Does the washing up fairy exist outside of Australia? [closed]
In my opinion, "dish-washing fairy" is not a set phrase, idiom, etc at all.
In my family growing up in Melbourne in the 1970s the topic of "the fairies", but also "the pixies", we were often told were not going to come along when we weren't looking and do various tasks we were too lazy to do ourselves, including but not limited to washing the dishes.
Whether these mentions ever included the specific phrasing "washing-up fairy", I don't specifically recall, I don't think so. But while this way to say it was a bit novel to me, the concept was very familiar.
Thus it seems the "washing-up fairy" concept could be expressed many ways such as "The pixies aren't going to come and wash your dishes for you." In Wiktionary jargon we would say "washing-up fairy" is just "sum of parts", meaning it's not a lexical item. It's more like "red car" than "red herring".
It seems from the other answers that the concept is not limited to Australia.
So I would answer The concept of the washing-up fairy does exist outside Australia but the term "washing-up fairy" doesn't really exist even within Australia.
I'm in the U.S., and I've never heard of the Washing-Up Fairy. Still, using a fairy to explain an unexplained yet serendipitous discovery is not unheard of. When I Googled "a fairy came and cleaned", I found:
my mother would call me the next day, “Oh! a Fairy came and cleaned the house” [in a Yahoo! answer]
“Let's pretend a fairy came and cleaned up your room.” [from a parenting book]
Every morning, it's as if a fairy came and cleaned the house for me. [from a Roomba vacuum review on amazon.com]
Miraculously, when I came downstairs I found that a fairy came and cleaned up the party mess inside (thank you Daddy!) [from a 2004 blog]
So, such "pay-it-forward" cleaning acts of kindness are often attributed to fairy folk. I never realized until today, though, that the Tooth Fairy had a cousin called the Washing Up Fairy, at least by those Down Under.
In the U.S. the phrase for cleaning the dishes after a meal is to wash the dishes (generically, to wash dishes). The action nominalization is dishwashing (with or without hyphen or space) in either case.
One can say wash up instead of wash the dishes, in context, but wash up in the U.S. is just one more phrasal verb and does not have the specific connotation it does in the UK (rather like fry up, which in the US just means to fry things until they're done, and is never nominalized as a fry-up). Wash up in the U.S. can also mean to wash oneself (short of a full bath or shower), or to wash one's hands preparatory to a meal; it can form the action nominalization a wash-up, but this is more likely to refer to handwashing than dishwashing.
As to fairies in the U.S, I am personally a firm devotee of the Parking Fairy, and, influenced by Fairiology as presented in Pratchett's Hogfather, I have recently come to discern the importance of the Traffic Fairy in our lives; many U.S. children believe in the Tooth Fairy; and Jim McCawley used to say, of some people, that "the Mind Fairy must have come and left a quarter under their pillow".
So, while most Americans will understand the washing up fairy as it's intended to be understood, if they hear it -- particularly if it's delivered in a non-American accent -- Americans don't normally use that phrase.
In Canada, I've often heard the phrase "dish-washing fairy". For example, if you visit your parent's place for dinner and your Mom says "Gee it would be really nice if a dish-washing fairy appeared and helped out in the kitchen (hint hint)".
After reading the other answers, it seems like the exact name of this "fairy" varies a bit, but the concept seems much more universal.