Lance Hill develops the rotary hoist clothes line into a national treasure from family home in 1940s Adelaide suburb
Made and sold originally from an Adelaide suburban home in the 1940s, the Hills Hoist was featured in the 2000 Olympics opening ceremony and declared a national treasure by the National Library of Australia.
Image courtesy National Archievs of Australia
Lance Hill, with good timing, created the great symbol of Australian suburban life with the rotary clothes line initially made and sold soon after World War II at his home in Bevington Road in the Adelaide suburb of Glenunga.
The Hills Hoist was a height-adjustable rotary clothes line, designed for compact hanging of wet clothes with maximum area exposed for drying. Frequently used as a metaphor for Australian 1950s/60s suburbia, Hills Hoist were featured as giant robots roaming the 2000 Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.
Although listed as a South Australian icon, the Hills Hoist wasn’t invented by Lance Hill. But, in 1895, Colin Stewart and Allan Harley of Sun Foundry in Adelaide applied for a patent for an “improved rotary and tilting clothes drying rack with the uppermost part tilted to allow access to the hanging lines.
Gilbert Toyne of Geelong patented, manufactured and marketed four rotary clothes hoist designs between 1911 and 1946. Toyne's first patented clothes hoist was sold through the Aeroplane Clothes Hoist Company set up in 1911. Toyne returned with injuries from World War I and continued to perfect the designs he patented in 1925 and began selling an all-metal rotary clothes hoist with its enclosed crown wheel-and-pinion winding mechanism.
Prolific South Australian inventor Gerhard “Pop” Kaesler also designed a modern rotary clothesline, used by his wife Mary, in the 1920s. Lance Hill bought the metre-high wooden prototype model and plans from Kaesler and began to manufacture the Hills rotary clothes hoist in his backyard in 1945. His wife wanted an inexpensive replacement for the line and prop she had for drying clothes, restricted by the yard’s expanding lemon tree.
Lance Hill's brother-in-law Harold Ling returned from World War II and joined him as a partner in 1946. Ling became the key figure in expanding the production and marketing the hoists. In 1947, Hills Hoists began manufacturing a windable clothes hoist, identical to Toyne's expired 1925 patent, with the crown wheel-and-pinion winding mechanism. After the clothes hoists were built and sold from Hill's home in Glenunga, production moved to Glen Osmond Road and, within a decade, the factory relocated to a larger site at Edwardstown. The company Hills Hoists became the more diverse Hills Industries.
The Hills Hoist was listed as a national treasure by the National Library of Australia. In 2017, Hills Industries sold the manufacturing (mostly transferred to China) and sale rights of its Hills Home Living brands to AMES Australasia, a subsidiary of American company Griffon Corporation.
With outdoor areas on new house blocks in 21st Century Australia shrinking, tumble dryers were increasingly replacing rotary dryers.
