Bless Reddit for always providing the goods when it comes to hyper-niche Australian nostalgia content. There’s nothing that signals incoming holidays more than everyone getting together online to share their fond memories of growing up in the family home. This time, someone asked what everyone’s bound to find in an Aussie household and the replies have not let us down one bit.
Redditor u/ThrindellOblinity asked the vast r/Australia subreddit community the question on Monday and gave some examples of the niche-but-shared items they’re talking about.
Think empty gas bottles in the back shed, Mum’s tackle box sewing kit, the cursed kitchen drawer that’s always chockers with everything and instruction booklets for appliances that have long since been chucked out. They wanted to know what the one thing others had (or have) in their homes that is an unspoken but shared experience in Australia.
The top response was “the potato masher that says ‘fuck you’ when you try to close the drawer” which hit a very specific nerve in my soul.
That fucking potato masher always
gets in the way no matter how much you try and reposition it and gently slide the drawer shut. And then proceeds to get stuck in a completely different way when you’re trying to open the drawer again later.
Others noted a bbq covered in spider webs, ageless boxes of Weetbix and a cupboard overflowing with mismatched lids and Tupperware containers are absolutely commonplace in every Aussie home. Can’t help but 1000% agree with every one of those.
One Redditor unlocked the memory of the “bag of bags” that every house had. You know the one — a single plastic bag that held dozens of other plastic bags and usually lived under the kitchen sink.
Or maybe you had a bag bags that you’d stuff placcy bags into and pull them out one by one from a drawstring hole in the bottom.
I think ours had a knitted doily frill on it and was hung up on the back of the pantry door.
I still have one of these calendars and it slaps.
Another reply listed the quintessential “first aid kit” that would probably do next to nothing in any kind of mild medical situation.
I can guarantee you those Band-Aids are all a billion years old and aren’t even sticky anymore.
Redditor u/HalfManHalfCyborg rattled off a bunch of items that had me nodding in agreement but one flung me back to my childhood so fast I got whiplash.
“In a shoebox somewhere, one of those gold coins mounted on a cardboard frame that were given out to school students at the Bicentenary, or the Centenary of Federation,” they wrote. “That you’re sure are going to be worth a mint some day.”
Not me though, I spent my commemorative $1 from the Canberra Mint on lollies from the canteen.
The best response for me was “that wooden bowl for chippies” which is a brief description but I bet you immediately pictured the exact one in your head. Do I currently have three of them and get them out for their correct use (chippies)? You bet your ass I do.
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