A public convenience

I once believed, naively, that adulthood would be defined by grander thresholds.
Love, perhaps. Or grief. Or some moment of professional arrival, a door opening, a hand extended, a sentence beginning with we’d like to offer you…

But if I’m honest, the moments that have most reliably revealed the kind of society we live in have been smaller, more bodily, more urgent. They’ve been the moments when the mind is not interested in philosophy because the bladder is staging a coup.

The moment I’m thinking of happened in the middle of a city day that had no right to become memorable. I’d been moving between appointments, coffee in hand, phone buzzing, the usual modern theatre of importance. I’d done what you do – grabbed a flat white as if caffeine is a civic virtue, then kept walking as if the body is an optional add-on to the mind.

Then, somewhere between one tram stop and the next, it hit.
Not a gentle reminder. Not a polite tap on the shoulder. A sudden, humiliating, animal certainty – you need a toilet now.

There is a particular kind of panic that comes with this. The panic of a system nearing failure. Your whole internal hierarchy rearranges itself instantly. That email can wait. That meeting can wait. That carefully composed self-image can wait. Everything becomes a secondary consideration to the simple question – where can I go without disgracing myself in public?

I looked around like a person searching for a lost child. I scanned for the signs we never notice until we need them – the little icons, the arrows, the promise of relief. I saw cafés, but they had the kind of queues that would outlast my dignity. I saw a pub, but it was barely open and the staff had that look that says – are you here to spend money or to extract bodily mercy? I saw a department store and felt a surge of hope, only to remember the cruel truth – the toilet is always on the top floor, always at the far end, always behind a maze designed to make you buy socks on the way to salvation.

My body began to do that subtle tightening thing, that internal clench that makes you walk faster while pretending you’re not walking faster. The face you make in these moments is a strange mixture – outwardly neutral, inwardly negotiating with your own organs like a hostage situation.

And then I saw it – a small, unglamorous sign on the edge of a park.
“Toilets” (with an arrow)

The arrow might as well have been a religious symbol.

I followed it with the reverence of a pilgrim. Around a corner was the building – squat, concrete, faintly stained, covered in graffiti that had long since stopped being rebellious and begun to feel like texture. There was a smell before I even opened the door, the smell that announces this is public, the smell of dampness and disinfectant and the faint ghost of things you don’t want to imagine.

The door creaked. The light inside was fluorescent and tired. The tiles were cracked. The lock looked like it had survived several decades of human desperation. It was, to put it kindly, grim.

But it was there.
And in that moment, grimness felt like grace.

Relief is not a subtle emotion. It doesn’t arrive politely. It floods. It makes you almost dizzy with gratitude for the most basic systems of civilisation. I remember thinking, absurdly – we landed on the moon but it’s this, this battered cubicle, that is saving me right now.

I washed my hands, because I wanted to feel clean, and because handwashing in a public toilet is always partly a moral performance, a way of reassuring yourself that you’re still a person with standards, and I looked in the mirror.

The mirror was scratched and cloudy, the kind that makes everyone look slightly haunted. For a second I saw myself as the truth – not a voice, not a mind, just a human animal who had been temporarily returned to the basic conditions of embodiment.

Then I noticed who else was in the room.

An older man stood at the sink, hands trembling slightly as he washed them. His shoulders were hunched, his face tight with concentration. He moved carefully, as if speed was no longer available to him. He looked up briefly and nodded at me, not as a social greeting exactly, but as a shared acknowledgment – we are both here for the same reason. We are both vulnerable in the same way.

A man came in behind him with a child who was already doing the frantic dance of the almost-too-late. The father’s voice had that strained sweetness parents use when they are trying not to panic their children while panicking themselves.
“Quickly, love,” he said. “Quickly.”
The child pushed past and nearly cried with urgency. The father’s face carried the exhaustion of someone who has spent too many days navigating the world with a small body attached to his schedule.

And then, as I stepped outside, I saw someone sleeping on the bench near the toilets, head resting on a backpack, shoes off. A person in that particular posture of public exhaustion – half-defended, half-defeated. They weren’t dramatic. They weren’t menacing. They were simply… there. Existing in a place that had not been designed to hold them, but which was one of the few places left that didn’t require a credit card.

I walked away and realised something I’d never properly thought before –
public toilets are not just about convenience.
They are about who gets to be a person in public.

You don’t notice toilets when your life is going well. When you’re young, healthy, confident, mobile. When your bladder behaves. When you’re driving from place to place with private bathrooms available at home, at work, at friends’ houses. When you can duck into a café and buy a coffee without it affecting your budget. When you’re not managing a body that leaks or aches or moves slowly or carries children or lives with illness.

But for a huge number of Australians, the presence or absence of a public toilet is the difference between participation and exclusion.
It is the difference between leaving the house and staying trapped inside.
It is the difference between catching the train and avoiding public transport.
It is the difference between walking in the park and never venturing far from home.
It is the difference between dignity and humiliation.

Once you see this, you start noticing toilets everywhere, not just as facilities, but as social statements.

You start noticing where they are and where they aren’t. You notice which suburbs have clean, well-lit, accessible toilets with baby change tables and working locks and soap. And which suburbs have toilets locked “due to vandalism,” or toilets that exist only as a memory, or toilets that require a key from a shop that may or may not be open, or toilets that feel like you’re entering a crime scene rather than a public service.

You notice how often public toilets are treated as an afterthought, as if bodily needs are embarrassing and therefore not deserving of proper investment.

You notice, too, how often the rhetoric of “safety” becomes a reason to close them.

Because public toilets are contested spaces. They are where the clean fantasies of a city meet the messy truth of human bodies. They are where the state’s desire for order collides with the reality that people bleed and piss and shit and vomit and need somewhere to do it.

They are also, bluntly, where poverty becomes visible.

There’s a reason the homeless person was sleeping near the toilets. Toilets mean water. Toilets mean somewhere to wash your hands, your face, your clothes, if you’re desperate. Toilets mean a few minutes of privacy in a life that has none. Toilets mean, sometimes, a place to cry without being watched.

I used to think of public toilets as minor infrastructure, the kind of thing you only think about when you’re road-tripping and praying for a servo that isn’t a horror story.

Now I think of them as one of the clearest measures of civilisation.
Not on account of them being glamorous. Because they’re honest.

A society can build stadiums and towers and shiny rail projects and still be cruel. It can celebrate itself loudly while letting the most vulnerable suffer quietly.

But a society that maintains clean, accessible, safe public toilets is a society that has decided, at least in this small way, that human beings are allowed to exist in public without being punished for having bodies.

The first group you understand this for is older people.

Ageing is, among many things, a shrinking of radius. Your world contracts not only because of mobility, but because of certainty. If you’re older, you may not trust your bladder the way you once did. You may have medications that affect urgency. You may have chronic conditions. You may simply have a body that no longer obeys with the same reliable timing.

So, you plan. You map your outings by toilets the way sailors map coastlines by harbours.

This is not an exaggeration. Watch older people in a shopping strip. Notice how often they locate the nearest toilet almost immediately, as if orienting themselves to safety. Notice how they avoid parks without facilities. Notice how many older people prefer shopping centres not for consumerism but because shopping centres have toilets, seats, air conditioning, an entire infrastructure of survival disguised as retail.

And then notice what happens when public toilets are closed or poorly maintained – older people simply stop going out.

They become more isolated. Their exercise declines. Their mental health suffers. Their world shrinks further.

We talk about “ageing in place” as a policy goal. But ageing in place is not only about housing, it’s also about whether the public realm is usable when you’re older. A city with no toilets is a city that silently tells older people – stay home.

Then there are disabled people.

If you are disabled, the presence of an accessible toilet is often the condition of leaving the house at all. If you use a wheelchair, you need space, you need rails, you need doors that work, you need sinks at the right height. If you have a stoma, you may need specific disposal facilities. If you have a chronic illness, you may need immediate access. If you have sensory sensitivities, you may need toilets that aren’t chaotic, loud, or filthy.

And here is where the cruelty of inadequate public toilets becomes obvious – when they’re missing, people are excluded from public life not by explicit discrimination, but by infrastructure.

It’s the most insidious kind of exclusion because it can be denied. No one is saying “disabled people aren’t welcome.” They’re simply building a world where disabled people can’t stay long enough to participate.

Parents with young children know this too.

You don’t truly understand the public toilet until you’ve had to navigate it with a toddler who has the bladder capacity of a teaspoon and the timing of an anarchist. You learn quickly that children announce their need at the last possible moment, with absolute certainty, and no compromise.

“I need to go now.”

And the “now” is non-negotiable. Not in ten minutes. Not after you pay. Not after you walk to another block.

So, parents become experts in public toilet logistics. They know which parks have toilets. They know which toilets are “good”, clean, safe, with a change table, with a door that locks. They know which ones to avoid. They know the private humiliation of trying to hold a child over a toilet seat while also stopping them from touching everything, while also keeping a baby in a pram from rolling away, while also trying to manage your own dignity.

Public toilets are where parenting meets the limits of polite society.

And the presence of a baby change table is, in itself, a feminist issue. Where change tables exist only in women’s toilets, it quietly reinforces the assumption that care work belongs to women. Where they are absent entirely, it forces parents, often mothers, to change children on benches or in prams or in cars, improvising hygiene in a public world that pretends it doesn’t do bodily mess.

A good public toilet says – we anticipated that humans have children.
A bad one says – manage your mess elsewhere.

Then there are women at night.

A public toilet can be a place of relief and a place of fear simultaneously. Many women know this – the calculation of whether it’s safe to enter, whether the lights work, whether anyone is inside, whether you will be trapped in a small space with a stranger. In poorly lit areas, toilets become zones of vulnerability. So, women avoid them. They restrict fluid intake. They plan routes carefully. They live with a background tension that men, often, don’t even register.

This is one of the hidden costs of inadequate public toilets – the way they shape women’s movement through public space.

A city that is serious about women’s safety doesn’t just talk about policing. It invests in lighting, visibility, maintenance, staffed facilities where possible, design that reduces fear. Toilets are part of that. Toilets are not separate from safety. They are safety.

And then, because we must speak honestly, there are trans and gender-diverse people, for whom toilets are not just functional spaces but political minefields. A public toilet can be a moment of anxiety – will I be challenged, stared at, harassed? Will my body become a public debate? Will I be safe?

The more a society turns toilets into battlegrounds, the more it turns basic bodily function into a test of belonging. The public toilet, again, becomes a measure of whether a society understands dignity as universal or conditional.

And finally, there are the people who most starkly reveal why toilets are infrastructure – rough sleepers.

If you live on the street, your body is already public. You have lost the privacy that most of us rely on to feel human. A public toilet can be the last remaining border between you and total exposure. It offers, briefly, a door you can close.

When public toilets are locked overnight “to prevent misuse,” what we often mean is – to prevent poor people from existing too visibly.

We don’t say it like that. We say “vandalism.” We say “anti-social behaviour.” We say, “maintenance issues.” Sometimes these are real. Public toilets do get vandalised. They do become sites of drug use. They do become dangerous sometimes, and the staff who clean them deserve safety and respect.

But it’s also true that closing toilets is one of the easiest ways to make public space hostile to homeless people.

Hostile architecture doesn’t only come in spikes on ledges. It comes in locked doors on toilets. It comes in removing benches. It comes in making the commons unusable for those who need it most.

And once you see that, you start noticing who is being managed out of sight.

The tragedy is that when toilets are neglected, everyone suffers, but the most vulnerable suffer most.

A person with IBS, Crohn’s disease, ulcerative colitis, incontinence, conditions that are more common than we like to discuss because we treat bowel function as shameful, lives their life around bathrooms. They may appear “healthy” from the outside. They may be high-functioning, successful, articulate. And yet a missing toilet can trap them at home.

I have a friend with a chronic gut condition who once described public toilets as “the difference between being a citizen and being a prisoner.”

That sentence sounded dramatic until I watched them plan a day in the city with the intensity of a military operation. Where are the toilets? Are they accessible? Are they open? How far is the next one? What if this one is closed? What if I can’t get in? What if I have an accident?

This is a level of anxiety most people never experience. But for many, it is daily.

We rarely talk about this because it’s not polite dinner conversation. But perhaps that is the core of issue – public toilets force us to confront the parts of life we would rather pretend are private.

They force us to admit that civilisation is built on plumbing.

The “grim but there” toilet is, in its own way, a public miracle. But we can do better than grim. We can treat toilets as a serious part of public life, not as shameful necessities shoved into corners.

Because here is the deeper truth – dignity is infrastructure.

Dignity is not a motivational slogan. It’s not a vibe. It’s not something you earn by being virtuous. It’s something a society either makes possible or makes difficult through the design of its public realm.

When public toilets disappear, the burden doesn’t disappear with them. It lands on the bodies of vulnerable people. It lands in accidents. It lands in urinary tract infections from holding on too long. It lands in panic. It lands in isolation. It lands in shame.

And shame is one of the most corrosive forces in a society. It makes people hide. It makes them withdraw. It makes them stop seeking help. It makes them angry.

We could avoid a lot of shame with a lot of toilets.

I think often of the people who clean them.

We talk about nurses and teachers and firefighters, rightly, as the frontline workers of society. But the person who cleans a public toilet is also frontline. They encounter the raw reality of bodies – blood, vomit, shit, needles sometimes, the aftermath of homelessness, addiction, illness, violence. They do it for wages that rarely reflect the social value of the work.

When a public toilet is clean, it feels like magic. But it’s not magic. It’s labour. Someone has been there with gloves and disinfectant and a bucket, doing work most of us would rather not think about, so that we can exist in public without stepping into someone else’s misery.

A society that wants dignity needs to dignify that labour too – fair pay, safe conditions, respect, staffing levels that make the job sustainable.

And then there is the design question, the part of me that can’t stop thinking in systems even when my heart is involved.

We know what makes toilets usable:
• They must be open when people are out. Closing them overnight might reduce some problems but creates others. If a city wants nightlife, late trains, late events, then toilets are part of that ecosystem.
• They must be safe. Lighting, sightlines, regular checks, emergency buttons that work, design that reduces hidden corners.
• They must be accessible. Not as an afterthought. As a core requirement.
• They must include baby change facilities in places that don’t assume only women parent.
• They must include soap and working taps because hygiene is public health.
• They must be maintained because neglect creates the conditions for “misuse,” which then becomes the excuse for closure.

The maddening thing is that none of this is beyond our capacity. Australia is not a poor country. We can build extraordinary things when we decide they matter. We can engineer tunnels and bridges, airports, and stadiums. We can spend billions on projects that make politicians look visionary.

We can also, if we choose, build toilets that allow vulnerable people to participate in public life- it’s a problem of priority.

And priorities are revealed in the small places, not just the grand ones.

Thus why toilets are political.

They are not merely facilities. They are invitations.

A public toilet, open and usable, says – You can be here. You can stay. You can belong.
A public toilet locked, filthy, absent, says – go home. Go away. Don’t be visible. Don’t be needy. Don’t be human in public unless you can pay for privacy.

We often talk about “the public” as if it is a concept. The public is a body. Many bodies. Bodies that sweat and bleed and need to pee. Bodies that age. Bodies that give birth. Bodies that break. Bodies that carry illness silently. Bodies that have nowhere to go.

The public toilet is where we decide whether those bodies are welcome.

I find myself returning, in memory, to that Wednesday afternoon – my own urgent need, the grim room, the older man trembling at the sink, the father shepherding his child, the person sleeping nearby.

I think about how close we all are to vulnerability. How thin the line is between the person who breezes past toilets without noticing and the person who maps their life around them. One illness, one pregnancy, one medication, one ageing body, one job loss, one rent increase, one relationship breakdown, suddenly the world looks different. Suddenly the toilet is a lifeline.

It is because of this, that I want to talk about public toilets with the seriousness we usually reserve for bigger institutions. Because they embody a simple ethical question –
do we want a society where dignity is conditional?
Or do we want a society where dignity is built into the ground beneath our feet?

We can tell ourselves stories about who we are as Australians. We can talk about fairness, mateship, the “go” in goanna, the informal kindness we like to believe defines us. But if you want to test those stories, don’t look at our slogans.
Look at our toilets.
Look at whether we have built a public realm that recognises bodies as part of citizenship.

Because a society that cannot provide a place to pee is not a society that has fully accepted its own humanity.

This is the reason I think of the public toilet as the librarian’s cousin. It sits in the same family of institutions we rarely praise but desperately rely on. It is a quiet keeper of the commons. It does not ask for your credit card. It does not care who you voted for. It doesn’t demand that you prove you deserve relief.

It simply offers a door you can close.

And in a world that increasingly commodifies everything, privacy, comfort, safety, even rest, that door is a kind of public mercy.

We should treat it as such.
We should fund it.
We should maintain it.
We should design it with care.
We should stop pretending that dignity is too embarrassing to build.

Because the day will come, perhaps sooner than you think, when you are walking through a city with a coffee in your hand and a meeting in your calendar and your body will interrupt your sense of importance with a simple, undeniable demand.

And in that moment you will not care about arguments on television or headlines or the latest outrage. You will care about one thing – whether your society has made a place for your humanity.

A public toilet, open and usable, is society’s answer.
It is not glamorous.
It is not poetic.
It is, however, profoundly civilised.
And it is the kind of infrastructure that tells the truth about who we are.