Washing and White Goods

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