The Hills Hoist: How a Backyard Clothesline Became a National Icon

Every Australian backyard built before about 1990 has one: a spindly steel umbrella standing dead centre on the lawn, equal parts washing line, swing set, impromptu cubby house (just drape a bedsheet over the arms) and, if you were twelve and bored enough, a cricket stump, a maypole and a merry-go-round all at once. The Hills Hoist is so woven into the idea of home that most of us never stopped to ask where the thing actually came from. Turns out the real story has a citrus tree, a dodgy war-surplus submarine net, and a patent dispute in it. Naturally, we had to dig in.

The classic silhouette: a Hills Hoist doing its one job in a Balwyn, Victoria backyard. Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

A Problem With the Lemon Tree

The man credited with the Hills Hoist is Lancelot "Lance" Hill, a boiler-and-refrigeration engineer from Adelaide who'd spent the Second World War at home training army mechanics and motorcycle despatch riders. The popular version of the story is simple and sweet: his wife, Cynthia ("Sherry") Hill, wanted a clothesline that didn't eat into her garden. The slightly more specific, and better documented, version is that the Hills' citrus trees had grown so large by 1945 that they were physically blocking the single-wire line and prop in their yard. Something rotary, something out of the way, was needed.

So Hill built one out of scrap metal in his own backyard. And this is where the story gets properly scrappy: where rival hoist-makers of the era were using timber, Hill built his in steel, using wire salvaged from damaged military aircraft and stay rods cut from leftover anti-submarine mesh that had been strung across Sydney Harbour during the war. His father straightened and cut the recycled pipe, and Sherry painted the finished frames. A small newspaper ad in November 1945 brought in six orders, and word of mouth did the rest — relatives and neighbours who saw the hoist in the yard wanted one too, and a cottage industry was born.

The Backyard Icon Nobody Patented First

Here's the bit the folklore tends to skip: Lance Hill did not invent the rotary clothesline. Not even close. A rotary "clothes drying rack" was patented in Adelaide as early as 1895, by Colin Stewart and Allan Harley of the Sun Foundry. More significantly, a Geelong engineer named Gilbert Toyne had been patenting, manufacturing and selling rotary hoists since 1911, including an all-metal design in 1925 with a neat enclosed winding mechanism for raising and lowering the arms. When Hill's brother-in-law and business partner, Harold Ling, tried to simply license Toyne's winding mechanism outright in 1946, the deal fell through — so Hill was forced to engineer his own version from scratch. The irony is that Toyne's original patent had quietly expired by 1947, meaning the Hills version that followed was, functionally, catching up to an idea that already existed.

What Hill and Ling had that Toyne didn't was hustle. Production moved out of the backyard and into leased premises at Fullarton, a Sydney branch opened in 1947, and Hills Hoists Ltd was formally incorporated in January 1948 with Hill as chairman. A lifetime guarantee and prices that undercut the competition did the rest: by 1954 the company had moved to a ten-acre factory at Edwardstown and was turning out roughly 600 hoists a week. The brand so thoroughly dominated the category that "Hills Hoist" stopped being a product name and simply became the generic Australian term for any rotary clothesline — the way we say "Esky" instead of "cooler" or "Ute" instead of, well, nothing else really describes a ute. By the time Hill died in 1986, more than a million of the things had been sold.

More Than a Clothesline

It's genuinely hard to think of another whitegoods-adjacent object that's embedded itself this deep into a country's identity. The Hills Hoist has been swung on by generations of kids until they were dizzy or grounded (often both), pressed into service as a cubby house with a bedsheet thrown over the arms, and treated as an honorary fielding position in approximately one hundred percent of backyard cricket matches played between 1950 and today. It's been photographed as a genuine piece of Australian folklore too: after Cyclone Tracy flattened Darwin in 1974, a news photo of a family's Hills Hoist standing untouched in an otherwise demolished yard became one of the enduring images of the disaster. The National Library of Australia has listed it as a National Treasure, the Royal Australian Mint put it on a one-dollar coin in 2019, and it even had its moment on the world stage at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where giant roaming Hills Hoist-inspired figures rolled through the stadium. Artists have used it for decades as shorthand for the whole mid-century suburban dream — and down at O'Sullivan Beach in South Australia, there's a giant novelty Hills Hoist built purely because the icon had earned it.

The icon, supersized: a giant Hills Hoist built as a local landmark at O'Sullivan Beach, South Australia. Image: Wikimedia Commons (public domain).

Where the Hoist Stands Today

The company itself has changed hands plenty since Hill's day. It grew into Hills Industries in 1958, and in 2017 Hills sold its Hills Home Living division — the clotheslines, the brand, the lot — to AMES Australasia, a subsidiary of the American company Griffon Corporation. These days the direct descendants of the original design are largely manufactured overseas, in China, although a couple of Australian outfits (Austral ClothesHoists and Daytek among them) still make rotary hoists on home soil. The classic design hasn't gone anywhere either — you can still walk into Kmart or a hardware store today and buy a "Hills Heritage" rotary clothesline that looks almost exactly like the one your grandmother had.

What has changed is the backyard it stands in. New housing estates, with their smaller blocks and bigger houses, increasingly don't have room for the full rotary spread, so wall- or fence-mounted folding lines have become the default for new builds. But in the older suburbs — the quarter-acre blocks this whole thing was invented for — the Hills Hoist is still exactly where it's always been: dead centre of the yard, doing its one job, and quietly hosting the next generation's backyard cricket.

Not bad for a device that started life as one bloke's solution to an overgrown lemon tree. Lance Hill didn't get there first, but he got there loudest — and eighty years on, we're all still folding sheets under his shadow.

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