Dialogue: A time of luck and legends

By SANDY BURGHAM

A friend of mine who hails from Palmerston North often recalls arriving in Auckland as a wide-eyed, freshly scrubbed gal from the provinces.

There was rubbish everywhere, most of it seeming to be concentrated on the grass verges outside the homes in what she had been led to believe was quite a pluty part of the North Shore.

It was astounding to a girl used to the tidy kerbsides of Manawatu.

She had, of course, struck a hard-rubbish collection, referred to more trendily these days as an inorganic rubbish collection, and still a charming quirk of our city.

Our suburbs are picked off one by one and turned into slums for a week. It's a strange and outrageous concept, but I am so glad I live here and not in some other town that would not dare host such an eccentric event on a civic scale.

Apart from being just plain convenient, inorganic collections draw all sorts of people out from behind their venetians for a peek - some surreptitiously, others shamelessly sorting through other people's garbage.

The kerbs are a hive of activity and in some places there is almost a festive atmosphere as people scour the kerbs for the elusive item that is the holy grail of bargain-hunters.

But don't assume that treasures from the inorganic collections are of value only to a few eccentrics with obsessive-compulsive disorder. The inorganics feed a thriving underground economy that many Aucklanders are contributing to in blissful ignorance.

This is just the first in many ironies when it comes to the fine art of inorganic rubbish collecting, which those in the know refer affectionately to as scabbing. To some, scabbing is not only a hobby but a livelihood.

If we subscribe to the notion of one man's meat being another's poison, it follows that what is found on the scrap-heap often has a value to someone else.

At some transfer stations, folk are employed to sift through the rubbish, panning for scrap metal and the like. In their search for pay dirt, they merrily commit to the landfill goods (or bads as the case may be) of far greater commercial value than the pieces they save. Among the finders-keepers and trade/exchangers of street merchandise, there are legendary tales of chaise longes and Victorian bathtubs that have been sold on for hundreds of dollars.

And this leads to the second irony. Those uptight citizens who find it distasteful to have scabbers sifting through their kerbside waste are often the same mugs who unwittingly buy something through reputable establishments, which at some time during its life cycle has fallen from grace and spent time on the street.

We always value things more if we pay lots of money for them.

I am told that scabbing is against the law or at least discouraged by the authorities.

A self-confessed junk junkie I know tells of his car being rammed by rubbish-collecting contractors who take their work seriously. He is routinely abused by people who would rather he left their rubbish alone and frequently chastised by the long arm of the law which would rather he moved on. (Undeterred, he presses on, considering it all part of the cat-and-mouse game of scabbing.)

All the while, the council is encouraging us to recycle and pass it on. Surely the real culprits are not the scabbers, but the sly citizens of other suburbs who cannot wait for their rostered collection. In the dead of night, they dump their rubbish in someone else's neighbourhood. This is truly distasteful.

Scabbing is a community event. My sister was ripping up her carpet and systematically transferring it to her front lawn when two friendly women appeared to take it away to a better life.

Later that morning, as she was culling attic junk, she found other scabbers outside, keen to secure seats on her balcony to get a preview of the clearance stock.

My aforementioned friend who lives dangerously on the knife-edge of scabbing, believes he is on a mission. He sees himself as a hero of hard rubbish, saving many items from the grave. He's giving a chosen few another chance.

As the bank advertisement says, what people do in the privacy of their own homes is their business; you can tell a lot about a person by the profile of their inorganic pile.

In a city no longer egalitarian, inorganics are a great leveller.