An ode to the ceiling fan
Yes, that’s right. The ceiling fan. The understated — in fact, overlooked — hero of the Australian household; the saviour of the school classroom on a summer afternoon.
Image Credit: Bonnie Huang
You can feel the slightly wet heat radiating upwards from the grass beneath your pounding running feet. It’s dry, patchy grass, punctuating large tracts of exposed dirt. You gulp from the bubbler, squinting from the blinding flash of metal-reflected sun and almost choking in between huge rasping breaths. Walking up the stairs to your Year 2 classroom – taking them two at a time with as much force as you can muster – your cheeks prickle, pink hot with a sweat icing brushed by cool-feeling air. As your breath moves through your rattled-but-now-stable lungs, it’s like fingers running across a sea-anemone, soft but stinging. barbed wire pulled up and down your trachea.
After unceremoniously shoving your lunchbox and broad-brimmed hat (complete with a sopping, half-chewed neck string) into your bag, you burst sweat-soaked into your classroom. A cool darkness envelops you, welcoming your entire being into a sense of dozy calm. You shuffle to your desk and pull out a copy of the Beast Quest book for ‘Drop Everything And Read’ (DEAR), chosen because it had the most awesome creature on the cover. And to cap it all off, the essential element that completes this sense of tranquil tiredness on a 33 degree summer day is the soft humming of the ceiling fan, wobbling slightly on its axis to hypnotic effect above your head.
There are many things that epitomise the early 2000s Australian childhood experience. Bottle-Top Bill and his best friend Corky. Those Smartie ice-blocks with the plastic container of bonus chocolate for a handle. Scholastic book fair catalogues, sent home at the bottom of a school bag. But I think there is one thing that trumps them all — an ultimately sensory object with a sight, sound and sensation that instantly transports me to a world of nostalgic relaxation. The humble ceiling fan.
Yes, that’s right. The ceiling fan. The understated — in fact, overlooked — hero of the Australian household; the saviour of the school classroom on a summer afternoon.
Most university students will be old enough to remember a time before air conditioning was ubiquitous, at least in most homes and public schools. A simpler time, when classrooms were filled with white noise that flowed through our ears like a silky ribbon waving through the air. A time when we could watch a kaleidoscope in beige — sometimes jiggling ominously — above our heads. A time when we could feel the cool tongue of artificial wind lick away the sweat on our arms, a sort of slobberless dog.
Don’t get me wrong. Air conditioning can be very nice indeed. There are not many experiences more transcendent than walking into the white light and cold air of a country-town Coles on a dripping-hot 45 degree day. It’s good for cooling down shopping centres, entirely closed off from the outside world (a function of dystopian consumerist psychological manipulation); for linoleum floored emergency rooms or luxurious white-linen hotel rooms.
But these are sterile spaces befitting our most sterile cooling device. Where are the elegant sweeping wings of a three-bladed ceiling fan in such places? Instead, we are given an ugly white box fixed to some wall corner. Where is the soft, pulsating whir? It’s not there, in favour of a dull whooshing hum that often borders on the dreadfully annoying.
What’s more, individual ceiling fans have a character that air-conditioning units could never match. They are devices with personalities. Not only are ceiling fans available in a vast variety of aesthetically attractive designs — from elaborate wooden five-fronded balcony fans to the sci-fi retracting blades of student accommodation fans, to even the humble off-white three-bladed public school fan — each and every one carries unique quirks and sensibilities. Some fans wobble slightly to the right in a mesmerising asymmetrical pirouette. Other fans jiggle violently as if in some frantic dance of death, threatening to launch catastrophically into a classroom full of kids, who make off-colour jokes about sitting under an execution device. Still more fans have their beige coats beautified with lines of whiteboard markers.
Every fan sings with a different voice. Some flutter wryly, melting into the background with a self-satisfied smile — they know they’re cooling you down, and they don’t need to flaunt it. Others click loudly, scraping against themselves in an endearing grab for attention. Others drone a pleasing baritone, matching the soothing dimness of the room. What can an air conditioning unit answer to that? With a monotone, one-size-fits-all blustery whoosh?
Yet nowadays, in classrooms and houses across the country, many ceiling fans sit in sullen silence, overlooked for the easier option of air-conditioning. This is a tragic fate for such beautiful mechanical creatures, many of which not only served us but our parents faithfully on countless hot summer afternoons. One can only imagine the scorn our ceiling fans must feel so harshly; the pain they must carry deep within their once-moving parts at being overlooked, undervalued and unused. Phased out and forgotten.
So next time you walk into a room on a February day, whether at university or at home — don’t immediately reach for the air-conditioning remote. Look instead for that faithful little dial, and give our underappreciated ceiling fans a spin. They deserve it.