Cleanup Australia Day – 2007

Written by Matt Barnes.

IIt all comes around too fast sometimes. It really didn’t seem that long ago that we were cleaning up Yellowmundi. But that was last year!
After a major stuff-up on my part, like sending all of the volunteers to an intersection that doesn’t exist, I managed to hastily correct my mistake on Saturday afternoon by e-mail. Luckily most of the crew got the message or worked it out for themselves.

Between 8.30 and 9.30, eight LROC members’ vehicles rolled up carrying an impressive compliment of 20 willing bodies. That’s right, 20 willing bodies giving up their Sunday to clean up someone else’s rubbish. Some possibly still tired from the festivities in Oxford Street the night before. Gets you right there (symbolically placing hand over heart)!

After some introductions, to each other and to our host Tegan Burton from NPWS we had a short briefing then we split into 2 teams. A small team led by Josh and Lesley, accompanied by Tony Corke's latest acquisition a 130 dual cab, and Roger and Lorna Davis in their sturdy little 88” series 2A. They headed off toward pacific park to extract some bit of car from the bush adjacent to a side track.

The rest of us headed a couple of kilometres south a short track through a locked gate that had become a convenient dumping ground for just about everything. Dave Hall graciously allowed us to use his Toyota tray-back Ute to shift the bulk of the rubbish from the bush to the skip beside the road near the gate. Aaron and I went ahead to the skip while the others were finishing up so that we could get a huge tractor tyre into the skip while it was empty giving us room to work.

While the Toyota was being relieved of it’s load, the rest of us saw some more rubbish just over the fence. As is the norm, these few bits of rubbish turned out to be another major exercise. It all had to be carried out by hand, half a car and all. By the time we had finished and Josh’s team had caught up with us and now the 20ft skip was overflowing. There was also an impressive pile of bags lined up against it.

The time was about 11.30, Tegan suggested we head to the 2nd site at Canoelands and get stuck into lunch. With no objections lodged, we headed off in an impressive convoy and settled in to a great BBQ lunch provided by the NPWS.

Unfortunately we had more work to do. Roger and Lorna had to head off, so the rest of us struggled to or feet and into our cars for another innings. Luckily for us while we’d been eating lunch the sky had clouded over and cooled things down a bit. However upon arriving at the second site the sun came out again and pushed the already stifling heat up a few degrees more but we had a job to do and were determined to get it done.

This site consisted of a loop track along a ridge dotted with various piles of refuse. Josh was happy he had another car to pull out. A group of us set about loading Dave’s Ute up again at the first pile. We took that across to the dumpsite then moved on to the next pile. At this point I think I should thank the thoughtless mongrel that dumped the second pile of building material. At this point, you’re probably saying “Huh!” This guy was so thoughtful while thoughtlessly dumping his demolition waste, that he neatly stacked his window frames up against a couple of trees and made a reasonably neat pile of off cuts. You’d think he could have at least bent the nails over for us!

A commercial fridge, an engine block, washing machines, bags and bags of rubbish, window frames all emerged from the bush and were stacked for pick-up…but still no sign of Josh and his crew. I went for a wander up the track to find his red Defender testing his Maxidrive by towing a car body that kept steering itself into trees. He then tried to find some magical way in which the car body would pass through the 800mm thick tree by applying more traction and more power which didn’t work.

The first thing we tried was to pull the wreck back, re-rig it on a shorter chain and replace the full snatch strap with a tree trunk protector, in the hope the wreck would follow the path of the defender a little better. This didn’t work either so we then ran out Mark’s winch to a tree off the side of the track to pull the wreck sideways and off the tree. Then repositioned the snatch block to pull the wreck forward past the troublesome corner. We then hooked Josh’s car back on to the wreck and this worked.

While the last of the rubbish was being offloaded at he dumpsite I did a run around the loop track to see if we’d missed anything. A quick group photo for the NPWS and then we said our goodbyes and headed off.
Overall, we’d made a huge difference to both the South Maroota SCA and Marramarra National Park. Tegan our NPWS ranger was extremely impressed with our efforts and hinted at the possibility of a guided trip through the national park at some stage in the future.

The LROC’s efforts for Clean Up Australia Day were wide spread. We also had a team at Parramatta Lake removing dumped cars and a team of the Tuff Trip guys helping out with the A.B.U.G. clean up effort at Appin.