LOCKHART BILL wrote:
>
> Ned (or anyone else interested),
>
>         Here is a small addition to your collection addressing point #2.
>
> > 2. Has anyone studied the movement, concurrent with the introduction of
> > running water, of the toilet from the outhouse to the back porch?  When,
> > and under what circumstances, did it become acceptable to put the toilet
> > inside the house?
>
> Bill Lockhart
> New Mexico State University
> Alamogordo, NM
> (505) 439-3732

In one of Frank Hardy's (a rather irreverent Australian writer) he tells
the story of a bloke whose accountant told him one year his business was
was doing rather well nd he had some excess money he had better spend
before the tax man got his hands on it. So he decided to build a BBQ in
the back yard. The following year the same thing happens but his wife
convinces him to get rid of the shouse in the back yard and install an
indoor toilet. Some time later he was asked by a friend how his new
found wealth had affected his life, to which he replied that when he was
poor he used to eat inside and crap outside while now he was rich he ate
outside and crapped inside.

In my youth in small rural towns in Victoria, Australia, the dunny,
shouse (short for shithouse), library (because of the newspapers kept
there for recycling) etc was down the back yard and emptied by us boys
as we grew older. The tomato garden always grew well! It wasn't until we
moved closer to the city that the dunny man used to collect the cans and
it would have been well into the 1960s before I installed a septic tank
at my parents house against some opposition from my father but not from
my mother.
John