Ashfield Council Household Waste Collection Reviewed We had to walk to the other side of Summer Hill to reach the abandoned mansion. In my ghoul attire I felt completely conspicuous. A man driving past grinned broadly at me, a little girl dropped her doll on the pavement with shock. I greatly enjoyed the attention and found when someone didn't notice me I would reassure myself that they must have bad eyesight and not able to properly see my strange appearance. There were lots of people out. It was the waning of a sunny Sunday, and people were dragging rubbish out to the kerb to add to their piles. Almost every house was marked by a mound of assorted junk, anticipating the imminent council collection of unwanted goods. People stacked boxes of building offcuts, unscrewed the doors of fridges, looking flushed with the excitement of discarding the broken and unwanted. Some of the junk was surprising: the first street we walked down had a number of home made animal enclosures. Beaten aviaries, collapsing hutches and other strange contraptions of chicken wire and wood. I fought the urge to rifle through people's piles. Steph was not much interested in the junk piles, and discouraged my interest. I picked up one grey ceramic flowerpot, coated in grime. “You'll need to clean it well,” she said. (It remains begrimed, in the flowerpot graveyard behind the bins.) On Sunday I walked back and forth from Summer Hill home a record three times. Each time I'd choose a different route, in order to take in the greatest scope of rubbish piles possible. I mourned the heaviness of a large, shell shaped mirror and thought of wheeling it home in a shopping trolley. Further along the street, a woman and her children rummaged through a bag of discarded toys. That's the joy of council cleanup, I thought, it unleashes the scavenger in everyone. Inherent in the minds of the men who roam the streets at night, shining torches on piles of junk, in the minds of the motorists who slow down alongside particularly tempting piles, is the idea that someone might have thrown out worthy objects. Mostly the objects I saw were broken or filthy. I saw two men making off with a blue footstool, an old man carting a heater back home with an expression of great purpose. Passing an old guy with a torch, I accelerated up the hill, not wanting it to seem like I was also looking at the junk piles. Turning the corner, I decided to walk one extra block to check out a different street. It was dark, and I could barely see the details of the objects I was passing. I had my eyes fixed on a lounge chair, when to my great surprise it moved and groaned. I gasped, terrified. A man's head appeared from under a blanket, unshaven and disorientated. “Are you alright?” he asked. “Yeah, I just didn't expect the chair to move,” I said. “Have I already talked to you?” he asked, suspicious. “No. Are you alright?” “Yeah.” “OK then, have a good sleep.” My heart was still racing. I figured he was either drunk or had been banished from his house, or both. It wasn't such a bad place to sleep. It never seems to rain anymore in Sydney, so it would be safe to sleep outside, and it was just cold enough for you to be cosy underneath a blanket. Summer Hill is quiet at night, it is the kind of place where the only disturbances are people walking poodles or a man leading his pony down the middle of the street. (Yes, a local owns a pony. I hope to one day follow him and find out more about this mystery. I worry that the pony is not properly housed, I have a suspicion it may be kept in a small inner-city backyard, or worse, in this man's house). Over the next few days, I watched the gradual changes to the junk piles. People in cars would cruise past, pulling up when they saw a tempting pile. One across from my bus stop proved particularly popular. Two old televisions on wheeled stands, a fridge, dirty couch cushions, a desk with the drawers missing, an oil heater, spears of wood, boxes of flowerpots. I expected the man who drove up in a van to load in the televisions or the desk, but he defiantly sorted through the flowerpots and made off with the pick of them. I thought perhaps he was the man on Old Canterbury Rd who sells carnivorous plants in his front garden, and he needed more pots to propagate new ones. Who knows? Perhaps he was making some kind of art installation involving flowerpots. At the nearest junk pile, a man pulled up and began to sort through some pipes. I was feeling mean, and decided to stare at him to make him feel uncomfortable. I know this was cruel, the thing I hate most when I am going through trash is having an audience. I watched him examining particular lengths of pipe, then judge them unworthy, and wipe his hands on his pants in an exaggerated movement to let me know he had finished. Almost as soon as he had driven away, another car crawled up to take his place. On Tuesday morning I was waiting for the bus, when I saw two council workers examining a fridge across the road. They picked it up and pushed it into the back of their garbage truck. One of them pressed a button and a metal arm came down and crushed the fridge in one powerful blow! It popped apart as if it were made of biscuits. As the fridge was crushed, the men were singing and dancing and punching the air. They obviously found their job cathartic. I watched a washing machine go next. Gritty black sludge oozed from it as it was crunched in the back of the truck. I could have watched whitegoods being crushed for hours. In the back of my mind was thoughts of landfill, guilt at our throwaway society and other such environmental paranoias, but overriding all of this was the pleasure of watching these objects being destroyed. The next morning, the streets were clear. Sometime during the night,
the junk piles had been removed. Only a few splinters of woodchips, or
scraps of fabric remained on the footpaths, and a feeling of lightness
presided over the households of Summer Hill. |