“Mark it up as a win,” said the young man at the Waste Transfer Centre, as I showed off the tiny piece of black plastic that I’d located in the scree of rubbish between the car bays and the bins. It had somehow detached itself from my ute hours previously, when I’d visited the tip to dispose of some pruned tree branches.
The plastic bit houses the rod that goes from one side of the ute to the other, keeping the tarp taut. Without it, you’d be driving around with a lake in the back every time it rained. As soon as I arrived home, I realised it must have snapped off while I was heaving out the rubbish.
I then wondered: how much will the car company charge for a new bit of plastic? The item would cost five cents to manufacture, so my guess was $143.65. Car companies, you may have noticed, always charge strangely precise amounts for spare parts, as if the price has been determined by some complex assessment of input costs, transport fees, plus local and international taxes, instead of some bloke in an office in Sydenham saying: “How much do you reckon the mugs would be willing to pay?”
Anyway, this particular mug was determined to locate the missing part, even though I knew it was an impossible task. A needle in a haystack? That would be easier than a tiny bit of black plastic, missing in a tip.
Tips, of course, are notoriously challenging when it comes to missing items. There’s a bloke in Britain who, some years ago, mistakenly threw out a computer on which he had stored his early purchases of cryptocurrency. If he could find that computer, he’d now be worth – in Australian dollars – about $700 million. He’s regularly offered the council a big fee if only he could methodically dig up the whole dump. No dice. The council says: it’s down there somewhere, and we took ownership the minute you threw it away.
Tips, at one point, were more forgiving. You were allowed to explore a tip. You were allowed to dig and collect. Children ran gleefully across the hillocks of rubbish like a scene from The Sound of Music. The father would back up the station wagon, and the kids would tumble from the car like cockroaches on a mission.
Tips, at one point, were more forgiving. You were allowed to explore a tip. You were allowed to dig and collect.
They’d fan out across the stinking, fly-infested bog and return with countless treasures. A deflated wheel from a wheelbarrow! A cracked vase! A broken cricket bat!
They’d all go into the back of the station wagon, to be praised and gushed over and glorified for weeks, at which point they’d be returned to the tip for other families to discover. There were old rusty bikes that had spent at least a week with every family in the suburb. All the same, each excursion to the tip would be declared the best event of the year – well, not counting the last cracker night, when Darren next door nearly lost an eye.
Colin Buchanan once wrote an excellent song about Australia’s rubbish tip culture. It was called Frank the Scab and told of a dad who went to the tip with half a load of rubbish and then always returned with the trailer fully stacked: “Look what Dad’s got this time”.
And, while on the subject of Australian literature, there’s a wonderful Frank Hardy novel, The Outcasts of Foolgarah, which celebrates the garbos themselves. These giants of men, as Hardy described them, who found treasures aplenty among the rubbish thoughtlessly thrown out by the silvertails of Sydney.
Of course, there are some rural tips where you can still muck around. The smaller ones can’t afford staff so they operate on an honour system. There’s one I occasionally visit that has prices on the gate: this much for a dumped cow, slightly more for a dumped horse. Maybe they have cameras, but I do wonder how they check? Does the occasional farmer sneak in a dead horse without paying, covering him over with tree clippings and cabbage?
In the overheated world of the city, of course, it’s not like that. In our suburban Waste Transfer Centre, there’s a small searchable zone. It’s the metre or so between where the cars are allowed to park and where the protective barriers begin. The bins – unsearchable, unvisitable – are many metres below.
When I arrive, second time that day, I search that messy fringe like a forensic scientist searching for clues. There’s an old pineapple. A flat football past its prime. Decaying vegetables.
And then, there it is, among the muck, my little black bit of plastic, looking up at me.
It might not be worth the $700 million lost by that bloke in Britain but at least I’ve denied the car company its profit. I decide – I know this is weird – that the whole day has been improved by losing the thing in the first place. I’m a lucky guy.
“Mark it up as a win,” says the guy at the gate, and the feeling lasts all day.
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