The Hills Hoist: Adelaide's rotary clothesline and its myth of invention

There's a Hills Hoist in the National Museum of Australia. Not a photo of one, not a scale model — an actual rotary clothesline, hauled in as a genuine artefact of the national story, filed somewhere between the Holden and the Victa mower in the pantheon of things that quietly organised Australian suburban life. I've stood in front of that display more than once, and I still reckon it's one of the odder flexes a country can make: we built a museum-worthy monument to a device for drying underpants.

But that's the thing about the Hills Hoist. It wasn't just a clothesline. It was the centrepiece of the quarter-acre block, the thing kids swung on until a parent yelled from the kitchen window, the load-bearing prop of a thousand backyard photos. And like most objects that become myth, the story of who actually invented it has become tangled with the story of who successfully sold it — and those are not the same story at all.

The Hills Hoist origin story, and the man who didn't quite invent it

The popular version goes like this: Adelaide engineer Lance Hills came home from the war, needed somewhere in his cramped backyard to dry the family washing without it flapping into the neighbour's fence or the lemon tree, and knocked up a rotary clothesline in his shed on a street in the Adelaide suburb of Glenunga. His brother-in-law Harold Ling, so the story goes, was involved too. Word got around the street, neighbours wanted one, and by 1946 the two men had formed a company and were making them commercially.

It's a lovely story. It has the shed, the returned serviceman, the backyard ingenuity — all the ingredients Australians like in an origin myth. The trouble, which any brand historian worth his notebook has to own up to, is that rotary clothesline designs had existed in various forms in Australia and overseas well before Lance Hills built his. Patent records and contemporaneous newspaper advertisements from the early twentieth century show rotary and umbrella-style clotheslines being sold in Australia decades earlier. Hills himself, by most accounts, never actually claimed to have invented the concept from nothing — the company's own later marketing was considerably more assertive about "invention" than the historical record comfortably supports.

What Hills and Ling did do, and did well, was refine an existing idea into something cheap, sturdy, wind-and-weather tolerant, and — critically — mass-producible in the post-war building boom. That's not a small thing. Plenty of clever backyard inventions in Australian history never got past the prototype stage because nobody worked out how to make five hundred of them a week at a price a young family could afford. Hills solved the manufacturing problem, not just the design problem, and in brand-history terms that's usually the harder job.

Why the timing mattered more than the tinkering

The Hills Hoist arrived at almost exactly the right historical moment, and I don't think that's an accident worth glossing over. Post-war Australia was mid-boom on new housing, particularly in Adelaide and the other capital cities, with returning servicemen and their families moving into new suburban blocks under government housing schemes. Every one of those blocks needed a clothesline, and the backyard rotary design solved a genuinely practical problem: it dried more washing in less ground space than the old prop-and-wire lines strung across a yard, it could be wound up out of the way, and it held its own against Australian sun and wind in a way flimsier designs didn't.

Steel, admittedly, was tightly rationed in the immediate post-war years, and early Hills production had to work around material shortages that constrained a lot of Australian manufacturing at the time. That the company got product out the door at all in that climate says something about how motivated they were, or possibly just how good Lance Hills was at finding steel when other people couldn't. Either way, by the 1950s the Hills Hoist wasn't a novelty — it was standard equipment, as assumed a part of a new Australian home as a Hills letterbox or a Colorbond roof would become later.

I'd argue the real commercial genius here wasn't the rotary mechanism at all — it was pricing and distribution discipline in a hardware market that rewarded exactly that. Hills built a business that could scale with the housing boom rather than against it, and that's a more interesting story than "bloke has good idea in shed", even if it's a less romantic one.

From backyard fixture to national shorthand

By the 1950s and 60s the Hills Hoist had stopped being a product and started being a cultural reference point. It shows up in Australian film and television as visual shorthand for suburbia the way a picket fence works in American media. It was on a stamp. It featured, memorably, in the opening ceremony of the Sydney 2000 Olympics, hoisted skyward in a sequence that assumed — correctly — that every person watching in Australia would recognise the silhouette instantly and everyone watching overseas would need it explained.

That's the mark of a genuine brand icon: when the object outgrows the company that made it and becomes a piece of shared vocabulary. Nobody says "I'm hanging washing on my rotary clothesline." They say "the Hills Hoist is full," even when, by the 2000s, plenty of the rotary clotheslines actually installed in Australian backyards weren't made by Hills Industries at all. The brand name did what Vaseline and Thermos did — it ate the category.

Hills Industries becomes a conglomerate

What's less discussed in the nostalgia pieces is what Hills Industries actually became. The company didn't stay a one-product outfit riding a single patent. Over subsequent decades it diversified hard, moving into building products, hardware, and eventually consumer electronics and security and communications technology — antennas, home security systems, health monitoring equipment. It listed on the Australian Securities Exchange and, for a long stretch, was a genuine ASX-listed industrial name, not just a heritage curiosity trading on clothesline nostalgia.

It's a pattern I keep bumping into writing this beat: the Australian manufacturer that starts with one deceptively simple household object and builds a diversified industrial group on the back of the cashflow and brand trust that object generates. Sanitarium did something not dissimilar with a breakfast cereal, as I've written about over at the Weet-Bix story — a single trusted product becoming the foundation for something much larger than the product itself ever suggested it would be.

Hills Industries has had a genuinely mixed run in more recent decades, navigating the broader pressures that hit Australian manufacturing generally — import competition, the cost of local steel fabrication, changing housing styles that don't always carve out backyard space the way the old quarter-acre block did. The company has been through changes of ownership structure and strategic direction that would take another article to do justice to properly. But the clothesline itself, as a design, has proven more durable than any single corporate structure built around it. Standards Australia and industry codes around Australian outdoor structural products have evolved considerably since the 1940s, but the basic rotary-arm principle Lance Hills refined is still, more or less, what you'll find in a suburban hardware aisle today.

Why the myth persists, and whether it matters

I don't think the "Lance Hills invented the rotary clothesline" version of events is going away, and honestly I'm not sure it should entirely. Myths that simplify a messier truth aren't automatically dishonest — they're often just doing the cultural work of picking a representative figure for a broader shift. Hills didn't invent the rotary clothesline in the sense of dreaming up a concept nobody had thought of. He, and Ling, took an existing idea nobody had properly commercialised at scale in Australia and built the company, the manufacturing process and the brand recognition that made it ubiquitous. That's a different kind of invention — the invention of an industry, rather than an object — and it's arguably the harder trick to pull off.

What I'd push back on is the company's own historical marketing, at various points, leaning into the "world's first" framing more confidently than the patent record really supports. It's a small thing, and it's an extremely common thing for founder-era companies to do with their own origin stories — Boost Juice's early spruiking about being a category creator, which I touched on in the Boost Juice piece, runs a similar line. But accuracy is accuracy, and a brand historian's job is to be the annoying person at the barbecue who says "well, actually" when someone repeats the shed legend uncritically. It doesn't make the object any less of an icon. It just means the real story has more texture than the plaque version.

Next time you're at a Bunnings and walk past the outdoor line section, have a look at how many variations on that basic wound-arm design are still sitting on the shelf, seventy-odd years after a returned serviceman in a Glenunga backyard decided the old prop line wasn't good enough. That's not a bad legacy for a bit of galvanised steel.