Imagine you are a swagman living rough in the Australian outback. You don’t have a lot of things to carry with you when you move about, but there are a few which are very important – the swag itself and of course your billy. The billy is a great friend to any swaggie in Australia – it can make anything from a cup of tea to cooking a stew. You don’t know where you would be without it.
When I showed the children this enamel billy, they did not realise exactly what it was. Although the billy is something of an Australian icon, it is not something which is often seen today. The children simply assumed the little enamel pot was nothing more than ‘a really small saucepan’. They were amazed to realise that this was a real billy, like the billy which is such a part of Australian folklore, and even more amazed to realise that for many, the billy was actually nothing more than an old can with a handle.
A billy is a tin which is used for cooking over an open fire, and most often to boil water and make tea. Essentially and in the most basic form a billy is made of a large, empty tin with a loop of wire attached in order to allow it to be held or suspended over a fire. Although in Australia we associate the billy with the outback, and it is almost an Australian icon in itself, the billycan is not specifically or uniquely Australian. They were known to be carried by workmen in England and Canada, often as a way to carry food, or to enable them to make tea, though whether they were actually called a billycan then is something which appears to be disputed. The tin itself was however well known in the 19th century and continued to be used into the 20th century.
How did the billy come to be such a central part of Australian history though? The billy rose to prominence on the Victorian gold fields. Food was, at that time, difficult to find and even harder to transport to the often remote gold diggings. As a result, large quantities of imported foods were brought in, in big tins. One of the most common foods to be imported in tins, the story has it, was Bouilli which came from France and was a meaty, soupy stew which was very popular with miners. They couldn’t pronounce the name of the product easily though, and so it became known as ‘billy’. The tin itself was also of a useful size though, and on the gold fields people didn’t want to waste things, so they converted the tin into a pot for boiling water and making tea. Soon enough specific tins were being made which also came with a lid (like the enamel version I showed the children). Many swagmen, bushmen and stockmen would carry a set of four billy’s in different sizes, one for carrying water, one for boiling meat, one for vegetables and the smallest for making tea.