Life on the West Island - At your convenience

Melbourne was once the West Island’s largest and richest city, especially when it flourished during the 19^th century gold rushes. According to recent figures, it has again become the most populous city in the nation, although some Sydneysiders claim that is due to a dubious change of boundaries to include some semi-rural outskirts.

During its golden heyday, Melbourne became famous for many things, including stately Victorian homes and public buildings; expensive exclusive shops and cosmopolitan entertainment and food. Less well-known – but still admired – were its wrought iron public conveniences which still to this day attract sanitary engineers and general tourists to parts of the city.

In a recent essay, historian Robyn Annear has taken a light-hearted look at these impressive edifices and the influence of a sanitary engineer who subsequently became a household name in Victoria. For more than 20 years, Edwin Fullerton Borrie was the chief sewerage engineer for the Melbourne Metropolitan Board of Works. His name has become synonymous with “taking a Borrie” – that is, what you might do while sitting in one of Melbourne’s historic public toilets.

Borrie is also probably the only West Island sanitary engineer to have a geographical feature named in his honour. He was a product of Scotch College, which records in its blog “Great Scot”: The famous bird habitat Lake Borrie in the Werribee Sewage Farm is named after Edwin Borrie. On the western shores of Port Phillip is Melbourne Water’s Western Treatment Plant at Werribee. Within this, Lake Borrie is a wetland area that provides a haven for thousands of birds. The lake was originally a small swamp with paperbark trees and a few red gums, but it is now a part of the sewage treatment lagoon series.

“Lake Borrie is the most significant wetland in Victoria for migratory shorebirds, and one of the most significant drought refuges for ducks. During the 1982/83 drought the site had almost a third of all of Victoria’s ducks on it. Migratory birds travel to Lake Borrie from as far as Alaska, Siberia, China and Japan, doubling their body weight on the abundant food over summer before heading back overseas,” says Melbourne Water’s website.

There is also a Borrie Street in the suburb of Reservoir which bears Edwin’s surname.

Robyn Annear reported on using one of the public conveniences of which Mr Borrie was very proud: Within the City of Melbourne, every public toilet is assigned a number, prominently displayed outside. A floating borrie greeted me in Toilet 145, on the edge of the Carlton Gardens, where a bog-standard fixture is housed in a heritage cast-iron edifice. Swing shut the heavy door and the interior feels almost ecclesiastical. High-up ventilation holes throw grids of filtered light reminiscent of the confessional scene in a mobster film. Only, in here you’re bulletproof.

A smattering of cast-iron dunnies survives around town, some dating back to the 1890s. Why they needed ventilation holes is a mystery, since originally they were roofless. Only after the city’s first skyscraper went up in 1958 did someone think to put a roof on the pissoir it overlooked.

It was a century before, when piped water arrived from the Yan Yean Reservoir, that civic authorities first gave a thought to public toilets. At the time, even advocates acknowledged the topic as a ticklish one: that “urge which though we may affect to be too delicate to name, we can neither control nor supersede, and which, in the absence of suitable arrangements, must either be checked at the risk of our health or indulged in at the peril of our morality”.

This quote needs to be read in the context that Melbourne’s many narrow lanes – now a major tourist attraction for their culinary delights – were for years used as open air toilets, gaining the city the unwanted nickname of “Smellbourne,” and posing significant public health risks. Annear records that of an evening, urine would stream from laneways branching off the Bourke Street theatre district, coursing over footpaths and down the gutters.

Even so, when public urinals began to appear they were controversial, especially because in the absence of sewers, they drained directly into street gutters. Eventually the sewerage system was built and by the 1870s male and female public toilets became commonplace in Melbourne’s streets and parks.

There is now an online advocacy group known as Public Toilets of Victoria. To win their approval, an amenity must have a gum tree visible from the entrance and a supply of three-ply inside. Above all, it must be free!

Annear goes on to explore the expansion of the system and a recent trend: Public toilets have always posed a problem. But in recognition of their necessity, there’s the National Public Toilet Map app. Public Toilets of Victoria calls it the second greatest use of taxpayer dollars in Australian history, after public toilets themselves. Launched in 2001, the NPTM now shows the locations of more than 22,000 amenities, nationwide. Tell the NPTM where you are and it will calculate the fastest – not necessarily the shortest – route to a public dunny.

Then there was her experience of using the NPTM app: A visit to Melbourne’s Pioneer Women’s Memorial, whose water feature combines trickling spouts with blue-glazed tiles, had me reaching for the NPTM app. Five options lit up in the nearby Royal Botanic Gardens, all with alluring names (not numbers) such as Touchwood and Zelkova. I tried them all. Toilet paper? Check. Gum tree within view? Check. Plus, free birdsong and signs reminding me not to squat on the seat. Two tram rides and a coffee later found me caught short in Brunswick. Relief came in the shape of a dunny stall so compact that, to operate the inward-swinging door, I had to squat on the seat. But hey, when nature calls, I answer.

So when you are on the West Island, you can look forward to interesting experiences at your convenience!