Published in Crossfire, Issue 6, October 2004
From tips in Queensland and op-shops in Melbourne to working the hard rubbish run in Sydney, Dave Medworth knows how to find the treasures in Australia’s trash.
Dave Medworth picks up rubbish. Whether he’s scrounging round a country tip or simply waiting to cross a Melbourne street, Dave is constantly on the lookout for any bits and pieces he might find useful – he even picked up a middle name somewhere along the line. (His parents always told him it was Jason, but when he went to apply for a passport he was told there was no such thing on his birth certificate.) Usually content with finding nuts and bolts on the road, the ex-garbo shifts into another gear during hard rubbish week – a week when he is truly in his element.
Once a year, hard rubbish transforms the landscape of suburban Melbourne. For a week, normally pristine nature strips become tiny islands of potential landfill, waiting for the rumble of the council’s compactor truck. Mounds of renovator’s rubble, whitegoods, broken furniture and outdated computer parts dominate the picture, along with a suspicious amount of exercise equipment the likes of which typically feature in hour-long television commercials at four in the morning. But while most hard rubbish really is just rubbish, the possibility of finding hidden treasure brings out the scavengers and the collectors.
‘I get an adrenaline rush when there’s curbside cleanup,’ says Dave. ‘I get excited – even a single pile on the side of the road, I’ll really rubberneck to see what’s in that pile.’
Dave sits on the floor of his suburban living room while his dog, Vic, sleeps on the couch. Looking around the place it doesn’t appear to be the house of a hoarder. The room is sparse and clean, furnished with only what Dave and his partner Berni really need – a sofa-bed and a coffee table, a small television, a stereo. In the corner lies a collection of musical instruments and board games. An old fishing net hangs from the ceiling. Some mail for a previous tenant sits on another small table, waiting to be returned to sender. The space suggests a life lived simply and frugally, without any of the unnecessary trappings and stifling clutter of modern life.
The experience of living in remote areas has given Dave an appreciation of living simply and making do. ‘For a few years we didn’t have access to shops, like we had no hardware store. So you had to make use of what you could.’ His habit of picking things up off the ground comes from a strong belief in recycling and getting the best use out of what is available. ‘It’s like that old saying – it’s better to have and never need than to need and never have,’ he says.
A seasoned scavenger, the first thing Dave remembers dragging home was a bumper bar from an old Ford Falcon. ‘I carried that home from the quarry which was about eight hundred metres away from home. It sat around the house for years, and in the end Mum gave it to a guy down the road who had old Fords in the garage. So someone got a use for it, which is the main thing. I hate seeing things get thrown away.’
While living in Sydney Dave took on work as a garbage collector, doing the weekly paper collection and the occasional hard rubbish run. ‘That was when I realized how sad it actually is because you’re crushing great stuff that we could have used and a lot of people in this world would have loved. We only had so much space we could fit it in the truck. It was very difficult to see a lot of things get crushed. It would just get smashed up and thrown into landfill.’ One hard rubbish memory stands out in his mind as being particularly sad. ‘I can still remember exactly where it was. It was a little boat and they’d run a circular saw through the middle of it because you can only have a certain amount of stuff out on the roadside. There was nothing wrong with the boat apart from being cut up with a circular saw. Surely you’d know someone who wants a boat, or put an ad on a wall rather than cutting it up.’
Even on the paper run Dave says he found interesting things, such as a first edition copy of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Puck of Pook’s Hill’. ‘It’s such a disposable society, even stuff that isn’t made to be.’
Under state law in Victoria, councils are expected to impose fines on anyone caught taking items from hard rubbish. The reason put forward is that collectors are deprived of income if people take recyclables. Yet, according to Dave, only a small amount of scrap metal gets recycled, the rest going straight into the compactor. ‘In the compactor there’s a front wall that keeps it tight as you’re packing, called a paddle. There’s a bit of space between that and the front of the truck, about the size of a three-seater sofa. But it was a funny shape so it would have to be smaller stuff that you could actually get in front of the paddle. We’d fill it with all sorts of bits and pieces.’
While working on the truck, he and his colleagues managed to salvage some copper and aluminium, and once they found a flute which they sold for $180. ‘We probably got ripped off, we garbos turning up to the music shop going, “How much for this?”’ But the fact that it was left on hard rubbish in the first place bothers Dave. ‘Surely you could give it to the local school or something. That’s what really annoys me,’ he says.
People should make more of an effort to find homes for their unwanted stuff, he says. And organizations such as the Salvation Army should collect things from more areas. ‘Like bikes,’ he says. ‘You see piles of bikes. I’m sure you could make decent bikes from all the parts that you see on the side of the road. It could be a work for the dole project. And furniture – all that furniture – it’s just sad to see it all go.’ He says he can almost see the council’s point of view in discouraging scavenging, ‘But I can only understand it if a charity organization was going to make the money instead of a private person.’
Over the years Dave has refined his fossicking skills. He says there are certain places that yield ‘the good stuff’ more than others. ‘Traffic lights are a good source of things like washers, screws, u-bolts that hold up exhausts, things like that – they come off cars, accidents. Whenever I’m at the traffic lights I have a good look at the ground. I like walking along beaches at the high tide line finding stuff along there. There’s a place I go in Mordialloc, under the rail bridge. Every time I go there I find a tennis ball for Vic.
‘If you find a good dumping spot you can quite often go back there and there’ll be more stuff. There was a spot in Sydney that used to be a good run, probably a couple of k’s away from my parents’ place. I used to go there quite regularly. People would dump timber, building stuff and bits and pieces like that.’
A scary experience made Dave stop visiting this last location. ‘I found a whole heap of handbags down there that had unexpired credit cards in them. With them was a gunstock, the timber part of a rifle and I thought, this is not good.’
He went home and phoned the police to tell them what he’d found. They asked him where the handbags were and he gave a description. ‘I said you won’t be able to find it, I’ll come and show you where it is because it was off the road, there was a rock outcrop and it was down below that. And they said, “Okay, where can we meet you?” and I said meet me outside this old building at the top of the street. And they never showed up.’
Dave reckons his habit of bringing home other people’s rubbish has never bothered those he’s lived with. ‘Mum was always saying, “What are you going to do with that?” but she’s actually pretty good. I brought home a big bit of shade cloth that was in a skip down the road and Mum said they wouldn’t have thrown it out if it was any good. Now she’s got it on the carport roof to collect leaves.’
The only thing Dave’s Mum ever threw out behind his back was a saddle he found at the tip. ‘It was a 1920s cob saddle, a beautiful Australian riding saddle. Mum’s paranoid of horses, she doesn’t know why. A clairvoyant told her she was trampled to death by horses in another life. So that might have been part of the reason why she threw the saddle out. She told me was it was “mouldy”.’
Berni chips in with a similar story about a piano. She and her brother found it outside a shop and took it home to turn into a bar. ‘We bought paints and started sanding it back and painted the keys black and white; we were so God damned excited. And then we came home one day and Mum had taken it to the tip.’
Soon Berni and Dave will have to gather up and pack away their bricolage life. The house they rent in Melbourne’s East is set to become the ultimate piece of hard rubbish, to be picked up off the side of the road and moved to start a new life somewhere else. When they signed the lease the couple were told that the house was to be demolished, an idea they found troubling – but now they seem content to know that it’s going to be recycled. There’s still some use for it, after all.