Everyone on base is expected to contribute to keeping the base clean and preparing food.

Generally people will do any jobs that they see need doing, like helping wash up or clearing a path of snow. Gash and Friday afternoon scrubout are the formalised traditions that help keep the base clean and pleasant.

Every Friday afternoon a scrubout roster is posted assigning a cleaning job that would take about an hour to each person on base. Between 5-6pm on Friday everyone on base sweeps, mops, vacuums or scrubs some part of the base. There is a bit of a vacuum cleaner shortage on base at the moment and these are highly sought after during scrubout   hour. In the tower we also use this hour to empty our bins, wipe surfaces and vacuum the floor. Moving food from the storage room in old Bransfield house across to the kitchen in new Bransfield house is another common scrubout job. This is done by forming a human passing chain so nobody has to move. In snow this is definitely the fastest method for manually moving stuff.

Gash is a long held BAS tradition. Everyday one person spends the entire day on Gash.  Gash person spends the day washing-up, cleaning the bathrooms, recycling and helping in the kitchen. An important part of the gash tradition is that at meals time gash-person is always served first. At the start of mealtime a queue has usually already formed in the   dining hall. But only after gash-person emerges from the kitchen and takes their food will the first person in the queue take their food. Newbies be warned this tradition is  taken very seriously.

The day following your gash day you also help with after dinner washup.  The gash job starts at 8.00am and ends at 8.00pm with a break of about 2 hours in the afternoon between lunch and dinner.