The recent posting about refrigerators took me back rather further in time I think than most of the contributors on GW go.

Even in winter , Australia is not a place where you could leave perishable food out of a cool place for very long . When we travelled in England we were surprised to see some shops with meat hanging in the open , or fish lying on un-iced slabs. Whether that is still the case I do not know , and apologise if things are different now . It is of course not just the heat in Australia , but we also have some ferociously aggressive blowflies and house flies , and there are often ants as well .

These problems were very prevalent in the time of the gold rushes , and since fresh food was at a premium in the Western goldfields , which were adjacent to some of the hottest deserts , it stimulated one contractor there in the town of Coolgardie to do something about it . This was one Arthur McCormick , who invented the Coolgardie safe , named not after its cooling properties as some believed , but after the town itself .

It is a simple but ingenious concept . The evaporation of water requires energy , so that if you place a wet bag over a bottle , and leave it in the sun , the bag dries but the bottle gets colder . McCormick adapted this principle to a box, and refined the idea further by keeping strips of flannel in a tray of water on top , which then drew the water down onto the hessian covering , and kept the food cool under the evaporating cover .

The idea has also been adapted to keeping water in a canvas bag . The wet bag dries from the outside , the water inside gets cooler , especially if it sits in a breeze. I had one on the block and used it in the orchard or down in the scrub rather than going back and forth to the house for cold water. The water of course takes up the taste of the canvas, but quirkily , I got to like that .

I can remember an old Coolgardie safe that lay unused in my grandfather's shed , though I can't remember my parents owning one. What they did own was an ice-chest , a wooden one painted the most virulent of greens . The ice was fitted into metal section at the top . It had a door that lifted up , and a run off pipe for melted water , that collected at the bottom under the ice-chest .

About twice a week then , the ice-man ( by no means as fearsome a person as those named in murder stories ) would come round with his horsedrawn cart and deliver a block of ice to replenish the supply. There was not always room in the upper part of the chest to hold a whole new block , and this resulted in someone being caught with the decidedly onerous task of chipping the old ice into smaller pieces that could be packed around the new block . I hated that job just a little less than the task of removing coal ash from the coal-burning stove, because the iron grate , slightly warped , was always difficult to manoeuvre back into position.

Sometimes too , the ice would run out before the ice-man's next call . It then became my task to ride my bike about two blocks up Quarrybylong Road at the back of our house , to buy a block from the ice factory that was in a lane off the road. It was fun to watch the attendant heave a great rectangular metal container out of the freezing chambers , hose down the rusty looking outside to allow the surfaces of the ice inside to melt , then tip it onto a big saw bench to cut it down into the right sized block. Then it was into slipped into the hessian sugar bag I had taken with me , and I rode home with it on my handlebars . Not without difficulty sometimes , I might add.

When the parents bought a refrigerator ( that first one of theirs was a kerosene model ) they donated the green monster to the wife and me after we were married . We had it for some time before we could afford a refrigerator for ourselves .

Since that day we have had a progression of machines , some large , some smaller . We even at one time , before we passed them on down the family , had a pigeon pair of fridge and freezer . But I must say that we have never had much trouble with our refrigerators . They have always been sufficient to cool my white wine .

Nevertheless I still remember with great nostalgia the cold white wine that I was able to sip regularly while I was working in a Pokolbin vineyard . It was almost back to the Coolgardie safe in that one could tie a string around the neck of a quart wine bottle , and lower it into the deep well down in the cellars . leave it a while , and finish up with a truly cold refreshing drink.