Shannon Lush thinks cleaning the house is fun. She turns it into a game, racing against her own time record. “My best so far is doing the bathroom in eight and half minutes,” she says, adding that music is a great help. “I like squirting vinegar spray when the cannons go off during the 1812 Overture.”

Lush, 51, is Australia’s most unlikely export – a cleaning guru whose weekly Sydney radio segments attracted a huge following. When her tips (most of them involving bicarb of soda, oil of cloves, tights or vinegar) were collected and published as Spotless, the book became a long-running bestseller. More than half a million copies have been sold in Australia, followed by a sequel, Speedcleaning. Both are published in the UK this month.

Other countries want her advice too – everywhere from Brazil to Norway, it seems, there are Lady Macbeths fretting over spots they can’t seem to remove. Along the way, the former art restorer has had to find the answers to culturally specific questions: “In Norway, they need to know how to remove herring juice and ski wax,” says Lush.

And in Britain? Is she prepared to offer advice on what chicken tikka masala might do to a quartz worktop or red wine to £100-a-roll wallpaper? Can anyone really be prepared for the combined interiors and cleaning obsession that has gripped the UK? Of course, a certain section of the population has always been consumed by housework. Growing up, we were all aware of mothers whose regime bordered on the pathological – the ones who vacuumed the entire house every day, and could turn violent if mud appeared on a carpet. But in the Seventies and Eighties, it was somehow embarrassing for an intelligent woman – let alone a man – to admit they took much interest. If you had a professional job, you probably paid someone for one morning a week; the upper-middle classes might have employed a “daily”. This no longer seems enough. Anecdotes abound of well-off women paying gangs of cleaners to swoop three, four times a week, standing over them to supervise. Or design-conscious men who will write lengthy notes explaining the precise way they would like their concrete worktops scrubbed clean, or their iroko floors polished to gleaming. Yes, Britain is a nation ripe for Lush’s scientific rigour. Cleanliness has become synonymous with social status, and the control of every aspect of life – including dirt – that this status can bring.

The obsession has been building throughout the Noughties. How Clean Is Your House?, co-presented by Aggie MacKenzie, a columnist in this magazine, tapped into the Zeitgeist and viewers embraced its message with enthusiasm. A year after the series was first launched in 2003, the value of the household cleaning industry in the UK went up by 2.5 per cent to £1.1 billion. The domestic cleaning product market is now worth around £2 billion, according to the UK Cleaning Products Industry Association. We spend more on specialist hard-surface products – for toilets, kitchens, stainless steel surfaces and so on – than ever before, which suggests that we have grown more finicky. And as environmental concern has grown, even the brands we use have become contentious. Are you a brutal Cillit Bang type, intent on instant dirt annihilation, or an Earth-loving Ecover bod, insisting on green credentials and tasteful packaging?

Lush herself is no domestic goddess, but a homely woman offering straightforward advice. She would not like to be an Antipodean Martha Stewart – “She sets the bar too high, it’s all too aspirational and perfect” – and has repelled the advances of every cleaning product company in the country. Instead, she is about to launch her own limited range of cleaning products shortly: “Just the basics that people need but can’t find any more in hardware stores, like sweet almond oil.”

Her big selling point is that she has a degree in chemistry, and takes an analytical attitude to the combination of products that will shift everything from beer stains to Blu-Tack. (For a beer stain on the carpet, use vinegar, a paper towel, detergent, cold water and an old toothbrush, while for Blu-Tack use ice, a plastic bag, scissors, sticky tape, talcum powder, dry-cleaning fluid and a cotton wool ball.) This is as much a book for slobs as anything – the stains that one might get on sheets include coffee, tea and vomit. Most of us would head for the supermarket and buy a stain-removal product we’ll only use once. Lush sees this as a pointless waste of money, driven by ignorance of beginners’ science.

“If you don’t do chemistry, you don’t know why some basic kitchen ingredients, such as salt, will remove a stain more effectively than anything you can buy at the supermarket,” says Lush. “Nowadays, everyone seems to have a prejudice against the word ‘chemical’ because they don’t understand science enough to know that everything is chemical – the air you breathe, the skin on your body. Take urine, for example – it’s a great cleaning product, perfectly sterile, terribly useful.”

She is also dismissive of some eco-products. “In many cases, they don’t work. If you put bicarb of soda and vinegar in a bottle together, as some brands do, the properties of one cancel out the properties of the other.”

In many ways, Lush is a throw-back to Shirley Conran, whose Down With Superwoman manual set out a template for working women to appear to accomplish everything, while ruthlessly eliminating unnecessary work and cost. Lush’s recipe for keeping a home clean and tidy revolves around doing a little every day: just 15 minutes on one room on a weekday and four rooms on Saturday is her formula. There is much use of a “clutter-bucket” into which all loose objects are piled before the lightning-swift clean begins.

But unlike Conran’s book, Lush’s is targeted at both sexes, though she will sometimes offer alternative approaches for men: “They generally clean from one side of a room to the other,” she says, “whereas women tend to be more job-specific. Men tend to be visual when cleaning, so you need to make sure their line of sight is unimpaired. Women clean because they know the dirt is there, even if they can’t see it. Neither style is better,” she says, diplomatically.

But, she adds, “No mother and daughter ever have the same approach to cleaning. It’s always a generational minefield.”

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