Motivation - the thunderbox

When I was a little kid, our home didn't have a toilet that flushed. Instead. at the end of a concrete path that my Dad laid in the backyard, was a little wooden toilet shed with a wooden "thunder box"inside. This was our toilet for at least 10 years - a hole on top of a wooden box and a little door at the front.

With one income to clothe and feed eight mouths, we were too poor for toilet paper. Instead, there were newspapers cut into strips and a can of sawdust in the corner from which you would grab a handful and chuck in the hole after you were done. I don't recall it being smelly, but man it was dark as in the little outhouse. There was also a wooden axe handle (without the metal bit) in the corner for protection at night. After all, The Bush started at the end of the little dirt road we lived in.

I never felt embarrassed or ashamed of this primitive set up as that was all I knew and besides, everybody in the area was in the same situation - tres egalitarian in an underdog, Aussie kinda way.

Every week a large green and red truck would pull up at the crack of dawn and it's sign "Hunter Brothers" bore the first words I could read. Some rough looking guys would run into our yard, open the little door of the thunderbox, take out the can of contents, lift it to their shouldders and run it out to their truck.My Dad instilled a keen desire to learn and get good grades by saying if you did bad at school, then you'd end up working for Hunter Brothers.

It kinda worked. I came top of my class in Year One!