Thoughts on Laundry and Nationhood

One advantage of Australia over the United Kingdom, in my experience (although, in light of the recent 'flood events', as the media insists on calling them, it is possibly not really the moment to notice this) is the speed with which you can get your washing dry - and the lovely smell it has when it's spent a day out in the sunshine. Even that stuff you forgot about that's been sitting in the washing machine since last Tuesday (oh, that's just me, is it - no-one else is that incompetent? I feared as much) and is starting to smell like boils (all right, how I imagine boils might smell - accuracy is everything, I agree) comes out fresh and odourless after a day in the Australian sun.

But before this transforms into some kind of nightmarish advertisement, featuring me grinning maniacally, wearing a frilly sprigged pinafore and holding up a box of all new Omo, I will hand over to Rosemary Dobson. Rather than noticing international differences, she spots the universality of washing in her poem called Folding the Sheets:

Folding the Sheets

You and I will fold the sheets
Advancing towards each other
From Burma, from Lapland,


From India, where the sheets have been washed in the river
and pounded upon stones:
Together we will match the corners.


From China, where women on either side of the river
Have washed their pale cloth in the White Stone Shallows
'Under the shining moon'


We meet as though in the formal steps of a dance
to fold the sheets together, put them to air
In wind, in sun, over bushes, or by the fire.


We stretch and pull from one side, and then the other -
Your turn. Now mine.
We fold them and put them away until they are needed


A wish for all people when they lie down to sleep-
Smooth linen, cool cotton, the fragrance and stir of herbs
and the faint but perceptible scent of sweet, clear water.


(From the sequence, 'Daily Living', published in Collected Poems, 1991)