Rubbish – by Liz Betts
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First rule of a crime story: always start with a body. The side of the road, wallaby grass, great lumps of quartz, broom beginning to flower. I see a flash of red, but I keep walking; it doesn’t scream crime. I stop, turn back, take a photograph, and move on. I take a lot of photographs when I am walking.
The bushland around my home is box ironbark forest. But, just like the housing estates that are popping up, this forest is new. ‘People worry too much about trees,’ my neighbour tells me. ‘When I was growing up, there were no trees here.’ This is goldmining country, and it’s true, the forests were completely denuded. My neighbour defines the natural state of the area by the timeline of his life, the period after mining had ceased, but when an old farmer still walked her cattle down to the creek to graze.
When I walk, I spy twiggy bush-pea, kangaroo tracks and white-winged choughs flying low. But what I am searching for is man-made. I started photographing rubbish in the bush in 2019 when I was preparing a land management plan for a small reserve near Lalgambook in central Victoria. I was cataloguing everything I found there: flora and fauna, both native and introduced; fencing and access; anything that required management. I found broken crockery, a cast-iron fire grate, a letterbox, old leather shoes and thick glass bottles. I wondered how this refuse had come to rest in this tiny sliver of bushland. Had it been dumped? Or had some of it travelled downstream along the water race that was dug to wash gold in the 1850s; colluvial deposits of accidental treasure?
This curiosity was why I stopped to photograph the red cigarette pack I noticed on my walk. Not quite a body, but evidence of a crime in contravention of Australia’s plain packaging laws. Perishable packaging such as this is not my usual subject. I prefer oil drums and old drink cans, the teardrop ring-pulls reminding me of the stretch of bubbles in a lava lamp. I like old metal that rusts and buckles in pleasing ways, and crumbles away leaving negative space for the imagination. On a bike ride I found a circle of paint tins, some with deposits that had thickened and hardened and begun to flake away. This rubbish is bad and shouldn’t be there. It is polluting the environment. But it also is beautiful in its imperfection, perhaps like the person who left it there.
The cigarette pack is not beautiful, but it is unusual in that it carries no warnings and no gruesome pictures of death, just the confident claim of the ‘Finest Virginian Tobacco’. I’m intrigued as to how these cigarettes, a brand I’d never heard of, came to be here. When I came across a second pack the next day, I decided it was time to do some digging.
Manchester cigarettes are thought to be the most popular brand of illegal cigarettes sold in Australia. With the exponential increase in excise on cigarettes, the black market in both chop-chop (homegrown tobacco) and smuggled cigarettes is growing in tandem. Australia’s plain packaging laws make this pillar-box-red packaging unapologetically illegal. So, I think to myself, the person who littered is the same person who purchased black market cigarettes. Is the sense of freedom we experience in open spaces the same sense of freedom found in bypassing laws and regulations?
Anxiety for the maintenance of natural spaces in ‘pristine’ condition is high. Jeff Sparrow, in his recent essay in Overland, discusses the wilderness paradigm, in which the concept of ‘untouched’ wilderness conflicts with evidence of thousands of years of environmental management by First Nations peoples. Sparrow argues that capitalism in Britain, and later Australia, ‘fundamentally altered human interactions with the natural environment’ (2022, pp 11–12)[i]. The dispossession of Britons from their land and their agrarian existence led directly to the colonisation of Australia, in turn dispossessing the Indigenous peoples. The state of the geographical world we inhabit today is inexorably shaped by the layering of these events. Appreciating rubbish, I tell myself, is merely an acceptance of what has occurred. While I take note of worm trails, fox scats or writhing knots of spitfires, I relish the discovery of the discarded relics of my neighbours, past and present, each bearing the same message: ‘I was here.’
When I come across a collection of old one-litre sherry bottles, the image is clear: someone’s drinking hideaway or, for a time, someone’s home. Classic bushman images of the softened felt of an Akubra, an old man shouting into the wind. When I find a collection of cans, I hear the hiss of the opening and the laughter of the drinkers. I am puzzled to stumble across the plastic midsole of a shoe. And did that fire grate belong to a neighbouring farmhouse, or an old pub, or a church?
I am on a mission to find an original pull tab from a drink can that predates today’s stay tabs. If I am successful, I can send it to the Netherlands to form part of a global archaeological mapping project. The pull tab was phased out in the 1980s because the litter created by the tabs being ripped from cans was cutting the feet of beachgoers and harming wildlife. The current stay-on tab is a wonder of modern engineering. Raising the ring-pull first releases the pressure in the can, then the fulcrum of the lever switches to the rivet and the tab breaks along the tear strip, bending the tab securely inside the can. The modern can bears testament to ingenuity and reverence for convenience.
The illegal cigarettes continue to haunt me in a different way to the ring-pulls. There is a milkbar not far away, where the blinds by the counter are always closed. Convenience stores are the most common retail outlet for illegal cigarettes and I feel like this one is giving off all the signs of being open to off-the-books exchanges. I try to let it go, but I have a mind that fixates. I am like a snag of fleece on barbed wire, unable to move on. I can find sensual pleasure at the sight of a car chassis rusting in the depression left by a fallen tree, as much as in the bright racemes of the wattle blossom or the supple double leaf of the orchid. I play out in my mind’s eye the vision of the car bouncing wildly through the night, its axis tipping on the rim of the crater and the back wheels spinning helplessly in the air, until its occupants give up and trudge home, only to return over the following weeks to retrieve parts of the car that can be removed.
I decide that my mind needs a bit more real-world experience, so I drive back to the milkbar. I park outside and walk in as nonchalantly as I can, and my fulcrum shifts from observer to player in this bizarre drama of living side-by-side with others. There is very little stock on the shelves. I’m in the mood for an iced coffee, but the drinks fridge holds only a few cans of cola. I take one and wander up to the empty counter. A young man with a late-’90s goatee emerges from the back room. There is an old-school cash register at the front and shelves behind for (legal) cigarettes. Their little roller doors are pulled down. I hold up the can and ask him if he has any Manchesters. ‘Reds or blues?’ he asks, and I reply ‘reds’. He opens a new carton and places a pack on the counter: ‘Twenty-two dollars.’ I hand him forty in cash. He looks at the cash register and replies: ‘Just make it twenty.’ ▼
[i] Sparrow, J (2022) ‘ ‘That’s what drives us to fight’: labour, wilderness and the environment in Australia’, Overland 246, pp 3–23
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