Has our obsession with toilets gone too far?

Nightly Bladder Doubt (NBD) is a biological condition where you suddenly wake up in the middle of the night and think to yourself: “Do I need to go to the toilet? I don’t think I need to go to the toilet.  But maybe I do need to go to the toilet.  But I’m so cosy and comfy, I don’t really want to move.  Argh, now I can’t sleep because I can’t stop thinking about whether I need to go to the toilet or not. Do I go? Do I not go? What do I do, WHAT DO I DOOOOOOOO?”

And during the next half-hour you stage The Great Bladder Debate in your mind until you finally decide to go, you climb out of bed, you get to the toilet, you come back, you get cosy and comfy again, then you think, “Am I thirsty? I don’t think I’m thirsty …”

NBD is such a serious problem, it has single-handedly shaped the relationship between Australians and their toilets.  For the first 40,000 years, toilets could be pretty much anywhere at all – a patch of bushes, a private gorge, parts of North Adelaide.  So when Aboriginal people woke up with NBD, they would get out of bed and go to the nearest toileting area – a beautiful pristine outdoor bathroom with natural paperbark toilet paper and built-in Eucalyptus-Mint Freshomatic Sprayer, no batteries necessary.

But when Europeans arrived 230 years ago, they didn’t want to walk so far to their toilets because they were slovenly people, often burdened by alcohol, ravaged with disease, and weighed down by leg-shackles.  So to deal with NBD, they brought their toilets closer to their sleeping quarters in the form of a “dunny”, a small cobwebby shack behind the house with a flimsy door, a broken roof, and a rat-kangaroo as a toilet-brush.

In the middle of last century a new, pampered middle class emerged, and they weren’t crazy about walking to a dunny in the middle of the night – they didn’t like the spiders, and the darkness, and the “outside air”.  So, they brought their toilet into the house: now they didn’t even have to wake up when NBD struck, they could just plod to the bathroom in a semi-sleeping zombie-like state, floorboards shaking, plaster falling from the ceiling.

About 20 years ago, Australians decided they couldn’t even be stuffed walking to a toilet at night, so they introduced “the en suite” – now they could just roll out of bed, fall into a bathroom, and hopefully wind up in a vaguely workable toileting position.  At the same time, they began putting more and more bathrooms in their homes just in case several members of a household were stricken with NBD at the same time. Or if one bathroom didn’t have any toilet paper, they could walk to another one instead of changing a roll.

Nightly Bladder Doubt has changed Australia forever. Our modern homes are nothing but toilets, with toilets coming off those toilets. We’ve become so toilet-ified, we’re even building houses that look like toilets.  You see them popping up everywhere: huge ugly toilet-block structures with a double garage out front.  And inside that double garage, a toilet.

Danny Katz is a newspaper columnist, a Modern Guru, and the author of the Little Lunch books for kids, now a new TV series on ABC3.