by John Wells
I've been to a few good tips in my time. As a little bloke I've had all sorts of fun in them and I've found all sorts of good things.

Tip-ratting is something we are not allowed to do now. Indeed, we don't have real tips anymore. We have transfer stations and waste facilities and so on, and those things are certainly a healthier arrangement, but back in the day we didn't know all that much about rubbish disposal and local councils would find a spot no-one much wanted and there they'd dump their rubbish.
Joe Public could simply turn up and empty his trailer or his ute.

There were three tips that featured large in my slightly wild and almost untamed childhood.

I remember the incinerators we had in schools up into the 1970s, concrete-block assemblies with the bottom half mostly filled with lunches that had been dumped and would not burn. Quite apart from the environmental issues, can you imagine the outcry now if a teacher sent a child outside to burn the rubbish? We loved the job, and if we were careful we could spin it out until afternoon play-time, which is just one more thing that has gone.

I wonder how much carbon was sequestered in rotting Vegemite sandwiches right across the state.

Schools now have skips and the rubbish bins are emptied into them and taken away by people that no-one in the school knows. Of course, there has to be a certain amount of rubbish-sorting so that glass is not mixed with green waste and plastics are not mixed with general refuse. It can be a complicated process.

There were three tips that I enjoyed, three in which I prospected for 'good stuff'. The first was on our Longwarry farm. There was a creek down the railway side of the farm, with quite a high bank on the cowshed side, just made for dumping stuff no longer wanted. Remember that I am going back about 70 years here.

There was not much to be gained from the farm tip other than corrugated iron and sheets of other materials that could be used for making huts in next door's bushland, which, of course, we did.

The second tip was much better, drawing perfectly good rubbish from a much wider area. Grandma and grandpa lived in a little cottage behind the Drouin Cemetery. Weerong Rd only went as far as grandma's and Clancy Rd was about a hundred yards of dirt road to grandma's gate and the two big oak trees. The road reserve was there for it to continue through to Parinda Rd, which was another dead end – at the tip.

That was convenient because we went up to grandma's every second weekend or so, and when the adults were yarning after lunch we'd go exploring in a most un-environmental way. We once found three tennis racquets which we thought rather a treasure. We found a box of comics, once, and comics were rather frowned upon at our place. We smuggled them home, or some of them. The tennis racquets were never used – not all good rubbish is actually useful for anything.

There were rats in that tip in large numbers and there were always a few feral cats. They seemed to maintain a balanced food chain. Rats are very cunning in tips.

The third little paradise for a tip rat was the Glen Cromie tip.
Once I took a load of rubbish out to the Glen Cromie tip, a small quarry up over hill from Glen Cromie itself (where did that name originate?) and on the turn out to Rokeby. I saw a few LPs dumped on the other side so I climbed very carefully across a dozen or so car bodies and found about 50 vinyl recordings of radio shows like Pick a Box, the Ampol Show and so on, with Jack Davey, Bob Dyer and the like. There was even a set of commercials for the new Porta-Gas. I collected them all carefully, but that was about 50 years ago, or a little more, and I have no idea where they went.

They'd be valued now.

I also found two huge photograph albums full of pioneer photographs of life in the Strzeleckis. I looked through them but left them in the tip. Bad mistake. They deserved preserving and now that I write a history (usually) column they would be a prime source.

This seems a little grubby looking back, but we were country kids, used to walking long distances and exploring the land carefully. We'd often have a rifle or two and we did not always have permission to shoot over the land on which we shot rabbits. I'm a much more respectable old bloke now, and I say that a little wistfully.

When I take a trailer load of rubbish to the waste transfer station (I think the Pakenham one is called that) I am warned to bring nothing home. Indeed, the balance now flows the other way. I take good things to the 'tip' only because my wife has declared them to be rubbish.

There is even an archaeology involved. When we dig we find messages from the past. Even in our garden we find evidence of our own 50-plus years in this place. We find bits of blue tile that would have been bright even in the 70, and a burnt-orange one or two from behind the stove. As we did jobs on the house we used the detritus to fill holes in the place. There is even a small dead refrigerator under an artificial rock.

The 'dug up things' that take us back are the dead soldiers. Young John had armies of those little plastic soldiers and everywhere there was some exposed dirt there would be a war, with John on both sides of it. We still find them, decapitated by the mower or with legs lost to the cultivator.

Do you remember when black plastic was all the rage in gardens, under mulch? We didn't now how much it killed the vital living things in the soil and we used metre after metre. Now we seem to dig it up whenever we pick up a shovel.

It all takes us back through the times of our lives, but it is not the good fun my brothers and I once had as tip rats.