Quotes of the Day

Told about the book by a workmate, Rebecca Dierking "was on a mission to get my hands on it," she says. After spending an entire afternoon reading through it, she bought six more copies as gifts for friends. "I thought, 'This is a book to have around all the time,' " says the 33-year-old Sydney insurance manager. She now keeps it on the coffee table, where "everyone who drops by picks it up."

The book they can't keep their hands off is Spotless, a guide to household cleaning - and an unexpected blockbuster. Launched in December with a modest first print run of 12,000, the paperback compendium of "solutions to domestic disasters" has been reprinted 10 times and sold 138,000 copies; according to Nielsen BookScan, it's spent 15 weeks on the Top 10 bestsellers list, three of them at No. 1. "It's our best-selling title ever," says Jane Finemore, of publisher ABC Books. "Other titles have sold more than 100,000 copies, but over several months or years, not weeks."

When author Shannon Lush goes shopping, readers bustle up to her, eager to share their triumphs: "They'll say, 'I did it! I did what you said and it worked!'" Part of the thrill, she says, is that whether it was getting mold off the edge of the bath or nail polish off the sheets, they've done it with products that cost next to nothing and were likely already in the kitchen cupboards. Lush's cleaning staples are the same ones everybody's great-grandmother used: vinegar, bicarbonate of soda, methylated spirits, detergent, glycerine, milk. Shoe polish on the carpet? Eucalyptus oil. Rusty pans? Bicarbonate of soda and cut potato. Musty clothes? Put tea bags in the wash.

Listeners to Lush's biweekly spots on ABC Radio provided most of the dilemmas in the book and throw new ones at her all the time. But the Sydney mother of two says she always has an answer. An artist and restorer, she had to become an expert at stain removal "because I make huge messes." And so far, she's never met a stain she couldn't beat. "I'm the CSI of cleaning."

"Cleaning spots is problem solving," says Lush. The difference between her and people who instantly reach for a commercial product or call a professional is that "they see a stain as a finished thing," she says. "They don't see how to break it down. But if you understand your stain and what it's made of, you can work out what will get rid of it." Take red wine. "Wine is an acid. Bicarb soda is an alkali. So when you spill red wine on the carpet, you mop up as much as you can, then sprinkle on bicarb soda. The alkali negates the acid. You'll see straight away the stain change from red to pale gray as the pH swaps over and the pigment starts to break down and the wine loses its staining ability." Lush hopes the book will help others see cleaning crises the way she does: as puzzles. "It's basic chemistry," she says. "The building blocks of everything around you are pretty simple. You just need to look at things and question how they work." And if you don't know, "Experiment!"

Lush has been doing that all her life. Her late father John, an engineer and inventor, taught her to make her own paints at age four. Her mother Ellie passed on the domestic skills she'd learned as a child in the 1940s. "We had to find a way of doing things with next to nothing," she says. "Clean, do plumbing - you name it." Lush recalls how, "when I was really little, Mum showed me how you could use rotten (spoiled) milk to get ink out of clothes. I thought it was magic."

Being able to fix anything with whatever lies to hand is a proud tradition in Australia, says Adelaide author Mark Thomson, who's writing a book about the people he calls "resourceful problem solvers." Some backyard tinkerers and rural handymen, he says, "will spend an enormous amount of time and effort doing a repair job with bits and pieces they've got in their shed. When it's fixed and it works, it's a real victory that you've done it yourself and it hasn't cost a thing." That frugal ingenuity is shared by many rural women, says Wendy Hucker, of the Pioneer Women's Hut museum at Tumbarumba, New South Wales: "People around here still use vinegar and newspaper to clean the windows, kerosene for getting grease marks off clothes, bar soap and cold water for grass stains." The "culture of capability," as Thomson calls it, was born of hardship. People had very little, so they had to be handy. Tips were exchanged with neighbors and passed from parents to children. "People no longer do that," Hucker says. "They don't know their neighbors, and they move a lot, so the three-generation family doesn't exist anymore."

Affluence has brought ease, says Thomson, but it also means "people in their everyday lives don't have enough opportunities for the expression of capability - ways to say, 'I did that! That was me!'" For men as well as women (who Lush says buy her book in almost equal numbers), Spotless may be a stand-in for the neighbors they don't talk to over the fence, or the grandparent they never see. And a way to take creative control of at least the few square meters of the world they call home. When everything else looks like a mess, it's neat to know you can fix just about anything with a dash of vinegar and a sprinkle of bicarb soda.

• Elizabeth Keenan
• An unlikely bestseller has Australians reaching for olld-time fixes - and the can-do attitude that spawned them