BEFORE the famous Hills Hoist came the Toyne version, GAIL THOMAS reports

The rotary clothes hoist has long been an iconic part of the Aussie backyard.

But do you know which brand of hoist you are pegging your washing on?

Camperdown's Neville Toyne, the last surviving son of Gilbert Toyne - who designed and patented the first Australian all-metal rotary clothes hoist - reckons there's still a few of his father's designs around.

"I'd say there would still be some of the Toyne hoists in places like Hawthorn and Camberwell," says Neville.

"My daughter thinks there is an original 1911 clothes line at Pomborneit, which was considered to be indispensable in a modern residence so we are getting some photos to identify it.

"And there is a 1923 line still in use at Boston Villa, the former family home in North Geelong."

While Lance Hill - the famous creator of the Hill's Hoist - is credited with inventing the simple lever rotary clothes hoist in his Adelaide backyard in 1945, Gilbert Toyne was making hoists in the 1920s, long before Hills were on the scene.

Vignettes about the Toyne family business and Australian washing line history have been documented in a new book Hung Out to Dry, by Peter Cuffley and Cas Middlemis.

The book tells how it was just around the corner from Toyne's Adelaide house and workshop where young engineer Lance Hill lived, and it was the Toyne 1926 model Hills Hoists copied in 1947 to create their first wind-up clothes hoist.

Cuffley and Middlemis' book explains that in 1911 Gilbert Toyne's rotary clothes hoist was showcased to much acclaim and intrigue at both the Royal Melbourne and Geelong Agricultural Shows and by the 1930s Toyne's hoist was available across Australia and New Zealand.

"I had erected an original 1911 pre-World War I clothes hoist at Macclesfield, when we lived there," says Neville.

"And when the National Museum in Canberra said they wanted one for the Hills Industries Ltd collection I gave it to them, as it was part of our heritage that would be retained by the museum."

Neville worked in the family business after school as a young boy and worked there full-time from the age of 14.

"I had always worked for my father, then Keith McKirdy (who had bought the rights to manufacture Toyne's rotary clothes hoist in 1925) put the business up for sale in 1962 and I bought that back.

"My wife and I ran the business from home in Glen Iris. Then when my dad retired I moved the business to his foundry and workshop in Dandenong Rd (East Malvern) and we made the hoists up till the 1970s.

"At one time we did the whole thing from making the castings ourselves to cutting the pipe up, grinding the castings and dipping them."

He says it's amazing how many types of clothes lines there are.

"In the standard wind-up, wind-down hoists, there isn't much to go wrong as you can just raise or lower them to the height you want.

"The hydraulic ones would sometimes leak and the lever type ones were a danger - the first lever one Hills made used to be called the "jaw breaker" as if it came up on its own and if you weren't hanging on to the handle it would come up really quickly."

Gilbert Toyne's patented 1926 all-metal design with a fully encased wind-up mechanism defined the standard for Australian rotary clothes hoists for decades.