NO OTHER bit of equipment so typifies the country as a pump.

They've been toiling away in the background of my whole life. Or not, as the case may be. Like yesterday, when the sewerage pump (how can I put this?) besmirched itself.

This bottom-feeder of the pump world should be avoided at all costs and that cost is about $50 an hour at the pump shop.

Any other variety I am willing to have a tinker with.

Long and fumbling experience has taught me that the general rule is to prime them and, if they still don't work, check the inlet side for air leaks.

That's basically the whole story.

If the Honda engine won't go, it's out of fuel or switched off or needs oil.

But such pumps, even the good ones, are tacky and impermanent compared with the dreamtime pump of childhood.

It lurked in the damp, mossy gully below our house, hemmed in by tea-trees and tree fern growing in the black morassey soil.

It was the green colour of machinery from the days of empire, and other hues of lichen and moss crept on to its solid, cast-iron haunches that were bolted to a sleeper that slowly mouldered into the soil.

It was a great single-cylinder Rosebury engine and it was brought to reliable life with a crank handle into the boss of its massive flywheel.

Cooling involved the simple expedient of a big, cast-iron box around the cylinder that was full of rusty water.

It is generally supposed that with sufficient water and fuel such an engine could run near enough to the end of days and, chugging away at about 100rpm, it sounded very pleasant.

Its connection to the pump was a broad leather belt that had to be engaged with a twist on to the moving pulley after the motor was started.

Dad would deftly palm it on, with his fingers well out of the way, and then the greasy muscle of the piston-pump would proceed to tirelessly push the crystal-clear spring water up to the house-tank far away and above.

But now, even that old draught animal of the machinery world has succumbed to irrelevance and the spring has all but disappeared and the jungle around it has retreated as this great drying out of the south goes on.

Pumps aren't what they were and neither, it seems, is water.