Washing and White Goods

Abstract

On the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands in northwest South Australia, an environmental health worker salvages discarded washing machines to reinstall in remote community homes. Tracking the fate of washing machines and householder well-being, this essay traces the militarized genealogies running contemporary settler colonial occupation in Australia. We are particularly interested in how the colonizing project decants militarized operations into the intimacies of domestic inhabitation. Where once this project facilitated a gendered labor reserve, today it enables the continued pathologization of Indigenous residents, such that renewed interferences and dispossessions may be authorized at policy convenience. This essay is a part of the Roundtable called “The Housewife’s Secret Arsenal” (henceforth HSA); a collection of eight object-oriented engagements focusing on particular material instantiations of domesticated war. The title of this roundtable is deliberately tongue-in-cheek reminding readers of the many ways that militarisms can be invisible to their users yet persistent in the form of mundane household items that aid in the labor of homemaking. Juxtaposing the deliberately stereotyped “housewife” with the theater of war raises questions about the quiet migration of these objects and technologies from battlefield to kitchen, or bathroom, or garden. Gathered together as an “arsenal,” their uncanny proximity to one another becomes a key critical tool in asking how war comes to find itself at home in our lives.