Michael Green

Writer and producer

The New Joneses

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It’s time to get what we need without buying it new.

THIS week, two plucky volunteers – “The New Joneses” – will move into a pop-up apartment at Federation Square.

“Mr and Mrs Jones” will enter on Monday in their undies and bathrobes, with a bag of toiletries, and stay there for four nights, until Friday.

They’ll also be clutching their household scavenger list, which calls for items such as bikes, bedside tables and board games, cushions, cookware and cutlery. They must source everything second hand, or by means of borrowing, renting or swapping.

Tamara DiMattina, the event’s founder, says the volunteers aren’t celebrities and it isn’t a crazy quest for reality TV; rather, it’s an exercise in thinking differently about the way we consume.

“When you move house, you tend to write a massive list and buy a whole lot of new stuff,” she says. “But anything you need, you can get second hand.

“The Grand Hyatt is bringing down the beds, sheets and towels. We’re aiming to get people out of the mindset that second hand is dirty. If you stay at a luxury hotel, you’re using a towel and sleeping on sheets that someone else has used. Second hand is not second best.”

But the New Joneses won’t only be procuring preloved goods. They’ll also learn to cook and shop differently, to reduce food and packaging waste. And the apartment itself is a low-waste, pre-fabricated building, complete with water capture and storage systems, as well as home composting and gardening.

School groups will tour the exhibition each morning, before it opens to the public in the afternoon.

One family in Hampton is already putting these ideas into practice. Nearly three months ago, Erin and Peter Castellas and their children began a ‘Buy Nothing New Year’.

These are their ground rules: they can purchase food and new health and hygiene products, such as soap and medicines; everything else they must borrow, inherit, or buy second hand.

“We wanted to take on this challenge because it fits with our values, as well as our budget,” Ms Castellas explains. “We’re raising a young family on one income. It turns a situation that could be a bit miserable into something that’s fun and helps us talk to our kids about consumption and environmental problems, and the value of money.”

She admits to some initial anxiety about running out of things: what would they do without simple items, such as sticky tape or aluminium foil?

So far, they’ve coped. But Ms Castellas says the small stuff doesn’t matter so much as the bigger realisations the experiment has afforded.

“We’ve shifted from thinking about what we don’t have, to being grateful for what we do have. That’s been really interesting for me,” she says. “And when we’ve asked ourselves whether we really need something, we’re surprised that we often answer: ‘No, we don’t really need that’.”

If you’d like to experiment with reducing your consumption, you could set a more modest (but still testing) goal: October is Buy Nothing New Month.

The Castellas family still have many months to go – including Christmas present season. But, to date, even the experience of giving has been richer. Recently, for their grandma, they hand-painted a photo frame from the opshop. “We figured out that what we really want to say is: ‘Nan, we love you!’ not, ‘Here’s a flash new digital frame’,” Ms Castellas says.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online

People in cars

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NOT many drivers will stop. Not grey nomads, not truckies, not women alone, not the elderly, not families with kids, not backpackers in rented vans, not young men – not young people in general, but especially not young men – not the pilots of vehicles with safety lights on top, not the risk-averse who turn their headlights on in the day, not owners of cars with leather seats, not owners of aqua-marine or burnt-orange speed machines, not owners of late-model Holdens and Fords – no, not them.

Above all: not young men driving leather-seated, late-model, burnt-orange Holdens with their headlights on.

I watched one whoosh by in Marla, South Australia, 230 kilometres north of Coober Pedy, 450 kilometres south of Alice Springs.

Few cars were passing. Marla is a roadhouse, hotel, shop and caravan park, and not much more.

I’d been dropped there by Amy, a Vietnamese woman wearing large sunglasses – a woman alone – who picked me up at Coober Pedy, and thereby proved my rules mistaken.

From where I stood, in opal territory:

She didn’t even pull off the highway; she just stopped. She was driving a Toyota sedan, its fender busted in a way that made it look like a racecar. That’s how she drove it. She didn’t have much English and wasn’t interested in small talk. She was driving from Melbourne to Darwin for a few months’ fruit picking. She was driving in a hurry. There was no rush, she said, except that she couldn’t sleep.

“Very tired,” she said, as I observed the speedometer chasing 130 kilometres an hour. The speed limit on that part of the Stuart Highway is 110. “Very tired,” she repeated, as she switched the music from smooth Vietnamese crooner to hard, relentless trance.

Amy had her GPS set for Alice Springs, but she was having trouble connecting times and distances. Not far into our race, she glanced at the device and said: “How long take Alice Springs? Two hours? Three hours?” The GPS said we had 620 kilometres to go.

I suggested she might consider staying overnight at Marla. “Very tired,” she said, as usual, and lit another cigarette.

Thankfully, she stopped. (“Very tired,” she explained, apologising for not taking me to Alice.) And so I stood by the road at Marla. It was about 1 pm.

I’d dallied at the campground that morning, talking with Jenny and Mike, a couple who’d camped nearby.

Mike had asked me a few questions: how was I going getting lifts? Where had I come from? His thick grey moustache was ambushed by several days growth, and it gave him a haphazard, approachable look. I’d noticed them the evening before, because they were camping in a simple tent, not hauling a fully appointed, medium-sized house, as is the fashion.

He couldn’t contain himself any longer: “You know you’re talking to two of the world’s biggest hitchhikers?” he said.

Through the 70s they’d hitched all around the world: more than a thousand lifts. Afghanistan? For sure! They worked in cabin crew for Qantas. Whenever they could, they picked a new spot on the map and went there. “We never had a plan for where we’d get to by the end of the day,” Mike said. “We met the most wonderful people, and we went everywhere.”

They hitched with their two toddlers, when they were aged one and three. “All you need is two backpacks and six cloth nappies. That’s what we’d say.”

They made me a cup of tea. Earlier, Jenny had gently discouraged Mike from talking too much. But then she warmed to the story-telling too, with an hilarious anecdote about sashaying into a stuffy, cigars-and-evening-dress British club in the Sri Lankan high country, their bohemian best caked with mud after a downpour on the way.

Mike was bursting with all these memories. Jenny suggested he get his thumb on the road again. But he wouldn’t, he said, sadly. He couldn’t: “I can’t go back. It was a magic time then. I don’t want to ruin it. The world’s not what it used to be.”

He gave me a lift to the highway, apologising for detaining me with their reminiscences, which had meant I’d missed the early morning travellers. (I couldn’t have imagined a better way to spend the time.) “But it doesn’t matter,” he said. “You always get the right lift.”

So there I was in Marla, a few hours later. Arguably, the lift with speeding Amy had not been ideal. But the experience of hitching does lend itself to the metaphysical. One long-time practitioner told me recently that it had changed his life. He’d come to believe in manifestation: you get back what you put out. By the road, it feels that way to me too – at least in part.

I take off my hat and sunglasses for each passing vehicle and try to make eye contact. I smile and wave, whether they slow or not. Whoever stops, stops. It’s beyond my control. If nothing else, I’m fishing for a reciprocal wave, a small addition to the global stock of friendliness.

I’d been aiming for Alice that day, but maybe it wouldn’t happen. That wasn’t so bad. I was reading a magazine article about the conflict in Syria while I waited, scanning the wide desert horizon for people in cars. I pondered Mike and Jenny’s extraordinary adventures, and his view about how the world had changed. Had it? Could it change again?

The burnt-orange-Holden driver accelerated past and I waved and smiled, trying, as much as I was able, to inject a little something different into his day.

Two years ago, I hitched for the first time in Australia, to Cairns and back. I was very nervous. Thousands of kilometres later, on the way south again, I was humming, brimming with joy. I remember standing a while near Tenterfield, watching each passing car and thinking: “You missed out, dude! We would’ve had a great conversation!”

Perhaps the Bureau of Statistics could introduce a Hitching Index, tracking minutes spent waiting for a lift. It would be a proxy for the state of our society, a better one than Gross Domestic Product.

For now, not many drivers will stop. Many can’t, of course, for practical reasons. But someone always will.

It was Dave who pulled up, in a blue ute with a loaded trailer. He hobbled round the back, to shift his gear so I’d have room. He was going right through to Alice, four hours drive away.

“Just before I left, my sister called and told me not to pick up a hitch hiker,” he said. “But I saw you there and thought it wouldn’t be right to drive on.”

And my, did he have a story to tell.

Mining the nature strip

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Footpath fossickers are inspired by both ethics and aesthetics.

EARLIER this year, Tania Lewis and her colleagues visited householders in Moreland, in Melbourne’s inner north, to ask about how they reuse hard rubbish.

Dr Lewis, an associate professor of media and communication at RMIT, happened upon a gem of her own – she observed a kind of “green materialism” at play.

She explains, by way of example: one of her interviewees, Mark, had picked up an old shoe-cleaning box, the sort you’d keep a brush and polish inside and put your boot on while you buff and shine. He repaired it and uses it, and also, daydreams about its history.

“He imagined the old Italian man who might have made it originally and used it through his life,” Dr Lewis says. “He loved the fact that it had been used before. He was very invested in that romantic ethic, the sense of having a connection with the material objects in our lives.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

She says people rummage through their neighbours’ refuse for many reasons, including frugality, sustainability and an opposition to throwaway consumer culture. But many of us also do it for the thrill and the pleasure.

“People often valued hard rubbish precisely because these objects had histories and lives before them; unlike new objects, which they felt were somehow sterile and alienating,” she says.

Dr Lewis is the co-editor of Ethical Consumption: A Critical Introduction, published in 2010.  She says her research revealed another perspective on life in the suburbs.

“They’re often depicted as places of hyper-consumption. I wanted to focus on people who are doing quite the opposite. I wouldn’t call them alternative; they’re just ordinary families who’ve opted to live differently and who are very critical of mainstream approaches to consumption.”

There’s good cause to highlight our everyday thriftiness: it’s more common than you might think. A survey of households in Frankston, conducted by Dr Ruth Lane in 2007, found that two in every five had gleaned something from hard rubbish in the previous two years.

In another recent study, Dr Lane, from Monash University, recruited householders to track the things they put out on their nature strip. They reported that more than a third of the items were nabbed before the scheduled pick-up (the most popular were white goods, sports equipment, furniture, electrical appliances and kids’ toys).

She found that much more stuff is reclaimed informally than through the official collections. According to the Department of Environment and Sustainability, almost all the hard rubbish gathered by councils goes to landfill. Only 13 per cent, by weight, gets another life.

Despite this, lots of councils discourage scavengers, both professionals and amateurs. Many have switched away from scheduled pick-ups. Instead, you must book your own, once or twice a year, when you need it.

“Unfortunately, many councils have moved to make hard rubbish scavenging illegal and I think that’s incredibly short sighted,” Dr Lewis says.

“We need to encourage these forms of reuse and encourage people to reflect on what they consume, where it comes from and where it’s going at the end of its life.”

If you’re looking for the low-down on footpath fossicking, visit the Hard Rubbish Melbourne Facebook group. It has over 5000 members, many of whom post details of their finds and ask for tips on repairs and missing parts. They’ve also collated information about the timing and conditions of collections all across the city.

Read this article at The Age online

Anyone got a good story of finding gold? I picked a laser printer/photocopier five years ago, and after a simple, no-cost fix, it’s still going strong.  

Power information for the people

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Bill benchmarking must go beyond the average.

WHEN householders hand Lara Olsen their electricity bills, they watch her with nervous eyes.

“We’ve spent lots of time doing residential energy assessments,” says Ms Olsen, from Energy Return.

“Everyone asks, ‘Is this normal?’ Some look at you as though they’ve received a test result and they’re handing it to a doctor. They’ve paid it for the past 20 years, but never really had a chance to read it and understand what it means. Using as much electricity as we like is something we’ve taken for granted. But I think that’s changing.”

That change, however, won’t necessarily mean lower bills or less brown coal electricity.

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

If you visit the Energy Made Easy website (set up by the Australian Energy Regulator), you can type in your postcode, together with the number of people who live in your home, and find out the seasonal average electricity use in your area. Electricity retailers are now required to provide this information on our bills too.

It’s a nifty site, but Ms Olsen says just stating the mean isn’t good enough. Average household energy consumption is skewed: it’s pushed up by a relatively small number of very high consumers. And that means we’re creating a social norm that’s higher than the typical home, and much higher than an efficient one.

“At the moment, that benchmark is the average and the majority of people actually use less than the average,” she explains. “If this information keeps going out as it is, we will create the social license to consume more.”

Energy Return has been working with the Moreland Energy Foundation and several councils in Melbourne’s north (and the Horsham Rural City Council) to test a better target.

The councils are part of the Northern Alliance for Greenhouse Action. From now until November, they’re piloting the “Go 5” campaign, which promotes a target of 5 kilowatt-hours per person per day (for households with gas).

“We’re helping people think about their individual energy use,” says Judy Bush, executive officer of the alliance. “But we’re also creating targets and benchmarks for this region. We’re saying: ‘This is what you and your neighbours could all be aiming for’.”

The councils are testing different tactics, from community workshops to publicity campaigns. Some will focus on “bill busting” and others on using new metering portals to understand how we use electricity.

In Nillumbik Shire, the “Watts your power 3099?” campaign will encourage householders to set their own energy targets, based on 5 kilowatt-hours per person per day, and offer prizes and incentives for those who take part.

For most people, it isn’t a stretch target. Ms Bush, for example, says she uses “dramatically less than that” in her two-person household.

But, just as with the Target 155 campaign on water, they picked a number that’s achievable, rather than intimidating.

Ms Bush says the pilot campaign will help her team analyse whether “Go 5” is the right goal, and also, whether or not people will continue to cut their bills, even if they reach the magic number.

The target is harder for a one-person household than for a family of five, so larger households could comfortably aim much lower. “The more people you have in a household the more efficient it gets per person, because you’re spreading the use of appliances, like fridges and heating, across more people,” she says.

Read this article at The Age online.

You might be interested in this related article, about the effect of social norms on consumption. 

Re-empowering Port Augusta

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AS we rolled into Port Augusta, Allan, the travelling salesman who was driving, told me that South Australians call the town Port Agutter. “No one cares about anything much up here,” he said. A police car was stopped up ahead. “That’ll be an issue with the tinted ones.”

Until then, we’d had a pleasant yarn. When we got closer, we saw a young Indigenous man sitting on the footpath.

The council’s slogan is “the crossroads of Australia”. I suppose Allan would snigger at that. In part, it’s a service town – nearly a third of employees are in community or admin work. One in five of the town’s residents are Indigenous. It’s a hub for the state’s northern regions.

Mainly, though, it’s a struggling industrial town. Cargo trains line its eastern flank, and coal power plants lie south and north. The lung cancer rate is twice the expected national average.

Nevertheless, at the top of Spencer Gulf, the foreshore is pretty. I drove to Perth in the heat of summer ten years ago and one of the images that remains in my mind is watching young Indigenous kids backflipping into the sparkling water from a small jetty there.

This time, my experience countered Allan’s cynicism. In fact, I lingered a day longer, because I’d been told there’d be a stall outside Woolies, set up by Repower Port Augusta.

In the library, I briefly met Daniel Spencer, a worker with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition who’d been living there for a few months, helping with the local community group’s campaign. We didn’t talk long – he was heading off to meet with a local elder.

The Repower campaign unites some unlikely allies: the local council, the business coalition and the National Union of Workers, as well as environmentalists near and far. They all want to replace the two coal power plants with solar thermal ones, if for different reasons. The locals want jobs, and solar thermal promises more ongoing employment than the other alternative, gas.

The plan (PDF) was developed by renewable energy advocate Beyond Zero Emissions. It says six solar thermal plants and 95 wind turbines would match the base-load capacity of the two coal plants.

For the time being, neither plant is operating, although the generator, Alinta, plants to fire up one for the summertime peak season. But it, too, is interested in solar thermal, albeit on a smaller scale.

A poll taken by Repower last month recorded votes from one-third of the town’s residents, and 99 out of every 100 ticked the box for renewables. This Sunday, September 16, there’ll be a rally signalling the start of the Walk for Solar. About 100 students are marching from there to Adelaide – 325 kilometres in two weeks – arriving for another rally in the big smoke, where they’re calling for an end to the coal smoke altogether.

So, with all this in mind, I thought I’d stick around. But the stall didn’t happen. Overnight, the federal government announced it had stopped negotiations for payouts to close the country’s least efficient plants, Port Augusta’s among them. They’ll receive compensation to keep running, instead. Dan jumped on a bus to Adelaide to attend a protest, and figure out what next.

In the absence of the stall, I got the best image I could. Just put your thumb over the ‘Ty’.

My experience in Port Augusta also countered Allan’s racism. Heading north, I got a lift from Robbie and Jimmy Barnes, an Arabunna man and his son, who were driving to Roxby Downs, where Jimmy was about to do a stint as a trades assistant.

Robbie had lived and worked there for a spell, decades ago. He’d worked all over as a boiler-maker. Early in the drive, there was a moment of silence. He shifted stiffly in his seat and looked at me in the rearview. “C’mon Mick, give us some yarnin’. Tell us a story about what it’s like in Melbourne!”

I went blank, but it didn’t matter. Robbie filled the space. He was talker of the first order. He spoke about growing up on Davenport Reserve north of town, the places they’d walked and camped, and how many goals he kicked from the forward flank. He grouched about young men drinking and fighting, about his diabetes and failing eyesight, and about the black cloud from Maralinga that killed his wife’s mother and many of her people.

As we drove on, Jimmy began to talk more too. He said there were too many suicides in town. But he thought that the programs run by a group of local Indigenous men called Males in Black (PDF, see page 12) made a difference, if only they could run them more often.

They dropped me off in Pimba, inviting me to visit them when I came to Port Augusta next time. “Just ask for the Barnes Boys,” Robbie said, with a wry smile. “We’re more famous than the Kelly Gang.”