Rubbish

 First published in Column 8, 25^th March, 1992

With all the discussion about the placement of a new tip, I can no longer avoid putting my oar in.

An occasional trip to the tip is good for the soul. The artist in me even finds a certain aesthetic pleasure in it.

Doesn’t the sight of countless seagulls swooping and swerving make your soul sing? I could sit and watch them for hours if it wasn’t for the smell. (You will have noticed, of course, that the latest generation of seagulls have evolved a small peg-shaped flap over their nostrils which enables them to go about their work at the tip without inhaling the odours.)

Don’t the car bodies heaped four and five-storeys high give you a feeling that man is still superior to the machine?

And best of all, isn’t there a marvellous sensation of off-loading when you toss heaps of rubbish into the pit and see it chewed and mangled by raging bulldozers? All your cares and woes and gripes discarded and forgotten. Wow!

I’m just fresh home from a trip out to Green Island and my only unpleasant memory of the journey was the feeling that my car’s suspension was suffering permanent seizure because of the pot-holey road. These holes brought back memories of a trip to Milford Sound, where avoiding the craters in the road was about as easy as missing rain drops in a storm.

As a result of casting all my cares upon the void, I now have a clean and tidy shed, having managed to overcome sentiment sufficiently to throw out all manner of things that survived last year’s clean-up. (But not yet the picture with the broken glass – from my childhood – of the QE II’s predecessor.)

Humans have an amazing desire to hang onto things that have outlived their usefulness, as though one day we’ll find a purpose for all manner of broken bits and pieces. Yes, I know there are times when we wish we’d kept that spare wheel to replace the one that’s just fallen off the kid’s trike, or even grandfather’s rusty hoe-head with the withered handle.

Attics and basements full of junk have a certain romance about them: they’re always the places where you’ll find the treasured antique that everyone else in the family has forgotten, or the secret diary, or the key to a strongbox containing untold wealth.

The trouble is these sort of antiques and diaries and keys always turn up in other people’s attics and basements. In our case the rubbish around our house threatens to overwhelm us, and devour all spare space.

Modern persons (that doesn’t have half the ring of ‘modern man’) have to decide what items are junk so that they can jettison them without fear.

Built-in obsolescence means things are constantly having to be replaced (toasters, for instance) and there’s an element in us (as well as the toasters) that hates throwing away something which only a few years ago we paid good money for.

Our collection of fading television tubes, spare vacuum cleaner hoses, chipped chisels, and worst of all, quarter-full paint can, will all survive barely a week after take our own last trip on this earth. There’s a certain irony that most of us wind up buried under the same kind of earth as our worn-out material possessions.

At least we rid ourselves of the material that’s clung to us during the course of our journey once and for all.

Without rubbish, smelly or aesthetic, man is born, and without it he will die.

I told you tips were good for the soul.

Landfill, Riverhead,West Auckland.New Zealand
Notice how tidy it is compared to tips of the past. 
Courtesy GPS 56Wikimedia Commons

I’m a bit amazed that decisions over the placement of a new tip were taking place when this was written, nearly 35 years ago, and the decision is still in the process.

I’m interested to read that also at this time, care bodies were being dumped at the tip. That hasn’t been the case for two or three decades.

In spite of my making it sound as though we were hoarders, in fact, we were a relatively tidy family. Far more junk went out that was kept. Thankfully.

Tips are no longer called tips in New Zealand: they’re now ‘land fill.’