The garbo, baker, milko, and iceman cometh

Sydneysider: A personal journey

When I was a small boy in Strathfield in the mid-1950s, the council garbage truck’s weekly progress down the street was an affair to wake the dead. The truck had a narrow platform at the rear and a hold-on bar. Two or three garbos rode, standing up on the platform, if the truck had to move any distance.

The driver moved forward about three houses at a time and the garbos ran down the street knocking the lids off the old-style galvanised iron bins. Then they hoisted the bin to their shoulders, ran back to the truck, tipped the load over the side (there were no compactors in those days), giving it a good bang on the edge to make sure all the contents were dislodged. Then they chucked the bin onto the grass verge.

It has occurred to me since that the advent of grass verges, ‘nature strips’ as they were improbably titled in the new suburbs then springing up, may have been partly to help muffle this noisy process. With all that running and hoisting, garbos had to be very fit and, unsurprisingly, many were football players. They also collected empty beer bottles (to be refilled), which they stowed in big hessian bags slung on the rear of the truck.

At Christmas it was the custom to leave the garbos a bottle of beer or three for their Christmas party. If you didn’t leave them a drink, they spilled some of your garbage on the nature strip.

Virtually every household had milk and bread home delivered. In the mid-1950s there were still a hell of a lot of people who didn’t own a car, so there was a lot of demand for these services. There were no supermarkets providing the whole range of daily necessities, and even the electric refrigerator wasn’t yet a universal feature of homes. I can remember my parents, when I was very young, relied on an old ice chest, for which a block of ice measuring about 30 centimetres square was delivered every couple of days by the iceman.

Both the milkman and the baker used horse-drawn vans. In an age when motor vehicle ownership was surging ahead, this was still a more efficient way to make deliveries than using a motor van because there was no need to jump into and out of a driver’s seat all the time. The baker or the milko whistled to signal the horse to move on down the street. Once the horse knew the round, the deliverer didn’t even have to do that. It just ambled on to the next regular customer and waited obediently outside.

The baker trotted down the street carrying loaves in a big wicker basket slung on his arm. There were only two types of bread: ‘white’ and ‘brown’ (or what we’d call wholemeal these days). They were high-top loaves which could be broken into two halves. Some people only had half a loaf delivered each day and maybe a full one on Fridays for the weekend.

My mother sometimes gave me half an apple to give to the horse, for which it was always very grateful, although I’m sure I wasn’t the only kid on the round who gave it a treat. You were never supposed to give the horse a whole apple in case it swallowed it and choked. Being a baker’s horse would have been a better gig than being a milko’s horse because the milko delivered before dawn when small children weren’t abroad.

When I was very young, milk was still being delivered unbottled. The milko used an official galvanised iron pint pot to measure out your regular order and poured it into a billy can with a lid that you left at your front door. But by the mid-‘50s, bottled milk was taking over. You had to wash out the empties and leave them on the front step to be collected by the milko for refilling. Again, it was a very efficient process, which, if recreated today would be hailed as a little miracle of recycling and sustainability.

Old Sydney flats, built in the 1930s and ‘40s often had a little delivery hatch for milk built into the wall of each flat on the stairwell. They had an internal and external door. The milko put your full bottle in the hatch and when you arose in the morning you opened the little door on the inside of the flat and got your milk. Decades later, long after milk deliveries had ceased, my partner and I lived in an old flat in Edgecliffe that was fitted with one of these wonderful little features.

I removed the doors and it became a handy cat entrance.