Kitchen Tours: Re-Interpreting the History of Gendered Labour and Technologies in the Home Through Four Australian Heritage Houses

ABSTRACT

Despite its material and metaphorical centrality to the home, the kitchen has been viewed as somewhat of a lacuna in architecture and design histories and heritage accounts. This is in part because of its traditionally gendered and class-dictated use, and its heightened exposure to obsolescence, with the result that there is surprisingly little recorded about kitchen and servant life, or remnant, artifactual historical evidence preserved. To address this historical absence, the paper describes a series of visits conducted to historic houses spanning the 1850s–1970s that are heritage protected and open to the public in the cities of Melbourne and Geelong, Australia. With a focus on the kitchens and associated service and servant areas, the author’s observations, interviews, and photographic documentation conducted on these visits is bolstered by archival research and broader scholarship around the historical shifts in the employment of servant and gendered domestic labour, and the technologies and infrastructure that supported them. In light of established feminist framings in historiography and curatorship, and the turn to micro-contextualised social, technical, and material studies since the 1980s, the paper argues that heritage interpretation and management can offer far more to the re-evaluation and evocation of the history of women’s work in the home. And in turn, that these experiences might sharpen our attention to the seemingly mundane, tacit attributes and values of domestic settings, technologies and infrastructures.

At dawn, Mary, the kitchen maid, first into the kitchen, checked the range was alight and ready for Cook, Mrs Brown, to prepare breakfast. First the servants’ breakfast was cooked and served, and then about 8am, the Sargood family’s … Mary’s morning activities were to blacklead (a mixture of carbon, iron and turpentine applied with a brush like shoe polish) the range and laundry fireplace, sweep and clean the downstairs servants’ area and the stairs down to the kitchen. Twice a week, she also scoured all the big kitchen tables, shelves, and cupboards with hot water and fine sand. Soap was not used as this would taint the food. Mary or one of the junior staff members would take a cup of tea to the cook who rose later than the housemaids. It was also Mary’s job to prepare the nursery and servants’ meals, prepare vegetable dishes; wash-up kitchen pots and pans in the scullery and do any other work Mrs Brown requested. It was hard work, but Mary knew that if she watched carefully and learnt well, she might one day become a Cook herself (National Trust of Victoria).

Protracted lockdowns in many parts of the world between 2020 and 2022 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, meant that the topic of “working from home” has never been under more critical and scholarly scrutiny.¹ Yet the collapsing of boundaries between the domestic home and places of work have been discussed in popular media, often with staggering naivety, as something novel that holds the possibility to reshape the future of “our” working lives. Even a cursory glance back into the past reveals that these perceived realms of home and work have always been completely porous for women as “house-wives”, working mothers and caregivers, and those employed as servants in houses or “home-help”.

In response to the amnesia surrounding this discussion on the present and future trends of home-based working, I became interested in questioning how our histories of domestic labour are currently being preserved by heritage bodies and retold to visitors through historic homes that are open for the public to experience. My focus is the “restless space” of the kitchen and associated service and servant rooms.² For, as Meah and Jackson have explored, “kitchens have much social, cultural and historical significance; they clearly blur the lines between public and private.”³ To carry out the research, a series of four heritage-listed houses in Victoria, Australia, that span the mid-19^th century to the 1970s were identified and visited: Como House and Rippon Lea both in south-east suburbs of Melbourne; The Heights, Geelong; and the Boyd House II, South Yarra, Melbourne. All these houses have large intact kitchens and three had servants’ quarters. The visits, kindly facilitated by property managers, allowed me to examine what tangible evidence these houses do and don’t offer to the visiting public in understanding and experiencing the shifting and gendered nature of historic spaces of domestic labour.

The history of women’s labour in the home is, arguably, now a broadly familiar one but has been less well told in the Australian context. Despite the ongoing fascination with fictional dramas and historical reconstruction of “life below stairs”, and the popularity of acquiring in-depth knowledge about historical food production in popular culture, the spaces of labour in most heritage homes appear life-less.⁴ Yet management of historic buildings and their contents performs a custodianship role of unique physical and spatial archives that have the capacity to be continually empirically and critically engaged with afresh, and in ways that promote a renewed return to the material. As Sara Pennell argues, historical kitchens are important communicators of “the evanescent sensory experiences that shape memory and emotional identification with concepts such as ‘home’, community and family”.⁵

This account therefore aims to demonstrate that historical service rooms, spaces, remnant domestic technologies and artefacts harbour as yet un-tapped potential to construct locally specific and rich, tangible re-readings of the history of home-work and workers. In turn, the paper suggests that the legacy of feminist frameworks of historiography, curatorship, and activism, and the turn to micro-contextual, gender-aware historical studies since the 1980s, can offer much to this re-evaluation, interpretation, and display of domestic sites.⁶ Critical heritage studies can thereby lean heavily on the legacy of Donna Haraway’s argument for the re-situating of “the politics and epistemologies of location, positioning, and situating, where partiality and not universality is the condition of being heard to make rational knowledge claims”.⁷ How might the personal stories of the likes of the maid Mary in the opening extract be re-situated in the places where domestic work was enacted, and re-figured as more palpable to wider and more diverse audiences? And in revisiting these four heritage house interiors, what more can be said about the progression of the nineteenth-century kitchen as a place of invisibility and exclusion, powered by segregated and outsourced labour, to its centralised and sociable location in the modern, “efficient”, “servantless” and open-plan house?⁸

Re-Framing Domestic Labour Histories

It has been well documented that first wave feminism and the suffragette movement were supported by other working women’s labour in the houses of those who had more time to devote to social and political causes outside their own homes.⁹ As Dolores Hayden emphasises: “Almost all American women involved in politics between 1870 and 1930 saw domestic work and family life as important theoretical and practical issues.”¹⁰ Histories of the lives of women have exposed that capitalist exploitation of labour was not limited to the factory floor, and was just as widespread in the home as workplace.¹¹ Therefore, the domestic environment has been recast as a potent place of labour struggle.¹² From the 1970s onwards, feminist accounts also called into question the heralding of the so-called labour-saving modern house, which still entailed full attention by the home-maker to keep clean and serve the expectations of an idealised family life.¹³ However, these critiques, Hayden suggests, did not go far enough: “Gender was the culprit; material culture was satirized and criticized but the architecture of gender was not reworked.”¹⁴

Scholarly historical work that followed in the 1980s contributed to the broader project of constructing new social histories using “bottom up” methods, including oral testimony, observation, and careful attention to gender, and sought to re-address the subject of housework and women’s historical role in home-making. For example, Marilyn Lake advocated for lifting the veil of ubiquity of women’s assumed role in the home, so as to recognise the significance of women’s work, and to attribute those roles more of a speaking part in larger histories: “Our challenge is to transform the disciplinary paradigm by challenging the masculine model of social reality which underpins it, a model which honours death over birth, the individual over the collectivity, the self-made man over community-sustaining women.”¹⁵ Key histories like Susan Stresser’s Never Done: A History of American Housework (2000), and B W Higman’s Domestic Service in Australia (2002), rose to this challenge and reassessed hidden histories of domestic labour patterns and associated technologies, thereby intrinsically linking the home to broader narratives of industrialisation, economic and social modernity, and in the process contributing to feminist theory and practice.

Likewise, museum curators from the late-twentieth century onwards began to redress the overwhelming focus on expansive masculine pursuits of war, nationalism, and industrialisation, which had relegated feminine stories on the home front.¹⁶ Museum displays of historic interiors in Australia, including at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the Melbourne Museum sought to shift “the low priority afforded to the research of women’s material culture,” and to challenge the representations of “women’s domestic work when it had been rendered invisible and, when visible, as unskilled and unimportant.”¹⁷ Other exhibitions concentrated on domestic technologies including Mechanical Brides: Women and Machine from Home to Office at the Smithsonian Institute in 1993.¹⁸ Also at this time elaborate tableaux of historical domestic interiors begin to be recreated in museums, and this has continued with, for example, New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibiting a full replica of the Frankfurt Kitchen designed by Grete Schütte-Lihotzky in 1926–27 in the exhibition Counter Space: Design and the Modern Kitchen (2011).¹⁹

Following formative investigations by Siegfried Giedion that drew critical attention to domestic technologies,²⁰ scholarship in architectural history and theory turned to the intersections of gender and domestic space via the work of, among others, Jane Rendell (2000), Beatriz Colomina (1994) and Hilde Heynen (2005).²¹ Barbara Penner, Elizabeth Darling, Annmarie Adams, and Caroline Ford have also written micro-histories of women’s roles in modern kitchen design and household.²² Despite this, there is still a lack of historical architectural attention on kitchens, arguably all the more marginalised from the pre-WW I period because they were either dismissed as a feminine domain that lacked extant evidence in wealthier houses, or consisted of very rudimentary amenities within living spaces in poorer houses.²³

Arguably heritage house museums have so much to contribute to the long overdue process of redress because of their unique collections, and their target audiences which tend towards women and families. As Iain Robertson writes: “Houses, quotidian and vernacular, and the artefactual memories they embody, are one of the most important loci for the performing of heritage from below.”²⁴ Yet wholesale re-thinking of domestic spaces of production, reproduction and labour has permeated heritage listings, conservation management, interpretative and display practices surprisingly little to date in comparison to their museum counterparts. Traditionally, sites of male industrialised work have been given far more attention, and impacts on family life all too prevalently ignored.²⁵ While the heritage industry has gone some way to questioning the delivery of exclusively top-down versions of historical interpretations – the biographies of male owners of stately homes for example – the unrecognised, incomplete, and bottom-up accounts that broaden understandings of all former occupants of houses – and evidence of their labour remain scant.²⁶ Properties preserved for either their uniqueness, or their representativeness of different historical periods, can provide tangible, physical evidence enhanced through interpretation and visitor experience to better understanding the planning and arrangement of rooms and their access; the hierarchies of design attention including materiality, visibility, and decoration; and perhaps most profoundly the impact of domestic technologies and infrastructures on service and labour. It is this last attribute of the remnant technologies of cooking, washing, and cleaning that I now briefly address before recounting the series of house visits.

In her ground-breaking book More Work for Mother, of 1983, Ruth Schwartz Cowan investigated both “work processes” and “technological systems” of domestic labour. Her analysis emphasised that housework is part of a wickedly complex and never-ending series of circular working tasks that are interdependent, and that the technological systems that service these tasks as sequences of tools and technologies are intimately interwoven. Cowan writes: “Thus the history of housework cannot properly be understood without the history (which is separate) of the implements with which it is done and vice versa. The relation is reciprocal, perhaps even dialectic.”²⁷ In this account, however, Cowan did not include any substantive investigation of the architecture, planning, and built-in infrastructures of home technologies. This was partially addressed by other more technology-focused domestic histories (such as those by Forty (1986) and Girouard (1979) respectively.²⁸ However, I have found Zoe Sofia — reflecting on Lewis Mumford’s formative thinking on the history of technologies in the 1930s — useful in further framing how technologies associated with women’s labour and lives have largely been lost or overlooked. Sofia recounts how Mumford distinguished machines and tools, and technologies of “containment and supply”, into three categories: utensils (baskets, cooking pots, bins, water storage, etc); apparatus (brick kilns, washing machines, etc. as well as the specialised spaced that housed them like kitchens and laundries); and utilities that supply essential infrastructural services.²⁹

Sofia’s feminist critique is useful in reflecting on heritage assessments and conservation management plans of houses which have tended to favour integral built fabric over machinery, service infrastructure or apparatus, and architectural ornament and decoration over domestic utensils and containers. Sofia continues: “To keep utensils, apparatus, and utilities in mind is difficult because these kinds of technological objects are designed to be unobtrusive’ and like their assumed user to ‘make their presence felt, but not noticed.”³⁰ Technological apparatus and utilities are also subject to profound obsolescence, and simple utensils are lost over time. As Gaby Porter writes, objects likely to survive obsolescence are those that are superior in materials and construction or cutting edge in the face of technological change; those that are associated with the “prosperity and permanence of their owners;” and those that are associated with individuals and groups who are very aware of their own importance and significance.³¹ As will be demonstrated in the analysis of the four houses, the possessions of home-owners have fared far better than those of their workers, however vestiges of domestic hierarchies that reflected the ordering of familial lives have survived, in particular when inbuilt into the infrastructure of the houses in spaces and objects like service stairs, alarm bells, cooking, and serving technologies.

Finally, before embarking on re-telling the house visits, it is also important to acknowledge that, just as the re-scripting of historical narratives is challenging to write and to be heard, so too is the task of revising heritage interpretation problematic. Few personal or detailed records survive about domestic servants, particularly those classed as unskilled, so the conditions and activities of their employment are not readily available. Scarce funding tends to be devoted to maintaining the core fabric of the properties, and the two years of pandemic-related lockdowns in Melbourne exacerbated this situation. My visits have been informed by research into the broader histories of domestic design and labour, along with specific details provided by each property’s conservation reports. This has been further supplemented by my own observations of each house’s form and arrangement, and photographic documentation which are elaborated on before returning to offer some broader conclusions about interpreting the presences and importantly the absences of gendered labour in the houses under review.³²

Como House: The Separation of Leisure and Labour

Como House is a substantial house and garden property in Melbourne owned and managed by the National Trust of Victoria since 1959. The house was added to and altered over time with a one-storey kitchen, scullery, and outbuildings – constructed of rudimentary rendered mudstone rubble – forming a separate wing to the main two-storey house, dating from sometime between 1846 and 1855.³³ Given its level of authenticity and intactness, it provides a valuable physical record of domestic life in over 100 years of occupation. Upon entering the estate grounds, visitors are encouraged to walk firstly via the new café and shop, through the laundries, scullery, stables, and kitchen that open out onto a rear courtyard and are connected to the main house via a verandah. This is obviously not how guests would have encountered the grand house but might be more akin to service and tradesmen’s experience via the backside of the grounds. At the time of my visit, these service quarters were undergoing significant structural and material conservation work and were largely inaccessible to visitors.

In terms of spatial and functional arrangements, Como House exemplifies a tradition in large urban houses and rural Australian homesteads where service areas and kitchens were built to be spatially and structurally severed from the main house.³⁴ This was for functional, sensory, and social reasons: separation attempted to mitigate fire risk, to isolate the smells and noises of cooking from formal public and private rooms, and to lessen opportunities for interaction between servants and family. Some were separated entirely, and some connected with a covered way or verandah as at Como House.³⁵ Despite this separation, the kitchen at Como “was the domestic and administrative centre of the estate”, and also doubled as rudimentary staff dining and living quarters to furnish the community “below stairs”, indicating that emotive associations of the hearth as the heart of the house had evolved in the 19^th century to the kitchen and the formal dining rooms depending on social standing.³⁶ This spatial configuration made for long distances between food preparation, laundry areas and the formal dining, living, and entertaining rooms: servants would move to and from the kitchens via steep, narrow, and winding service stairs. As written by a Lady Casey of Queensland in the 1880s: “It seemed that people preferred to eat tepid dishes, delivered with difficulty from a distance to the awful risk of smelling food as it cooked and of hearing the laughter and mutterings of the cook and her helpers”.³⁷ On the day of my visit it felt highly evocative to climb these service stairs and imagine carrying full plates or buckets of water, however this space is generally not open to the public, thereby diminishing visitor appreciation of this important apparatus of spatial and visual segregation.

Other hierarchies are embodied in the fabric of Como. In a material sense, the dark-textured walls of red brick and rubble stone in the kitchen and servants’ wing contrasts with the plastered and painted white exterior of the main house. The original kitchen is finished with stone paving, built-in cupboards and draining boards, and these features are still intact today. Around the large, well-scrubbed and locally made wooden kitchen table, all sorts of domestic tasks were carried out including the making of candles, the salting down of vegetables, the boiling up of soap, and the preserving of fruits. Unlike the formal rooms of the house, there were few chairs in the service rooms for sitting or resting. The walls were originally covered in lining paper, white-washed or painted to reflect light and aid hygiene, again in contrast to decorative wallpapers in the main house. There were no ceilings and high windows modestly aided ventilation from the smoke of the ovens but did not allow easy view between the outside and inside of the service rooms (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Como House, Melbourne, kitchen space: photographer author.

There is little by way of specific information available to the visitor about the servants at Como. In its heyday it is expected that there would be a female cook, housekeeper, nursemaid, lady’s maid, laundress and seamstress, along with male gardeners, stable hands and groundsmen to service the lifestyle of a self-styled aristocratic family when visiting Melbourne from the country. By the late 1950s Como was maintained by only one housekeeper and cook and one maid.³⁸ Domestic servants in Australia, particularly those who could work at prestigious properties such as Como, were in a constant state of short supply and received a working wage that was markedly above those of comparable duties in England, so as to compete with factory and shop work in the rapidly expanding and developing colonial city. To retain workers, house mistresses were obliged to offer incentives in the form of more reasonable conditions, and concessions on the wearing of uniforms. Employment advertisements also featured the latest household laboursaving devices, such as novel gas appliances, running water and electricity services, as indication of their scarcity and as inducement to work.³⁹ A good cook was in high demand yet, as the opening quote of this paper describes, the work was unrelentingly hard and wages were relatively low in particular for women.⁴⁰

In terms of domestic technologies of supply and containment,⁴¹ technological advancements in the 19^th century fuelled slow change in kitchen work with open fires, rudimentary fire boxes and wood fired bread ovens gradually being replaced, at least in larger middle-class homes, with a cast iron cooking range imported from England, and typically fired by wood, rather than coal. The improvement of ovens had a notable impact on labour in terms of lessening the demand for fuel, increasing flexibility of use and the ability to regulate temperatures. But, as architect and historian Phylis Murphy has written, oven designs changed slowly, and “there was no pandering to the dictates of fashion.”⁴² Gas was mistrusted by many house mistresses and cooks until well into the 20^th century. By the 1890s electricity was installed at Como, and a connection to sewerage disposal outside the home — however this was not typically reticulated to households in Melbourne until the early 20^th century. If better informed through interpretation, visitors might view the plumbed enamelled sink and brass taps as key to alleviating the burden of fetching water offsite, and appreciate the importance of connecting houses to sanitary utilities in Australian cities.⁴³

The inclusion of work utensils in the kitchen display goes some way to conjuring how the kitchens may have looked when in use: arrays of polished copper utensils providing a degree of ornament in utility; cooking equipment such as roasting spits and coffee roasters, and utensils like large forks, spoons, strainers, skimmers, and grindstones described as “tools for the housewife’s hand.”⁴⁴ The National Trust of Victoria provide some historical interpretation in the form of guided tours, signage, and the curation and management of these room tableaux. They have also staged a few visitor-orientated events in the kitchen area. At the time of my visit, however, interpretation that might promote understanding of the lives of past workers was fairly scant, with just one photograph of a grouping of unnamed servants from the house loose on the kitchen table, and a recipe and remedy book of the period open on the dresser. Containers, crockery and utensils not original to the house have been collected and displayed as period props. Other hints of former occupation and everyday labour include, for example, a display of washing in the process of being done, and cast-iron pots placed on stoves (Figure 2). As Young has noted: “the reduction of house museum interpretation to a conventional assemblage of ‘the warm parlour of the past’ merely reinforces stereotypes.”⁴⁵

Figure 2. Como House, Melbourne, laundry space: photographer author.

Rippon Lea House: Labour Goes to Ground

Rippon Lea is situated in Elsternwick, Melbourne and is one of Australia’s largest and most intact private suburban homes that was bequeathed to the National Trust in 1963. The polychromatic brick estate, designed by Reed and Barnes from 1864 onwards, was built for Frederick Sargood and evolved over 35 years as a 15-room family home for entertaining and socialising.⁴⁶ Ten years after its completion Marion Sargood died while giving birth to their twelfth child and the house was resold to Benjamin Nathan. In 1911 it was inherited by Nathan’s two daughters Louisa and Lorna. Louisa made more substantial alterations in the 1930s including the building of a swimming pool, that was rare for the time, and brought more than a hint of Hollywood glamour. During this period, the original kitchens located in the semi-basement floor were superseded by a new industrial-scale kitchen on the level above to service the lavish lifestyle focused on entertaining.

Remarkably, despite their obsolescence, the original expansive service areas on the lower ground floor were left intact and reflect the original configuration of the 1880s when rooms like the laundry and scullery, cool room and pantry, kitchen, dairy, cellar, fuel stores, and day nursery were added to and housed an estimated 20 servants. This sequence of spaces is therefore rare and highly evocative. However, only around half of the 12 rooms are typically open for very limited public viewings, and the kitchen basement is not normally part of house tours.

In contrast to Como, and typical of the Edwardian period, these abandoned rooms are overwhelmingly dark in tone aside from glazed wall tiling, and today are dim, dusty, and damp (Figure 3).⁴⁷ Basement kitchens were much more common in Britain than Australia. Enhanced by slate floors, they maintained more constant temperatures. Shielded from the casual view of owners and guests, frosted glass in openings allowed for minimal light without affording the visibility of servants at work. The provision of a servants’ sitting room at Rippon Lea was testament both to the number of servants and the need to attract and retain “good help”.⁴⁸ These were spartan rooms with no heating or lighting, but as the interpretation signage states, allowed for some free time for “talking and mending”. With far fewer servants living-in service by the late 1930s it was converted to laundry and drying rooms, and stairs were relocated to better access the main house (Figure 4).

Figure 3. Rippon Lea, Melbourne, basement kitchen space: photographer author.

Figure 4. Rippon Lea, Melbourne, basement service space: photographer author.

Depending on one’s position, below ground kitchens therefore had both advantages and disadvantages in being spatially disconnected from the main house. As at Como, an elaborate network of steep and narrow passages and stairs were designed to convey the products from the kitchens to the first-floor dining areas and other public rooms.⁴⁹ Servants were expected to be on call 24 hours a day, until gradually more regulation of working conditions in Australia was achieved.⁵⁰ Symbolic of this ready availability of bodily labour, and lack of agency over time, an intricate system of bells, and later electrical alarms, were installed to facilitate communication between the staff downstairs and where and when assistance was required in the main house. This system is still very evident at Rippon Lea — call bells were not abandoned but indeed expanded in the late 1930s when the kitchen moved to the first floor (Figure 5). Kitchen technology thus supported one-way communication, spatial and visual separation, and a regime of segregation and surveillance. A dumb waiter device was also installed in 1882 that connected the kitchens to the servery upstairs and was powered by hydraulic power pumped from the lake in an attempt to increase the speed of delivery of food and mitigate some of the work in carrying heavy loads up and down stairs. This defunct technology of communication and portage is perhaps the most powerful evocation of the absent servant in the house today.

Figure 5. Rippon Lea, Melbourne, basement, stairs and service bells: photographer author.

In respect to other domestic technologies, there remains a fascinating array of integral appliances, fixtures and infrastructure including the substantial kitchen range, a number of sinks, benches and pantry storage cupboards, laundry copper, and drying racks in the servants’ sitting room dating from later conversions. A sophisticated ventilation system was built into the house, by the 1880s it was supplied with fresh water from rainwater storage tanks, and then connected to mains water by the end of the 19^th century. Toilets, in the form of earth closets, drained to an external pit, where sewerage was treated and used on the Rippon Lea grounds as liquid fertiliser. The historical documentation of the house, including auction and employment notices, tell us something about the kinds of artefacts and utensils that were originally contained in the kitchens, although these are not evident to visitors. Other displays are only superficially indicative of how the rooms might have been used, and include an odd assortment of crockery, earthenware vessels and bowls of fake fruit to signify the preparation of food.

There are a few interpretation boards in situ that attempt to convey a little of this kind of historical detail to visitors. Tour notes for guides are more thorough in describing what life was like “below stairs”. It is known, for example, through a history of employment records that between 1879 and 1881 Rippon Lea employed a butler, cook, nurse, and governess, housemaids, ladies’ kitchen and scullery maids like Mary (who washed dishes by hand for up to 500 people), a dressmaker, coachman, stable hands, gardeners, and housekeeper. Other interpretation notes for tour guides emphasise all the endless tasks, processes, and physical actions that female servants would perform in the course of their days: washing dishes; preparing and cooking food; making preserves, jams, sauces; preparing and storing meat; making butter, jellies, and pastries. While laundry work, prior to the invention of automated washing machines, included “bluing”, starching, washing and steeping in urine, rubbing with soap, pounding, or batting, mangling, drying, ironing; making soap; maintaining fires for the copper and so on.⁵¹ The wording of employment advertisements for these kinds of positions — with respectability and thoroughness being highlighted as desirable — also indicate something about the moral presumptions and attitudes that prevailed about the relationships between employers and domestic employees.⁵² A timber screen demarcates where the pay office for the servants used to be located, and could be explained as a reminder of the house’s economic role as a significant employer in the area.⁵³

The Heights: Streamlining Home Labour

The Heights is also managed by the National Trust of Victoria. It is a rare surviving, heritage-listed prefabricated residence of German origin that was shipped to and erected in Geelong, Victoria, in 1854.⁵⁴ The estate included a substantially intact coach house, groom’s cottage, stables, and kitchen garden, and also contains a rare example of a complete 1930s modern, “fitted” kitchen. Like many renovations of this era, part of the verandah was then filled in to become a pantry and eating area. Kitchens were, by the post-WW I period, transforming into more specialised spaces, due to new ideas in hygiene and designed efficiency: tiling became more extensive, rooms were made brighter through electric lighting and more daylight, and appliances and finishes became sleeker and streamlined.⁵⁵ At the Heights, in contrast to the two 19^th century kitchens, the stainless-steel sink is over-looked by a generous window that affords sunshine and a view. Modes of cooking and storing food were also evolving with the original range on the extended, modernised, sealed, and tiled-in. Built-in cabinetry, stainless steel, and terrazzo bench tops and other fittings remain intact today as a rare unaltered survivor of the 1930s. A large table tightly flanked by windows and elaborate built-in pantry cupboards signals a historic shift in the eating of casual meals — migrating away from the formal dining room and into the kitchen which was smaller but comfortable, efficient, and habitable place.⁵⁶ With the cooking, storage, and preparation areas now compressed into one main room, the layouts could allow for more practical bodily movement while undertaking tasks. This accords with Giedion’s 1947 history of mechanisation in the home, which pictured the modern “organized cupboard” — complete with “space-saving compression” and well-ordered utensil drawers — that symbolised the pursuit of scientific housekeeping and efficiency from the late 1920s onwards.⁵⁷ When I visited the Heights in 2021, the kitchen was the highlight of the house, in all its lemon-yellow Moderne Laminex and chrome glory (Figures 6 and 7).

Figure 6. The heights, Geelong, kitchen space: photographer author.

Figure 7. The heights, Geelong, kitchen space: photographer author.

The associated servants’ quarters in the south-west corner of the house – which included a sitting room, bedroom, bathroom, laundry, kitchenette, and direct access to the kitchen garden – were deemed of secondary heritage significance, due presumably to their alterations and lack of built-in decorative or functional details.⁵⁸ Occupied at some level until the house was vacated in the mid-1970s, a clear hierarchy of finish and comfort is at play, with lower ceilings and rudimentary decoration and heating throughout this area, although more comfortable and sizeable servants’ amenities, as furnished from the 1930s also speaks of attempts by housewives to address the difficulties of attracting and retaining servants by this time. Distinctly separate entry and exit ways still reinforced the “right of entry by class”, with people, goods, and services all supplied through the busy tradesmen’s entrance (Figure 8).⁵⁹

Figure 8. The heights, Geelong, service space: photographer author.

The Heights kitchen is representative of an interesting period of transition in domestic labour in Australia which accords with aspects of both American and British experience. With this absence of live-in servants came the shift towards the visibility and spatial centrality of the kitchen into the home: “In collapsing the food/eating axis spatially, early twentieth century house builders drew old functions into the house.”⁶⁰ The power of technology associated with modern design is firmly on display in terms of the material fabric of the kitchen, the streamlining of design and physical labour, and the associated steady decline of household servants. As Hayden writes of the 1930s: “Home economists and household engineers soon attempted to provide a more modern answer, to seep the sacred hut into the twentieth century with the power of technology.”⁶¹ Electricity promised a way forward and supposedly out of the tyranny of housework, and would enable the replacement of a large servant workforce to address the perennial “servant problem.”⁶² Electric appliances like Electric Servants Australian General Electric, were advertised as literally becoming the home-owners surrogate “servant.”⁶³ Although the presence of a service hatch, electrified bells and a strange xylophone contraption for communicating between staff and the family reminds that this transition was far from complete in pre-WWII homes of the wealthy. However, the Heights clearly demonstrates an advancement in the transition towards reconfiguring the kitchen room as a technological appliance in itself, that contained dedicated utensils and was serviced by more elaborate and reliable utilities. While the extensive built-in cabinetry and dedicated work-tops begin to fulfil the brief of designed unobtrusiveness which, like their users, were fashioned to “make their presence felt, but not noticed.”⁶⁴

Boyd House II: Invisibility Takes Command

After the Second World War, technology was consolidated as a reliable and cost-efficient replacement for the female servant. The shifting burden of housework from domestic help to the housewife represents a significant lifestyle change for middle class women: “This passing of the baton from servants to the mistress of the house placed heightened importance and status on the kitchen and the labour that happened within it.”⁶⁵ As Pascoe writes, post-WW II families spent more time together in communal spaces like the kitchen, living and dining rooms, and as kitchens inched away from the invisible margins of the house towards the centre, they increasingly became the centre of shared activities often focused around new technologies of food preparation. Or at least that was the image sold to Australian women via new and increasingly popular homemaker magazines that now engaged them in planning and buying domestic dreams that were increasingly gendered.⁶⁶ This dream of the abundance of domestic appliances and utilities was sold with the allure of eliminating the grinding labour of housework as well as glamorising the cooking and serving of food to the nuclear family. While largely American in origin, Australia increasingly also began to manufacture its own appliances. However, in the 1940s only 13% of Australian homes had a fridge and 2% a washing machine.⁶⁷ As women retreated from the labour market after World War II, housework began to be subject to ever-escalating expectations of domestic perfection.

The Boyd House II is perhaps not representative of typical suburban homes of the 1950s in South Yarra Melbourne, but certainly made an impact on domestic architecture of the period. Designed by Australian architect and writer Robin Boyd, it was constructed in 1958 for the Boyd family. The property is now managed by the Robin Boyd Foundation in the service of promoting wider appreciation and awareness of good design and the legacy of the work of Boyd. Although not strictly a house museum, the house is heritage-listed and protected, and is open to the public on limited occasions. It pursues an explicit curatorial agenda of appearing as a home rather than a museum, so interpretation and signage is largely confined to digital guides and resources. I have some intimate knowledge of the kitchen, having helped play “hostess” to various professional architectural and heritage functions and meetings over the last decade: I have washed glasses in the kitchen sink, prepared platters of food and drink on the minimal but adequate counter tops, appreciated the carefully designed fold-out crockery cupboards, wrestled with the aftermath of rubbish disposal and the cleaning down of surfaces. However, in early 2022 accompanied by a volunteer guide, I re-visited the house with the mission of really noticing the kitchen, and to hear about stories of its former occupation.

The Boyd House II was, like many architect-designed houses for their own families, an experiment in modern ways of living and a forerunner of American and European-styled home design that would trickle down into everyday suburban homes in the following decade. The house is divided, formally and functionally, into two separate volumes around a courtyard, with the then unusual aim of providing total separation between adult and child zones. The front of the house was focused on entertaining with a carefully orchestrated entry sequence that began upstairs on the mezzanine for drinks, with guests then progressing down the open central staircase to the living and dining space. The narrow galley kitchen was streamlined and modest by today’s standards, but the flowing configuration and integration of efficient built-in storage and white goods, recessed lighting and concealed services were all highly innovative for the day.⁶⁸ Brenda Niall writes in her biography of the Boyd extended family: “The children could be seen and not heard when there were dinner parties, as there often were … Robin and Patricia liked to entertain, because they were good at it”.⁶⁹ While Boyd himself remarked: “Here was a family plan based on convictions of anti-togetherness: parents’ and children’s blocks were planned to be separated by a court for mutual privacy. Yet it was still intended to be one shared home.”⁷⁰

My guide tells me that Robin’s wife Patricia did all the catering herself for these many social engagements hosted in the house. She had input into the kitchen’s design, with the expressed desire to be part of the social core of the house when cooking, rather than separated from it. It’s modesty of scale indicates that only one person typically would be working in the kitchen. The services in the kitchen and other prosaic features like the ironing board were still partially hidden by clever design, but the kitchen was now fundamentally interconnected within the living/dining zones. The brick paved floor continues seamlessly from the living areas into the kitchen, with a strip of inlaid vinyl providing cushioning for standing working at the benchtops. The laundry appliances and trough are located at the northern end of the galley kitchen, with no demarcation between the cooking of food and the washing of clothes. The pale timber cabinets, and moments of jewel-like reflectivity of brass and copper, lend a certain restrained kitchen glamour — harking back perhaps to the copper pots at Rippon Lea (Figures 9 and 10).⁷¹

Figure 9. Walsh Street, Boyd House, Melbourne, kitchen space: photographer author.

Figure 10. Walsh Street, Boyd House, Melbourne, kitchen space: photographer author.

In this radically new domestic arrangement of visibility and audibility everything had its place including the housewife and hostess — the labour of cooking was only thinly veiled behind open stairs and cabinetry. The smells of cooking were now seen as alluring rather than abhorrent.⁷² This shifting arrangement brings to mind the American sociologist Erving Goffman observations written in 1960: “The decline of domestic service has forced quick changes … upon the middle-class housewife. In serving a dinner for friends she must manage the kitchen dirty work in such a way as to enable her to switch back and forth between the roles of domestic and hostess, altering her activity, her manner, and her temper, as she passes in and out of the dining room.”⁷³ Likewise, the architect Harry Seidler commented in 1955 on the revised expectations of the Australian housewife who “does not want to be shut away from her family while preparing, or simply unfreezing, meals. She wants to be able to partake in conversation with her family and guests, and, above all, she demands an efficient and pleasing work centre.”⁷⁴

In their shift towards transparency and openness, modern homes thereby now promised a radical reorganisation of once carefully policed boundaries between the clean and the dirty, the domains of the employee and the owner, and the visibility of the tools and spaces of labour. The post-war home reversed the separation and relegation of traditional backstage female activities of cooking, nurturing, washing, and cleaning or the food axis of the house; freed of architectural compartmentalisation that reflected “the new sense of boundlessness and possibility of the spectacular post-war society.”⁷⁵ In the 1960s kitchen, with the provision and preparation of food greatly streamlined by processed foods, the prevention of drudgery became a problem to be solved by domestic science, and to be disguised by a newfound pursuit of domestic glamour and fun through pleasing interior design and decoration. As Johnson and Lloyd have remarked: “The front and backstage of the home, given the new visuality of home-making had to be scrupulously managed so that the wife did not look ‘tired’ or ‘untidy’ in comparison to pretty business girls who would look fresh.”⁷⁶ Both the mythologies and paradoxes of the servant-less house had come of age.

Interpreting Absent Subjects

After peaking around 1860 and then falling steadily — apart form a slight rise in times of national depression — by the 1970s domestic servants in Australia were largely seen as obsolete. The employment of outsourced cleaners replaced some of the myriad of tasks that in-house servants used to undertake, or home-occupiers have continued to do the work themselves with the aid of domestic appliances and infrastructure. In Higman’s detailed account, it is concluded that social and economic inequality was “the driving force of domestic service … it determines social relations of servant/master, especially at close quarters, as demonstrated by distinguishing modes of dress and address, architectural segregation, consumption and leisure.”⁷⁷ In light of this survey of four properties that have been preserved and opened to the public in Melbourne, class and gender inequality and segregation shaped the design of these houses. I return, therefore, in the concluding discussion to the opening questions around what more tangible evidence and renewed interpretations these houses can offer by way of appreciating and understanding historically gendered spaces of domestic labour? And in turn, how can established feminist frameworks strengthen approaches to historic house curation?

It is clear that through the physical act of visiting and moving through potent places of housework including kitchens and service areas, the potential for enhancing thinking and feeling in visiting audiences is great. It is also clear that there is still much informed work to be done within the heritage sphere to tease out and communicate the narratives, memories, facts and impressions connected to these “back door”, “below stairs” functional and liminal spaces and domestic technologies, and the inequalities they enshrined.⁷⁸ Linda Young issued the challenge in 2002 that house museums needed to move “beyond simple, conventional styles of house presentation to introduce more complex ideas of social and feminist history”, and it is clear that this has not yet been adequately addressed.⁷⁹

Making domestic labour more visible and sensible to the contemporary visitor, however, runs counter to the historical thrust of rendering home labour largely invisible: whether through the employment and management of servants that directed attention away from the spaces, sounds, and smells of domestic work, or through disguising the work of the modern housewife and mother.⁸⁰ The extent to which spatial and visual patterns of labour influence our sense of gender should not be underestimated and, as Judith Butler has eloquently described, gender is something that is produced through “repetitive enactment.”⁸¹ While it is self-evident that most women historically negotiated their everyday lives overwhelmingly around domesticity and home-making, the tendency to overplay the dichotomy of gendered modernity, where the masculine realm of work was situated exclusively outside the home, is far too simplistic. Rather, as this account has begun to unpack, such polarised divisions between public and private and between employed work and home-making were neither accurate or useful. New approaches to addressing these invisibilities can be fruitfully informed by established historiographical and curatorial feminist-informed approaches, and more informed ways of understanding the histories of domestic technologies.

Firstly, these houses lack adequate interpretation, whether that be in situ or through additional information that might augment public visits. Although, as noted, there are very understandable pragmatic and economic explanations for such absences, there are still too few heritage-protected places notable for their association with women as both employees and employers. Given the lack of personal archival records, diaries, images and documents associated with the women who worked in these houses, generalised histories of work can go some way to assist. But it is also critical that the physicality of buildings, and the artefacts and utilities contained within them, do more work in rendering former labouring lives more articulate and visible. Mainz and Pollock have discussed this in their formative study of women’s work in modern times by suggesting that informed interpretation, narration, and re-presentation can still be radical in the face of nostalgia.⁸²

Equally, having lost much of the direct evidence of women’s labour in the home, curation techniques might pay more attention to leading contemporary audiences towards noticing such absences, which are everywhere, by creating more evocative interior spaces and destabilised visions of absent subjects. Yet, as Bergsdotter reminds “absence and presence are entangled becomings,” yet they “cannot be dismissed as nothings.”⁸³ More targeted research could better reveal the personal stories and voices of women like Mary the kitchen maid, as has been achieved within museum curation over the last three or more decades to “use the personal to rewrite the masculinist narrative.”⁸⁴ Ultimately, interpretation is fundamentally important. It lends context to what are often today, at least on the surface, more appealing and empathetic service spaces of nostalgia and frugality, in contrast to overly ornate and out-of-fashion public rooms in historic houses.

Secondly, as described, historical technologies for heating, cooking, water, and sanitation, alongside other examples of appliances, containers, fixtures, and fittings have the potential to inform and educate about the shifting conditions and expectations of gendered domestic labour. In this regard we might think of the persistence of technical objects as “standing in for” the missing persons who once operated them. And to do this effectively, as Madeleine Akrich has described, we must “move constantly between the technical and the social” so as to provide them with a historical “script or scenario,” and to thereby better picture their quotidian patterns of use in the home.⁸⁵ Stoves, sinks and clothes-lines do not communicate much without careful annotation and inscription or what Akrich terms “de-scripting.” She continues: “Technical objects define actors, the space in which they move, and ways in which they interact … Once technical objects are stabilized, they become instruments of knowledge.”⁸⁶ It is thereby again through historical interpretation, and by valuing and highlighting the integral nature of such technologies within heritage space and settings, that the reciprocal relationships of obsolescent technological artefacts and their ghostly subjects might be affectively illuminated.

The history of domestic labour is also fundamentally linked into broader histories of urban infrastructure and how basic service provision — water, power, heat, sanitation — was gradually integrated into the very fabric of our houses. And conversely, how these services gradually became de-coupled from servant-power towards semi-automation, with the demand for servant labour being replaced by other duties and expectations of housewives and home-owners. In general, the kitchens under examination have been well preserved, but the ancillary service and servant rooms, and associated corridors and stairs have been generally deemed less intact and therefore less significant and authentic. They therefore exist today as left-over spaces often closed to visitors and claimed for ad hoc storage. Without these interstitial spaces, the domestic hierarchies, as identified in this paper, of front and back, inside and outside, upstairs and downstairs, served and service, public and private, dark and light, and leisure and work cannot be fully appreciated or experienced. By attending to already established feminist readings of power, labour, and design, there is so much more that could be achieved in the way that historical service spaces and infrastructures are today valued, conserved, explained, and displayed. These zones should be opened up completely to the public and maintained as carefully as other rooms.

In all the houses visited, little remains of the sensory stimulation associated with cleaning, cooking and food preparation. So, thirdly, how might curators and heritage managers of these properties more successfully enhance the sensory and performative possibilities of visitor’s experiences? As Sarah Pink has examined in her analysis of contemporary housework through ethnographic techniques of inquiry, “how people’s experience and understandings of engagements with and metaphorical references to the aural, tactile, olfactory and visual elements of their home figure in the way they performatively negotiate their gendered identities in this space.”⁸⁷ Joni Lariat continues this provocation in relation to heritage more broadly by calling for performance and performativity to play a renewed role in finding alternative and nuanced critical heritage representations in the domestic sphere. She asks: “how can we overlook the significance of everyday performance as a key site of heritage production?”⁸⁸

We might equally ask therefore how heritage house curation might also explore, with more intensity, the description and re-enactment of mundane and habitual sensory experiences and tacit bodily practices? Because as Pennell reminds although “experiences of the kitchen are in part defined by the material goods and architectural features that shape their uses, the routine purposive tasks that structure daily lives within these spaces also contribute to how the world is understood”.⁸⁹ Without resorting to kitsch Disneyfication it is possible to empathise with the weight of a weekly wash in a 1930s copper tub, to feel the intense heat of a coal burning stove in a stiflingly hot kitchen, or to experience the dim, steep service stairs rather than just the formal set-piece tableaux of stately furnished front rooms that heritage houses tend to remain fixated upon. Again museum displays provide many examples, with the most eccentric and my own favourite being the Denis Severs’ House in Spitalfields, East London where the house is dressed each day with tactile, ephemeral artefacts — here the food is real, and the soup cooking on the range can be smelt by visitors who participate in the immersive experience in silence.⁹⁰ Equally, artist and curator in-residence schemes are providing ways to animate existing historic properties.

Ultimately, domestic heritage could provide so much more to illuminate the history of gendered labour in Australian homes if there was less reliance on received, established, and “authentic” historical narratives, in favour of more incomplete translations to present audiences that are, in the words of Haraway always “interpretive, critical and often partial and ‘stuttering’ in its gaps of evidence.”⁹¹ These kinds of critical and immersive historical interpretations could in turn bring more inclusive historical perspectives to contemporary debates about the ongoing challenges of working from home.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Andrea O’Reilly and Fiona Green, Mothers, Mothering, and COVID-19: Dispatches from the Pandemic (Demeter Press, 2017).

2. Sara, Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 1600–1800 (London: Bloomsbury, 2106), 12.

3. Angela Meah and Peter Jackson, “Re-Imagining the Kitchen as a Site of Memory,” Social & Cultural Geography no. 17 (4) (2016) 514.

4. Megan Elias, “Summoning the food ghosts: food history as public history,” The Public Historian 34, no. 2 (2012): 14.

5. Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 11.

6. Gaby Porter, “Putting your house in order: representations of women and domestic life,” R. Lumley The Museum Time Machine: Putting Cultures on Display (London: Routledge, 1988), 103.

7. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies, Autumn 14, no 3, (1988): 589.

8. Elizabeth C. Cromley “Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis,” Material History Review 44 (Fall, 1996) 8–22.

9. Elizabeth Darling, “A Citizen as well as a housewife,” Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London: Routledge, 2005), 54.

10. Dolores, Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: The Future of Housing, Work, and Family Life (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1984), 54.

11. Adrian Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750–1980 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 99.

12. Laura Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge Oxon: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 23.

13. Joann Vanek, “Time Spent in Housework,” Scientific American 231, no. 5 (1974): 116–21. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24950221.

14. Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream, 54.

15. Marilyn, Lake, “Women, gender and history,” Australian Feminist Studies 3, no. 1–9 (1988): 9.

16. Lorinda Cramer and Andrea Witcomb. “Hidden from view’?: an analysis of the integration of women’s history and women’s voices into Australia’s social history exhibitions,” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25, no. 2 (2019): 128–142 (130).

17. Cramer and Witcomb, “Hidden from view’?, 130.

18. Ellen Lupton, Mechanical Brides: Women and Machine from Home to Office, (New York: Cooper Hewitt National Museum of Design, Smithsonian Institution, 1993).

19. See https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1059 (Accessed August 24, 2023)

20. Siegfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: a contribution to anonymous history. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948).

21. Jane Rendell, Barbara Penner, and Iain Borden, (eds.) Gender Space Architecture: An Interdisciplinary Introduction (Architext Series. London; New York: E & FN Spon, 2000); Hilde Heynen and Gulsum Baydar, (eds.) Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, (London; New York: Routledge, 2005); Beatriz Colomina, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1994).

22. Annmarie Adams, Don Toromanoff, ‘Kitchen Kinetics: Women’s Movements in Sigrun Bulow-Hube’s Research, Resources for Feminist Research, Vol. 34, Nos. 3&4 (2015), 9–39; Barbara Penner “The Flexible Heart of the Home,” Places Journal, 2018: https://placesjournal.org/article/home-economics-and-flexible-design/;

23. Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 38.

24. Iain J. M. Robertson, 2012. Heritage from Below. Heritage, Culture and Identity, (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 9.

25. Henry Heller, “The Industrial Revolution: Marxist perspectives.” The Birth of Capitalism: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective (London: Pluto Press, 2018.)

26. Linda Young, 2002. “A Women’s Place in the house … museum: Interpreting women’s histories in house museums,” Open Museum Journal 5, 1–24.

27. Ruth Schwartz, Cowan 2008. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave, (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 11.

28. Forty, Objects of Desire: Design and Society 1750–1980; Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979).

29. Zoe Sofia 2000. “Container Technologies,” Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy (May: 2000), 182 & 189.

30. Sofia, “Container Technologies,” 188.

31. Porter, “Putting your house in order,” 106.

32. Arndis Bergsdotter, Arndis and Sigurjon Baldur Hafsteinsson, “The fleshiness of absence: the matter of absence in a feminist museuology,” Grahn, Wera and Ross, J. Wilson (eds.) Gender and Heritage: Performance, Place and Politics (London: Routledge, 2018), 132.

33. Robert Sands, The kitchen/scullery: Como, South Yarra (Melbourne: National Trust of Victoria, 1996), 7.

34. Marika Neustupny, Water + House: The Architectural Design of Water Infrastructure in Urban Dwellings (Melbourne: Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Queensland, 2018), 106.

35. Phyllis, Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” Irving, Robert, and Richard Apperly, (eds.) The History & Design of the Australian House (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 241; Alain Corbin, “Domestic Atmospheres,” Bryden, Inga, Janet Floyd (eds) Domestic Space: Reading the nineteenth-century interior (Manchester: Manchester Uni. Press, 1999), 105.

36. Sands, The kitchen/scullery, 7; Kimberley Webber, “Embracing the New: A Tale of Two Rooms,” Troy, Patrick ed. A History of European Housing in Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92.

37. Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” 242.

38. Allom Lovell, Como: An Historic Structure Report, (National Trust of Victoria, Melbourne, 1982).

39. Forty, Objects of Desire, 192.

40. Kay Saunders and Raymond Evans, “No place like home: the evolution of the Australian housewife,” Saunders, Kay and Raymond Evans (eds). Gender Relations in Australia: Domination and Negotiation (Sydney: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992), 183.

41. Sofia, “Container Technologies,” 182 & 189.

42. Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” 237.

43. Neustupny, Water + House, 2018, npn.

44. Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” 239; Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1934), 139.

45. Young, “A woman’s place is in the house … museum,” 11.

46. Roslyn Colman and Ian Colman, Rippon Lea: conservation analysis, (Melbourne: National Trust of Australia Victoria, 1988).

47. Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” 247.

48. Forty, Objects of Desire, 84.

49. B. W. Higman, B. W. 2002. Domestic Service in Australia, (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 208.

50. Porter, “Putting your house in order,” 106.

51. National Trust of Victoria, informal background notes for the interpretation of Rippon Lea House (personal correspondence with author).

52. Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 285.

53. Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 34.

54. John Patrick, RBA Architects, The Heights: 140 Aphrasia Street, Newtown, Geelong: conservation policy and management plan, (Melbourne: National Trust of Victoria, 2001).

55. Murphy, “The Colonial Kitchen,” 248; Lupton, Mechanical Brides, 8.

56. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis,” 10.

57. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 520.

58. Patrick, The Heights, 73.

59. Irene Cieraad, “‘Out of My Kitchen!’ Architecture, Gender and Domestic Efficiency.” The Journal of Architecture 7: 3, (2002), 265; Corbin, “Domestic Atmospheres,” 105.

60. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis,” 14.

61. Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream, 104.

62. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command, 516; Saunders, “No place like home,” 183.

63. Lesley Johnson, and Justine Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life: Feminism and the Housewife (New York: Berg, 2004), 54.

64. Sofia, “Container Technologies,” 188.

65. Marianna Janowicz, “Kitchen debate: where labour and leisure collide” The Architectural Review, (January, 22, 2022), npn.

66. Johnson and Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life, 66; Carla Pascoe, “Home Is Where Mother Is: Ideals and Realities in Australian Family Houses of the 1950s.” Journal of Australian Studies 41:2, (2017), 186.

67. Saunders, “No place like home,” 183.

68. Lovell Chen Architects, Walsh Street (Boyd House II) Conservation Management Plan, (Melbourne: National Trust of Victoria/Robin Boyd Foundation, 2014), 55.

69. Brenda Niall, The Boyds, (Carlton, Vic.: Melbourne University Press, 2002), 279.

70. Robin Boyd, “Under Tension,” The Architectural Review, (London, 1963), 324.

71. Lovell Chen, Walsh Street, 56.

72. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis,” 9.

73. Erving Goffman, Erving. 1960. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, (Scotland: Doubleday, 1960) 123.

74. Nicholas Brown, Governing Prosperity (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 61.

75. Cromley, “Transforming the Food Axis,” 8.

76. Johnson and Lloyd, Sentenced to Everyday Life, 68.

77. Higman, Domestic Service in Australia, 177.

78. Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel, and Gary Campbell, (eds.) Heritage, Labour, and the Working Classes. Key Issues in Cultural Heritage. London; New York: Routledge, 2011) npn.

79. Young, “A woman’s place is in the house … museum,” 20.

80. Young, “A woman’s place is in the house … museum,” 14.

81. Judith Butler, “Subversive Bodily Acts,” Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 24.

82. Elizabeth Cowie, “Working Images: the representations of documentary film,” Mainz, Valerie and Griselda Pollock (eds.) Work and the Image II Work in Modern Times: Visual Meditations and Social Processes (London: Routledge, 2000), 174.

83. Bergsdotter, “The fleshiness of absence,” 109 & 111.

84. Cramer and Witcomb, “Hidden from view’?: 140.

85. Madeleine Akrich, “De-Scription of Technical Objects.” Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change edited by Bijker, Wiebe E., and John Law. Inside Technology, (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992), 216.

86. Ibid. 216.

87. Sarah Pink, Home Truths: Gender, Domestic Objects and Everyday Life (Oxford: Berg, 2004),10.

88. Joni Lariat, “Impasse or productive intersection? Learning to ‘mess with genies’ in collaborative heritage research relationships”. In Grahn, Wera and Ross, J. Wilson eds. Gender and Heritage: Performance, Place and Politics, (London: Routledge, 2018), 149.

89. Pennell, The Birth of the English Kitchen, 11.

90. Hannah Lewi, “I have ended up like the house, pretending to be myself: Uncanny Heritage House Museums,” Taylor, Mark, Georgina Downey and Terry Meade (eds), Domesticity Under Siege: Threatened Spaces of the Modern House (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 158.

91. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” 589.