In 500BC, the world's first municipal dump was opened in Athens, Greece. That might not mean much to you but it does to me because I've been to our local tip twice in the past three days and I've gone from perspiration to inspiration.
When I read about the Greek venture in 500BC, my first reaction was: "Wow, what foresight! Were they cleaning up the city for the Olympics?"
My second reaction was: " I wonder if they know the price of entry has gone up?"
Before Sesame Street came to our televisions, we had tips and they were free.
Sesame Street convinced generations of Australian kids that the stuff we had always called rubbish was, in fact, trash and instead of throwing a biscuit into a rubbish bin you really needed to dump a cookie into a trash can.
Likewise, nowadays tips are frequently called dumps or even waste disposal centres. But they are one and the same.
Pre-Sesame Street, if you could stand the stench and the never-ending screech of seagulls, there was gold in them thar places.
I knew of one man who made his living as a professional scrounger . Whenever you went to the tip, there he was sifting through the piles of rubbish to see what he could find and sell.
I knew other blokes who often came back from the tip with as much as stuff they had taken there. This explains why you believe you've seen that same deer head on that wall somewhere else. You have. In someone else's house. Fred didn't bring it back from a hunting trip. He found it at the tip and now he lies about it.
Country tips were the best when I was growing up. They had all kinds of interesting stuff, including old cars to play in, and were a delightful playground for a young teenagers seeking adventure and the odd discarded Playboy magazine.
I've made two trips to the Canberra tip this week.
On Monday, it cost me $16 to get in.
Today, it only cost me $8.
I have no idea why. I was in the same car with roughly the same amount of rubbish. I even wore the same cap. Perhaps Wednesday is half-price day?
I wonder how many drachmas, if any, they charged in Athens in 500BC?
According to my research, regulations required waste to be dumped at least a mile from the city limits.
I imagine that the keeper of the tip was a man named Bottletopipides and he drove a big heavy-duty chariot, which was the forerunner of the bulldozer that is used nowadays to push all the rubbish. He also wore the forerunner to the hard hat. He called it a helmet.
We weren't so much on first name terms as all name terms.
"Hey Martinopolos," he'd greet me at the gates.
"My man Bottletopipides," I'd retort. "Anything good come in today?"
"Nothing to speak of, mate," Bottletopipides would say. "A few empty retsina bottles and a row of outdated marble columns from that place they knocked down in the High Street to make way for the Olympic Village."
Fast forward to Canberra tip in 2006 and it's a very different place now.
No stink. No seagulls. You could take your wife there these days. You follow the yellow line until you come to the tipping bays. Then you tip your rubbish over a small wall on to the bay below. But, alas, there's a sign to say that climbing down to the bay is not permitted.
You know what that means, don't you?
It means that I will never, um, er, read another Playboy magazine.
Or build my own Acropolis.
Or, worst of all, I'll never be able to tell a gullible person how I shot that deer from 10 metres away. And I shot the lion who was chasing him too but that one's at the taxidermist right now.
©November 1, 2006 John Martin. All Rights Reserved
NB: I called this site Dunno because I kept drawing a blank when I had to put a name to it
Australian writer John Martin looks at the funny side of life at the tip
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