Throwing Out History

I wrote this piece some months ago. I wrote it because of my interests in collecting Australiana and how much of it has been lost, because early historical pieces weren't considered collectable in respect to financial terminology. History, not matter how new, is always collectable and worth saving for a nation like ours that is so young.

It’s Thursday and I visit our local tip were the usual garbage, broken furnishings, and bottles are piling up around the lip of the tip’s hole.

Tomorrow the local council’s bulldozer attends to its weekly errand and scrapes the rubbish into the gapping mouth.

Scavenging is an interesting activity for children, rubbish calling to them “…come look…”

The lure of throwing an empty beer bottle into the mouth, to watch as the bottle breaks and scatters, the shards like dark amber trinkets skipping away from its broken parent.

Or there’s the creative projects that children create, contemplating the use of “…all that broken wood…?”

What interests me is the good stuff that people throw out along side of the refuse!

Kitchen utensils, magazines, books, canvas, to name but a few recyclable objects.

In a country community there’s few second hand stores to send your recyclable items to, garage sales are virtually non-existent because of the stretch of distances between houses and properties, and there’s no base for a Life Line bin.

Yet we all head into town, once per week or fortnight, where such places certainly exist!

The tip is, however, many people’s first thought to discard their household, garage, or shed spring-cleaning, and sometimes they throw out history with the rubbish.

This Thursday I was a rescuer of history, not of anything ancient or antique, but valuable all the same.

Newspapers, two different types, many, many editions dating from 1949 and 1950, torn, cut to fit under the old lino that was from the same era, yellowed with age and fragile to touch.

The results of the local shooting competition announced in a couple of pages, where I find local generation families’ names from around the district amongst the competitors and winners alike.

The price for beef or sheep, in pounds and shillings, not monetary terms that I understand, but would surely be of interest to would be writers of fiction, history or just for the locals to compare the meat market value changes from then and now.

Get this Menzies visited a neighbouring district!

Menzies!

He bothered with a small country area like ours?

It was before he became an Australian Prime Minister and then became one of the biggest Australian mysteries when he disappeared into thin air.

These newspapers thrown out uncaringly at the edge of foul smelling, rotted food and wriggling maggots would have been lost to Australian history within 24 hours.

It was fortunate that these newspapers had been discarded far enough away from the surrounding refuse, and were not further stained, or worse, ruined.

Rescuing them meant I was able to show the local schoolchildren there local communication history and donate two complete newspapers to the local Woocoo Historical Society.

This early local history wasn’t recognised as important to the community or valuable in monetary terms.

The local museum, seven minutes from the tip, was not considered when the old lino was uprooted and discarded.

It is so easy to throw away history and not see the value for the generations of here and now, and those to come.

Why were these newspapers not considered as interesting local history and not given to the local museum, or framed and used as a talking piece for a newly renovated home?

It amazes me what people throw away, such as the fruit bowl from an Australian Ceramic Company lies broken, but the missing piece lies beside it, slotting perfectly into place.

The piece was easy to mend and the previous owner could have passed the item on to family members or the museum?

Like so many early Australian products (but not antique), it would have been lost, because people do not look further ahead, only to the here and now.