BACKYARD CHARACTER DEMISE

 In Australia, the rotary clothes hoist stood as a dominant, silent sentinel in millions of backyards.

For about one hundred years, this symbol of affluence, had been used to hang out the family washing.  The sheets, towels, shirts, trousers and personal smalls are pegged to the lines, to flap and take advantage of the drying breezes from all directions.

Happy, energetic children have also enjoyed the pleasures of swinging from the flexing arms of this backyard roundabout much to the horror of their parents.

There had been some controversy over the origins of the humble rotary clothes hoist, which had been traditionally constructed of pipe, linked with several strands of wire, wisely spaced to allow the breeze and sunshine to reach each drying item.

The clothes hoist had stood silent over the generations, through storm and tempest, dust, bushfire and desertion.

This backyard symbol of prosperity had even been found in the deserted gardens of isolated, derelict station homesteads in the remote, vast Australian outback.

It was just this solid strength which moved two station hands to slip over to the ruins of a neighbouring station, fifty kilometers away, to salvage such a hoist.

There never seemsed to be enough clothesline space when everyone did the washing on a busy cattle station.

So one afternoon, the pair set out in the station four wheel drive utility, to rescue the lonely clothes hoist.

With the ute carefully placed, they proceeded to unbolt the piping at the strategic point, to remove the hoist from its mounting, which was firmly concreted in the ground.

One side of the gangly, heavy structure slowly pitched towards the ground.

The two raiders struggled to place the entire awkward cargo intact, on the tray of the Land Cruiser ute.

With their wide, ungainly load secured, they were ready to leave the scene of the crime.

As the vehicle reversed away from the site, the passenger side was clear, but the drivers side became entangled in a wayward, unseen tree branch.

One arm of the structure was wrenched to a weird angle, but it didnt deter the pair.

As they continued their escape from the property, the arm on the other side, became caught up in a low, roadside bush.

Their journey took them along thirty kilometers of highway between the two properties.  They progressed with their now unrecognizable haul, hanging precariously onto the back of the ute. 

The perplexed expressions on the faces of a gang of bikies resting on the roadside, was a most accurate, unheard appraisal of the passing tragedy.

Another twenty five kilometers along the station road also took its toll.

As the sun slipped to rest over the western horizon, the limp, crippled rotary hoist cast a sad shadow of it former, rigid glory on the roadside verge and vegetation, as it passed by.

Rendered useless by the uncalculated obstacles, the rotary hoist was left to lie derelict and deserted to rust in its final, isolated, resting place, in the Australian bush, on the western edge of the Great Sandy Desert.