Rubbish is a big, big subject. Only, when you sit around council tables to wrestle with the issue, nice people call it landfill. But it’s still rubbish.

I can recall nearly 20 years ago when we were told there was only about five years of landfill space left at Eaglehawk, the site of Bendigo’s landfill.

Since then, of course, it has grown into Mt Landfill as we develop “space” up in the air. It can’t go on forever. Soon Mt Landfill will look like an off-shoot of the Great Dividing Range and will have its own weather patterns, and I doubt people will want residential space on top, no matter how stunning the views are.

But, dear downtrodden reader, as you may have guessed, Bushwhacked has a solution. Turn the clock back 50 years. Or even 30. We are all encouraged to recycle as a way of stopping more stuff being sent off to Mt Landfill, but we are also banned from recycling in one very important and entertaining manner.

As a child, I loved the local tip. All the neighbourhood kids did. We lived at Karadoc on the Murray River not far from the little town of Red Cliffs. About five kilometres across one salty, marshy mudflat from where I lived, the good people of Red Cliffs had decided was a good place to dump their rubbish. They just hoiked it over the lip of a 20-metre steep escarpment. 

Then we kids would spend many happy hours clambering over it, finding “handy” things to make games from and practicing chucking yonnies at anything remotely fragile. 

It didn’t stink because in those days people did not dump food or garden waste. That went to the chooks or got dug back into the ground. There was nowhere near as much packaging as we endure today. Groceries were packed in re-used cardboard boxes. The tip was (from a germy point of view at least) fairly safe for kids.

Occasionally, we’d find something really exciting and drag it home across the salt flats, such as bits of old cars – and here I’m talking bits of vintage cars you’d now give your first-born for. And broken bikes, shovels and picks which you’d fix up.

When I think back to the stuff we played in, I get a little guilty. Such as using a pretty intact 1920s car for slug gun target practice. Or jumping up and down on a timber gramophone case until it shattered. I am sure I shot the top off many now very valuable bottles.

You can’t do this any more. You are now banned from taking anything from the tip, sorry, landfill. Even a relatively few years back you could still have a quick squiz around the tipping area to see if others were chucking away something interesting or useful. And yes, there have been times (even this century) when I have come home with as much as I tipped. The damn weighbridge at the exit makes that impossible now.

Not all the good stuff gets picked up by the mandatory pre-dumping inspections. I have seen a lovely old valve radio go under the monstrous grinding wheels of the tip tractors. Sob. A big box I was about to make a mad dash for to turn into a guinea pig hutch was pulverised before I could reach it.

The overall point is this: why don’t councils let us rummage about a bit to see if there’s anything we can rescue from landfill and nobly recycle?  We’d be doing society a favour. Either that or bring back the much-loved hard-rubbish collections from the nature strip.