life of the clothing, so it made sense to wash hard-to-replace clothing (including underclothing) as little as possible. Washing clothes  everyday was a nightmarish thought, once a week was bad enough for most households. The difficulty of providing fresh clean clothes to change into remained a disincentive to taking frequent baths or showers.

In the UK, public bath houses often included public laundries, but this was not the case in NSW. Newcastle City Council did consider installing a washing machine to launder towels at its Bogey Hole baths in the nineteenth century and there was also a mid-twentieth century suggestion that the Port Kembla Olympic baths offer a public laundry.

Laundry became a far less strenuous business only when modern detergents and washing machines became available.

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