17/05/2026
A TOASTER FROM THE FUTURE WITH MEMORIES OF THE PAST.
The other week after Mother’s Day, and my sister and I found ourselves exchanging articles we had written about our late mother. It seems to happen more as we get older. Memories rise unexpectedly. Small things return. Not always the grand occasions, but ordinary moments and familiar objects that somehow carry whole chapters of life within them.
One of those objects sits on our kitchen bench every day.
It is an old Sunbeam Toastermatic. First designed in the 1940s this one dates from the 1950s or early 1960’s. Heavy chrome with rounded Streamline Moderne curves and little red glowing windows, like something imagined for the kitchens of the future. The kind of appliance made in an era when things were expected to last. I have used it daily for thirty-five years. About thirty years ago I had the control mechanism repaired in a little workshop in Box Hill because it seemed worth repairing rather than replacing. It still works beautifully.
My mother had a toaster just like it in the 1960s. I honestly cannot remember whether this is the exact same one or not. Usually, I can tell you where I found things. I can remember the clearing sale, the bric-a-brac shop, the old shed, the person who sold it to me. But with this toaster, the story is blurred. Perhaps that is because family objects often slip quietly from one life into another without ceremony. One day they simply become part of your own household story.
The toaster itself is not especially important, but it is more than just a toaster. Each morning the bread descends slowly into its radiant chrome chamber, like a small ritual from the age of railway dining cars and optimistic futures. The elements glow. The smell of toast fills the kitchen. And somewhere in all of that are echoes of the kitchen on the dairy farm at Yarra Glen, early mornings, earlier lives.
Motherhood is often like that. Not always dramatic or celebrated. Built instead from countless repeated acts of care that become almost invisible while they are happening. Toast before school. Cups of tea. Packed lunches. Late-night conversations. The quiet labour of holding family life together.
As children, we rarely notice the repetition of those acts. We simply assume they will continue forever.
Then one day we find ourselves standing in our own kitchens, making toast, hearing familiar sounds, and realising that much of what formed us came through these ordinary daily rhythms of care.
Most old technologies eventually disappear for good reason. I have sheds full of machinery that was built to last: typewriters, ploughs, flat irons, tools and equipment that could still be made to work. But the world moved on. Farming practices changed. Businesses changed. Better technologies emerged.
Yet every now and then something gets it so right that it quietly refuses to become obsolete.
This old toaster feels a bit like that.
Perhaps relationships are not so different. Good relationships also require maintenance, forgiveness, adjustment, and repair. They survive not because they are flawless, but because someone keeps tending to them over time.
The old toaster on our bench reminds me of that.
I have often lamented that my parents were of the generation that rarely told you that they loved you. But we were loved. My toaster reminds me that love is often carried not in grand declarations, but in ordinary faithfulness repeated across years. In Christian language, we sometimes speak of grace appearing in simple things: bread, w**e, water, shared meals, hospitality, daily care.
Not every sacred moment arrives with trumpets and lightning.
Sometimes it arrives quietly, in the smell of toast on an ordinary morning, and in the memory of those who once made breakfast for us long before we understood how much love was hidden there.
Brian Spencer, Minister
