Now that makes me feel old.

But maybe it just means I know more things about toilets than other people.

I am going with the latter – no matter how odd that is.

So if you’re wondering, and it could be a question on a quiz show one day, it’s a dunny. And if you don’t know what a dunny is, it’s a toilet. I guess thunder is a noise kind of a thing happening in the aforementioned dunny.

Anyway I also know, from my mother, not my own experience, that there used to be nightmen who trawled the back alley ways of homes in cities and emptied their outside dunny buckets into their carts.

That was just once a week – and the bucket was returned unclean.

My mum said she hated going to the outside toilet – it was scary and her younger brother would often add to the fear by leaping out in front of her as she made her way down the path.

I also know that in major cities, and perhaps minor ones, you had to pay to use public toilets. The graffiti you see now is a little different but back then you could often read “here I sit broken hearted, paid a penny and only farted”.

I actually have memories of perhaps Myer charging a few cents to use their toilets – and then there was the wonderful ladies’ lounge where you could sit on a nice chair and take a break from shopping.

I remember it well from feeling a little off-colour one shopping trip and being deposited there with the words “and don’t move” by my mother who was clearly in need of retail therapy.

Mind you, a trip to Melbourne was always inviting. It usually ended with a set of bobbles, red funky hair ties, and a lunch consisting of a bowl of chips and a chocolate eclaire. Yum.

But back to dunnies.

Our home in Frankston had a septic tank until the early 70s when it was upgraded to a sewerage system. When the trenches were dug it made for a great playing space until pipes were laid and it was filled in again.

And the trench came in handy one day when a friend of my younger brother let off a pop gun right next to my lovely dog’s ear. She yelped and I punched – with all the might of an eight-year-old. Mind you, he was only six, but down he fell into the sewerage pit.

And he was fine. It was the days when you went out to play in the morning, returned for lunch, and then buggered off again until dinner. If you were home you were quizzed on what was wrong. You might have to help do dishes or something similarly unsavoury.

And we had lovely places to play including plenty of building sites going up around our streets. These days they would be fenced off with plenty of warning signs, then they were just enticing places for young children to hop, skip and jump around the foundations and leftover nails.

And so we had sewerage.

I always thought my mother spent an inordinate amount of time in the toilet. Each to their own though. However she later told me it was the only place she could find peace – and a bit of reading downtime. Four kids – fair enough.

These days my husband and I have more than our fair share of dunnies. Four all up. But we do live in a former school – so I guess the kids needed a few.

And we’re back to septic.

No sewerage in our little piece of country Victoria. Which lead to an almost disastrous 10-year wedding anniversary not long after we moved here.

We had planned the day perfectly. Loads of family and friends, a ceremony on our deck, overlooking all those guests, and a wander over to the shire hall for dinner and dancing.

The day before the big day we noticed a bit of an odour, shall we say a foul smell, coming from our shed. On investigation we found the septic had overflowed and was somehow backflowing into the shed. And about to find its way onto our lovely grass lawn.

We rang a company which empties septic tanks. My husband oddly asked me “how much are you willing to pay” to which I shrilly replied “just pay the price”. And he did. And they came and saw and conquered.

And our service was just perfect.

And when everyone had gone home and we made our way back through the pitch black that is the country I felt like penning “my lovely home was getting crappy, but we paid $500 and now we’re happy”.

But I didn’t. I know my limitations and that’s no….ummm, no lies.