In past posts I have talked about using up our scrap piles, trying to reduce waste by limiting purchases of new fabric, sourcing fabric from Op Shops, rehoming old quilts and giving them a new life and utilising unlikely materials for textile art.  All this in a (very small) individual effort to NOT MAKE THINGS WORSE.  All the terms we hear are good principles to guide us in our creative pursuits – make do and mend; reuse, recycle, repurpose; everything old is new again.  We will not save the world by individual action, but it is a start and better to be on a path that offers small positive outcomes rather than large, endless, negative outcomes.

I started to think about “progress” and the way we do things now, compared to how it was done in the “good old days”.  Is one better than the other?  I thought about changes that I had seen during my lifetime, the last 65 years (that I remember), and questioned whether, the way we did things back then, was more environmentally friendly than how things are done today.  In a serious discussion, you must consider population changes and technology and other societal factors, but those things are beyond the scope of this little scribble.

So, my husband Jim and I were on a 3-hour road trip for a specialist medical appointment, and I asked him how many things he could remember having home delivered when he was a kid.  We were both born in the mid 1950’s and had mothers who did not work outside the home during their child-rearing years.

Our list looked like this, but please comment if you have a different experience.

Milk, – delivered nightly in glass bottles by the Milko, clean bottles picked up for refilling.  I also have early memories of a billy can placed on a gate post at night and filled with fresh, warm unpasteurised milk by a local dairy farmer who delivered his milk by horse and cart.  We also had a school milk program throughout my primary school years, but that is a story for another time.

Newspaper – pitched onto the front lawn by the Paper Boy riding a pushbike

Bread and Rolls – The local bakery delivered to nearly every home and often had iced finger buns if you were lucky.

Fresh Meat – home delivering meat to local customers, calling out BUUTCH! as he approached the house. The Egg Man might also make an appearance from time to time.

Icecream – Most suburbs in bigger towns had an icecream vendor in a van with a cone light on top.  Our brand was called Mr Whippy and he would drive up and down the street playing ‘Greensleeves’ on his roof speaker to attract all the kids.  We would hear him 2 streets over and run inside to beg money from Mum to buy an icecream.

Wild Caught Rabbits – Once a week the Rabbitoh would walk about town calling out “Rabbits, get your fresh caught Rabbits here.”

 Night Soil – Many small country towns in Australia, up until the late 1960’s, had no common effluent system or septic tanks; outdoor toilets involved a metal can which was collected weekly.  The Can Man would drop off an empty can in the outdoor dunny and take the full one, hefting it onto his shoulder and walking back out the driveway to place it on his cart and take it to a local farmer for fertiliser.

Good Deeds – If there was a local chapter of The Salvation Army, they could be found every Sunday morning, marching down the local streets, collecting donations and handing out their paper.  Our local Sally Band rode on the back of a flatbed truck.

We also recalled stories about the Ice Man, before refrigeration was widely available; deliveries of wood, gas bottles, oil and briquettes for heating, travelling tailors – who would sharpen your scissors and knives, and costermongers – who brought a selection of fresh fruit and vegetables from local farms.

These days we have centralised distribution systems, hypermarkets and UberEATS.  The old way of home delivering food would surely be inefficient when we can drop by the supermarket on our way home from work and pick up our shopping – click and collect, direct to boot.  But then we are so tired after working all day that we really don’t want to bother with making a meal from scratch, so we order a takeaway and get someone to deliver it to us. Or we buy everything we need on the internet and the post office sends a little truck around to leave it on our front doorstep, and it might still be there when we get home from work, if we are lucky.

A final word about the Milko.  I hear many people my age claim that milk in glass bottles was a great form of recycling and abandoning glass was a mistake.  I wonder if this argument takes into account the cost to collect, centralise, clean to suitable standard, refill, cap and redistribute the milk in a bottle.  Not to mention the carbon cost of creating the bottle in the first place.

I find the only conclusion I can arrive at is: It’s complicated to feed the world and save it at the same time.

Completed:        May 2026

Dimensions:      1,000mm H X 990mm W

Materials:          recycled polypropylene disposable medical blanket; used dye catchers; commercial threads; Indian ink; black ultrafine Sharpie pen; polyester wadding; commercial cotton backing.

Techniques:       applique