Michael Green

Writer and producer

The lambs in winter

In Environment, The Big Issue on

All the focus recently has been on drought, but winter can bring the cruelest months for people on the land.

Bill Allen is closing the gate as I arrive. He’d driven out to collect the mail. Tall and strong but bowed and stiffened by the years, the old farmer shuffles over to shake my hand. “You’re the university lad are you?” he asks. I’m here from the city, on a break from crowds, concrete and cars.

We stand on the bridge over Salt Creek and Bill, now 87, proudly explains how his son David built it to replace the rickety wooden one. The thick concrete slabs and steel girders dwarf the skinny creek below.

Boorook is a family-run property in Woorndoo, near Mortlake in Western Victoria. The Allens arrived in 1906. Their grand old farmhouse reclines on the low hill above the paddocks and gullies.

Puddles line the dirt road. Bill tells me there was half an inch of rain overnight. They desperately needed rain to break the drought, he says, but it came at the worst time. The shearing is on and shearers won’t work with wet sheep; the damp wool gives them dermatitis. If it rains again, they’ll have to call off the rest of the week’s work. All that can be shorn today are sheep that were undercover last night.

Bill leads me to the woolshed and introduces me to David, who runs the farm. David is tall and solid, with thick, strong hands. His navy woollen jumper is flecked with newly shorn fluff. The shearers are working, their machines buzzing and whirring. They are hunched over, backs supported by braces on springs from the roof, bare arms moving in long and short blows over sheep pinned between their knees. After each sheep is done, the shearer pushes it through the gate to join his tally, eases his back up straight and drags the next one from the pen.

A few years ago the Allens collected interviews and compiled family trees for Boorook’s centenary celebrations. They made a book that tells of tennis tournaments, days spent rabbit hunting and eight children taking lessons at home, of two world wars and one employee who rode into town to get the mail each day. The Allens employed many workers in decades gone by, but now there is just one, Gary. He is leaving soon and will be difficult to replace. Farm labourers are hard to come by while mining money is oozing out of the West.

The woolshed, with rusting corrugated iron roof and walls, is even older than the farmhouse. David thinks it was built around 1860. Inside, the walls are adorned with fading airline posters. The floorboards and rails are worn smooth and sticky with wool fat. Little has changed here over the years; shearing technology has been much the same since the introduction of machine shears in the late 19th century.

I watch as two female rouseabouts stride back and forth along the row of five shearers, their hard brooms clacking on the floorboards, pushing the loose wool into small piles. The rousies stoop to gather the full fleeces from the shearers’ feet then throw them evenly over the wrought iron bench, as if spreading a blanket over a bed.

Outside, the sky darkens.

Not long after smoko they run out of dry sheep. A mob of waterlogged ewes, with long thick fleeces, was next to be shorn but now they slosh through a wet paddock. There’s no way to hasten the drying; they need sun, wind and time in the paddock. The shearers must wait with no work.

Wild weather is forecast overnight, so we herd the thousand newly shorn, bleach-white lambs back into the shed. David and I drive in the ute, his son Nick rides the motorbike and their sheepdog, Bella, scurries in wide arcs. David whistles instructions, “Wayback Bella, wayback. Wayback Bella wayback.”

Winter shearing intrigues me. We put our woollies on, I think to myself as we follow behind the dog, and take theirs off. But David says they rarely lose sheep to the weather. “We lost more when we sheared during summer. Summer frosts catch them when they aren’t prepared for the cold.” A battalion of sheep runs up the hill as another mob comes charging down and it reminds me of an epic movie battle scene. “It’s like a moving snowstorm,” David says.

Just before dawn I wake to the sound of wind and rain against the windows. The bureau forecasts that the rain will blow over in the afternoon, so David and Nick decide to let the sheep out of the shed and move them to a distant paddock, where there is good grass to eat. It is a difficult decision: the sheep will suffer from the cold, but they need food in their bellies. There is no room for feeding in the shed.

We herd them in the heavy rain and I am glad to chug along in the fogged-up ute while David and Nick are drenched on their motorbikes. The lambs are only ten months old. They have been hand-fed through the drought and look small and feeble without their wool.

The rain doesn’t blow over. By afternoon the hills are streaming with water. Drains are overflowing, dams are filling and the creek is rushing under the big bridge. Two months ago the farm was hard and dry. The dams were almost empty. We take a tea break in the old farmhouse; the rain dominates conversation. Dorothy, David’s mother, brings us cheese on toast and fruitcake. Bill says it’s been ten years since they had rain like this.

The Allens have seen the weather change over the decades. Their forebears stripped the land for grazing, but now they are taking action to look after the farm and the local environment. David has planted thousands of new trees and fenced off Salt Creek to keep the cattle out and save wildlife and water flows. He has built more dams and begun construction of a wetland bird sanctuary on the farm. More trees mean more shade for the animals, and more dams mean more water.

After the tea break, Nick and I dig out a drain to let water flow into the dam near the mailbox. We are driving back when he gets a call from David. Earlier that morning, worried about the cold, David and Gary had guided the sheep into a cluster of trees by a dam for protection. They had left a trail of barley to encourage them to eat. Nick puts down his phone. “There are dead sheep everywhere,” Nick says, looking straight ahead.

We drive out and over the crest of the hill and see the lines of sodden grain still yellow against the muddy grass. Then dozens of lambs lying dead. They’d been too cold to eat the food they needed.

The farmers, stern-faced, confer in low tones. I stand by awkwardly in my borrowed gumboots, not knowing what to do. Stunned, Nick says he’s never seen anything like it. The living sheep shiver; some huddle around the ute, desperately seeking the warmth of the engine. Still it rains. The night is forecast to be cold and wet again and the surviving lambs – too many and too far away – are too weak to make the journey back to shelter. We must leave them behind.

That evening, the family is quiet around the dinner table, knowing the worst is yet to come. David sighs and stares at his food, ruing the decision to move the sheep out of the woolshed.

In the morning we find the shocks of dead white among the green trees, many more than expected. Others are in the dam, blobs of pale flotsam from the storm: hand-fed, drought-surviving lambs, wasted in the rain.

With his tractor, David digs two large pits close by and then begins scooping drowned lambs out of the water. Gary gathers the stray dead, dragging them two at a time by rope from his motorbike. Nick and I work among the trees.

At first, I place the lambs gently on the back of the ute, avoiding their glassy, grey eyes. Cold water squelches down my sleeves from their stiff legs. Then through weight of numbers I grow tougher and begin to drag and throw them roughly on the pile. Yellow bile drips from their open mouths and the tangle of bodies wobbles like jelly as the ute rolls away.

We work together in silence. I look away at the mud while Nick slits the throats of the ones soon to die. Then we push them all into the pit-graves. The count reaches three hundred, almost a third of the lambs shorn two days ago. It is still drizzling and the forecast shows more rain on the way.

I leave the next morning. Bill and Dorothy see me off with extra food, concerned I’d seen only the worst of Boorook. This downpour runs into dams, catchments and reservoirs. Back in the city I track the water levels rising, on the corner of my newspaper. I know that David is planting his wetland, watching the weather, wondering what it will bring next.

***

A year on, I call again. David Allen still shudders at the memory of the lambs’ deaths. “It was a miserable bloody day,” he says. “I made a bad decision to let them out of the shed,” he says. Since then, the Allens have planted 2500 trees on their property and have ordered 700 more. The lambs and the land will be better protected. “People always laugh at farmers talking about the weather, but we do it for a good reason,” he says. “It’s often a life and death situation.”

Healthy spring lambing brought his mob’s numbers back up, and the summer was mild. Two shearings have passed as normal, with no hitches. There has been little rain.

Photography by Michael Green

Global cooling

In Community development, Environment, Social justice, The Age on

A new project is turning our old white fridges green.

At the Phoenix Fridges warehouse in East Brunswick, two long rows of fridges face-off like football teams before a big game. On the left, a refurbished line-up is clean, efficient and ready to run. On the right, the dusty, sticker-covered new recruits will soon face their ultimate test.

But unlike a footy game, this eco-friendly scheme always returns a win-win result.

Phoenix Fridges, co-run by the Brotherhood of St Lawrence and Moreland Energy Foundation Limited, aims to curb the appetite of our power-hungry refrigerators. To do it, they collect unwanted appliances and retrofit them to improve efficiency. Then, the recycled goods are resold in the Brotherhood’s opshops.

The scheme is not only a plus for the environment, but also lends a helping hand in the community. Last year, while learning how to fix the whitegoods on the job, three refugees completed six-month traineeships and TAFE certificates in electrotechnology services. This year, the number of traineeships is set to double. The program’s other important social benefit is that low-income families gain access to cheap second-hand fridges with lower running costs.

Bruce Thompson, Business Program Coordinator at MEFL, says Phoenix Fridges offers a strong practical step for cutting electricity use. The fridge devours more energy than any other appliance. “It is responsible for about ten or 15 per cent of a household’s greenhouse emissions,” he says.

Thompson encourages people to buy a new fridge if they can afford it. “From a greenhouse policy perspective, it is really good to buy a new one. They are about 70 per cent more efficient than a fridge you would buy 15 years ago.” But there’s a catch. Over a third of Victorian homes have a second fridge: people tend to put their old unit in the garage and use it to store drinks. “So instead of saving 70 per cent, they’ve increased their energy consumption,” he says.

That’s where Phoenix Fridges comes in. The project has been in full swing for over a year. In that time, it has collected more than 5000 old refrigerators – almost one hundred per week – across metropolitan Melbourne. The free pick-up zone now stretches as far as Mt Eliza.

When the chunky donations arrive at the workshop, electrical engineer Noe Cuellar and his trainees assess the efficiency and quality of each one. They send approximately half the machines to be scrapped.

According to Thompson, this is a crucial part of the process. “We want to manage the project so that we are returning good fridges back into circulation to make them affordable for low-income households,” he says. “But we don’t want to send the energy hungry ones back,” he says.

Before the cast-offs are sent for metal recycling, their dangerous refrigerant gas is captured from the pipes. “A kilogram of the old CFCs in a fridge… is equivalent to 8000 kilograms of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in terms of its global warming equivalent,” Thompson says. If you put your old fridge out for hard rubbish collection, he says, the pipes are likely to break along the way and release the harmful gas.

For those fridges that make the cut, where necessary, Cuellar and his team replace seals, thermostats, filters and compressors, and add insulation. He says that, on average, they cut energy use by between five and ten per cent.

Each unit is fitted with a sticker listing the appliance’s energy consumption, carbon emissions and running cost per year. Cuellar says that customers appreciate this extra information, as well as the improved performance. “We’ve found that people love the fridges,” he says. “They find them really cost effective.”

Thompson acknowledges that Phoenix Fridges doesn’t create five-star efficiency in the old units. “We can’t do that,” he says. “But we are improving them or rejecting all of the bad fridges that are in that second-hand market.”

With climate change upon us, and so many energy-gobbling fridges still clogging our homes, we all need to get in on the action. It’s a perfect match.

To organise a donation and collection, call 1300 366 283. 

Building a bridge with your tradie

In Architecture and building, The Age on

Building troubles are a homeowner’s worst nightmare. Michael Green goes on site to unearth the problems and find out how to make sure they don’t happen to you.

Just before 7.30am, Jack Crawford arrives on the job in Clayton. “On a cold morning it would be nice to just stay in bed,” he says, with the easy grin of an old surfer. “But it’s just about throwing that leg out first.”

Today, the 48-year-old builder is working on a pergola and outdoor dining area. Wearing his faded red cap, as always, he unloads his tools and his dog Ned, from the ute. Mr Crawford is a sole trader and he’s been in the industry for 31 years. “I just love being the carpenter and I want to be personal with the clients,” he says. “That’s where I get my satisfaction.”

Building or renewing your home is exciting. It can be like signing a new lease on life. If you see eye-to-eye with your tradie, even the dusty process can be fun. But what happens if your new square bathroom goes pear-shaped?

Tales of crooked tradies are standard fare at dinner parties and the dodgy workman has become a cliché of current affairs television. But it’s more than an urban myth. Building gripes account for about one-in-ten complaints made to the state consumer watchdog, Consumer Affairs Victoria (CAV). In this industry, the dollar values are high so complaints can be serious, both financially and emotionally.

CAV has researched the plight of Victorian consumers across all kinds of products. “We survey the nature of problems they experience in buying goods and services and assess the level of detriment involved,” says Dr David Cousins, CAV’s Executive Director. “More than 30 per cent of that comes out to be detriment associated with building.”

According to Dr Cousins, complaints normally relate to quality and to contracts. “Those are not unrelated at times because often people haven’t got in place a good enough contract to enable them to deal with issues that arise of poor quality,” he says.

Dr Cousins says his organisation has had a focus on shonky construction cases. In the last financial year, CAV prosecuted 34 builders. All up, the tradespeople were fined more than $400 000 and forced to pay nearly $190 000 in costs and compensation.

In one recent case, the Melbourne Magistrates’ Court convicted Wantirna South man Saroush Saeedi for lying to a McKinnon pensioner that he was a registered builder. Mr Saeedi charged almost $70 000 for work that an independent expert later valued to be worth no more than $1700.

Dr Cousins says the case is “not an atypical example” of the complaints received by his organisation. “We have dealt with lots of situations where elderly people have been taken advantage of by sometimes itinerant tradespeople,” he says. But the CAV chief is quick to note that when thinking about the number of complaints, we should keep in mind the high level of construction work on the go.

Mr Tony Arnel, the state Building Commissioner agrees. “For the most part, consumer satisfaction is really high in Victoria. The quality of building is high and the number of disputes is low.”

“Our focus is on making sure the building industry does operate at a high level,” Mr Arnel says. The Building Commission is an independent authority charged with overseeing the building control system. It conducts regular surveys on industry performance and its latest results show that nine out of ten people have high confidence in their builder, a slight improvement from the last set of figures.

Back on the job in Clayton, Mr Crawford and his apprentice Joel have spent the morning digging out the earth below the pergola and getting ready for concreting. The builder says he gets a thrill from jobs that go well. “If you get customers at the end who are really excited about what you’ve done, then that’s more than the payment you need. It’s almost like, ‘Well don’t worry about paying me’.”

To get the best results, Mr Crawford believes clients should try to take pleasure in the building process and not worry too much at the untidy early stages. “The eggs have to be broken,” he says. “There’s going to be a bit of dirt, there’s going to be a bit of mess, but if they enjoy that then we all feel more comfortable and more excited about turning up to work.”

He understands that clients can feel frustrated if a project drags on and tradespeople aren’t available. “Often what clients don’t realise is that their job is not the only job we’re doing…and that’s where a bit of angst comes in,” he says. “In an ideal world we would love to start and finish a job for one person then start the next, but the continuity of other tradesmen doesn’t allow you to do that.”

For people beginning new work, Mr Crawford’s main advice is to do your homework before choosing a builder. “Even if you do select someone out of the paper you can still say ‘Give us a list of your clients, and we’re going to go around and chat to them.’”

Mr Robert Harding, the Housing Industry Association’s (HIA) Acting Chief Executive for Victoria, agrees. “If you’re searching for a tradie from scratch then it can be a good idea to get a few quotes for greater piece of mind and to ask lots of questions about the process.”

He advises that clients get a written quote before agreeing to anything and also make sure that their tradesperson has the required licences or registration to do the work (only registered builders are allowed to do jobs worth more than $5000).

If something does go wrong, the first step is to talk about it directly to your tradesperson. “As with all things in life, sometimes work goes to plan, but sometimes it won’t,” Mr Harding says. “Always communicate: if you think something is going wrong say so, rather than letting it fester and blow up at the end of the job when it is possibly too late.

CAV advises straight talking too. “That’s best for both parties,” Dr Cousins says. “We find that often where disputes arise, communication breaks down and they become more intractable.”

If discussions fail, Dr Cousins says, your next stop is to contact the builder’s association (like HIA or the Master Builders Association Victoria), because if problems crop up the association’s reputation is at stake too.

Another option is to call Building Advice and Conciliation Victoria (BACV). Jointly run by CAV and the Building Commission, BACV offers free advice and help to resolve disputes. Where quality issues come up, it can organise for a technical inspection of the work.

“If we still can’t get a resolution of those issues then what we suggest to people is that they can take their matter to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal,” Dr Cousins says.

In the afternoon, Mr Crawford and his apprentice pour the concrete and then prepare for paving. He organises for delivery of new sand and cement and sets out levels for the next morning’s work. Finally, he arrives home at 5:30pm and then heads out again for Ned’s nightly hour-long walk.

By 9:00pm he’s at his desk plugging away at bookwork and quotes for upcoming work. Except for a few bad apples, Mr Crawford is sure that tradies do try to do their best for their clients. As for the secret to a smooth job, “it’s all about communication isn’t it?” he says. “That’s the key thing.”

Tips for trouble-free building

Shop around

Invest time and effort at the start to save money and trouble if things go wrong. Check out your builder’s work record by contacting Building Advice and Conciliation Victoria, or the Building Practitioners Board. Talk to previous clients. Remember, if a quote seems too good to be true, it probably is.

Choose a registered builder

For work worth more than $5000, your tradesperson must be registered with the Building Practitioners Board. For work worth more than $12 000 your tradesperson must take out builders warranty insurance.

Don’t sign until you’re ready

Know what you are getting yourself into. Your building contract should list all costs, including fixtures and fittings. Make sure you understand the exact details of your plans and your contract. Avoid agreements that lock you in with a builder before plans and specifications are finished.

Ask independent experts

Before signing any contract – including the standard contracts developed by industry associations – get independent legal advice. Hire an independent building surveyor to check that the project will satisfy the regulations and your standards.

Don’t pay until a stage is done

Pay on time, but before each stage payment make sure the work has passed the surveyor’s inspection and all contractual requirements have been met.

Act immediately if things go wrong

If you think something isn’t right, talk to your tradie about it. Take photos of the problem and take notes of the conversation. Confirm any new agreements in writing and be sure to keep a copy of the letter. If you need help to resolve a dispute, call Building Advice and Conciliation Victoria on 1300 55 75 59.

Have fun

Take an interest in the job and in the skill of the tradespeople. Everyone enjoys positive feedback, so compliment a job well done. And remember: a nice cup of tea or a glass of water can do wonders for your tradie’s enthusiasm.

Tips adapted from Consumer Affairs Victoria, Building and Renovating Quick Tips.

 

Cafe Nostalgia

In Culture, Social justice, The Big Issue on

Published in The Big Issue, with a beautiful illustration by Lisa Engelhardt.

Michael Green sips a bittersweet cup in Buenos Aires, a city that has survived the best and worst of times.

On my first day in Buenos Aires I caught the trail of lost love: a friend’s love, not mine. But then the sultry city lured me in.

Not long ago, my friend lived here with his Argentine girl. They had an apartment in Palermo, just north of the centre. A wrought-iron balcony over a shady street. His favourite café, Café Nostalgia, on the corner. ‘They make the only decent coffee in Buenos Aires’, he told me, but he mustn’t have minded the bad coffee. He lounged for days on end in cafés and cantinas, watching the old couples leaning close, listening to the secret card games in the corner.

That was after they broke up. Immersed in the city and lost in confusion, he delayed his return for months. Finally, he went home, for good, and one morning soon after, my plane landed.

That afternoon I walked past his two apartments, the one he shared with the girl and the one where later, he lived alone. As the sun shuffled through the leaves of the knobbly-trunked trees I imagined my friend’s memories. I imagined being in love with the girl and the city. I felt his exhilaration at carving a new, unusual life and felt his uncertainty at its end. I arrived at Café Nostalgia with a list of his old haunts in my hand: travelling alone, with a bittersweet trail to follow.

Bittersweet suits Buenos Aires. Porteños, the people of Buenos Aires, are famously haughty and brooding. Thirteen million live in the city at the mouth of Río de la Plata and history lingers and threatens them like a heavy cloud in the distance. In the last sixty years they have seen dictatorship and despair, war and torture, poverty and economic collapse. But they are famous too, for their reputation as lovers.

At the turn of the 20th century Argentina was rich. It sat among the ten richest countries of the world, and it’s capital bears the marks of wealth: boulevards, parks, plazas and opulent French architecture; tall, carved doors that lead to marble staircases; a blue art-deco spire growing between plain apartments.

But it isn’t so rich anymore. Another night, as I drank my coffee, a small boy hunched in the opposite gutter, ripping open garbage bags and pulling out plastic bottles under the yellow streetlights. In the café, the ceiling fans swirled, the football was on the television and no one paid the boy any attention.

After the peso crashed in 2001, the city changed. A new phenomenon emerged: Los Cartoneros. They are the ghosts pushing trolleys, scavenging the city’s rubbish from sundown, extracting anything recyclable and scattering the rest. It’s hard, long, degrading work for little return. My friend had told me about them before I came. ‘The city doesn’t quite know what to do with them’, he said.

In 2003, the government registered 10,000 cartoneros, but now no one knows the exact numbers. They come from the provinces and spread through the streets every night, catching the city in a great web of poverty, and maybe even sobering the rich and the tourists as they look out from their bars.

Tango, the tourist icon of Buenos Aires, was once the music of the poor. On Sundays, struggling Spanish and Italian immigrants dressed up and danced while the rich turned up their noses. Now, nightly tango spectaculars have become slick foreign money-spinners. At many community dance halls, though, young porteños are claiming it back.

‘On a Thursday night at Cochabamba 444,’ my friend said, ‘you can drink a few beers and watch the people dance tango.’ The doorway opened from a dark street to a narrow dance floor surrounded by simple tables and chairs. The crowd brought a change of shoes for dancing and hung their small bags from hooks on the wall.

With a flick of the eyes, the men asked the women to dance and the floor filled: firm bodies gliding, pausing, leaning; interlocking, kicking legs. They moved with eyes closed and impassioned faces, as though savouring the flavour of a fine wine.

The tango is heartbreak to a tune. Another night, in a small old bar called ‘El Boliche de Roberto’, two silver-haired tango singers played as a storm came down heavily outside. High up on the walls, the wooden shelves were stocked with antique liquor bottles now black and dusty. The young, fashionable crowd shared the anguished lyrics, mouthing the words and staring into their drinks. Then for one song, almost everyone in the bar sang along, and the sadness changed to joy.

Now I am back at Café Nostalgia, on my last afternoon in Argentina, already reminiscing. My plane leaves tonight. Here I am, looking out at the flower stall beneath the trees, daydreaming of the city. I followed my friend’s bittersweet trail, and I too, have fallen for his lost love – Buenos Aires. I never did meet the girl.

Waste not

In Environment, The Age on

Recycling is more than the weekly trudge to the nature strip: it’s the alternative resource boom. Meet Melbournians who are turning rubbish into a recycling revival.

ART

Ash Keating has taken in the trash. Truckloads of it. The 27-year-old artist wants to shock with the sheer bulk of waste going into landfill everyday. And for his Next Wave Festival show, 2020?, he’s putting it to better use.

Keating had five trucks of industrial waste dumped at the Arts House Meat Market in North Melbourne and asked more than 20 artists to shift through it to create sculptures and installations.

“We’ve got a connection with waste in our family,” says Keating. His grandfather ran a rubbish-removal service and his mother started a waste-management business.

The concept for 2020? came years ago, while Keating was working for Waste Audit. He saw potential art supplies squandered: “Being a visual artist and understanding how expensive materials are to get a hold of, it became really obvious to me that there was a huge gap in terms of the value of resources. I really dreamed about being able to intercept these trucks and take them elsewhere.”

Melanie Upton is also gripped by garbage. “I often turn up at home with rubbish,” the artist admits. “I have piles of rubbish in my house that I’ve collected.”

Her installation in the city, Beautiful Trash, features dozens of small sculptures – replicas of discarded drink bottles, cast in aluminium, plaster or concrete. A shiny silver milk carton stands next to a gold, deflated water bottle. Logos and colour schemes may have disappeared, but the brands are easy to pick by their distinctive shapes.

Upton believes there’s a message in her bottles. “I think this work definitely speaks strongly about the sort of consuming society that produces this waste and then people’s relationship to that.”

CRAFT

On the first weekend of every month, Sam McKean opens her colourful Fitzroy North store, Aprilmay. Betty Jo bird-shaped brooches, crafted from discarded lino and buttons, rest on an old, white shelf. Made By Maude ducks, hatched from reclaimed fabrics, perch on top of a wardrobe. McKean makes cushions and bags from 1970s furnishing fabrics and stretchy bangles from rolled-up tights. She thinks that demand for recycled things is growing as people are becoming more environmentally aware. But that’s not the only benefit of her stock. “There’s always a story behind every product,” she says.

Former history student Dan Vaughan is also captivated by the stories behind his Nearly Roadkill bags, wallets and belts. The 29-year-old makes his wares with car upholstery gleaned from motor trimmers. Years ago, while travelling in Europe and the US, Vaughan saw people making new goods from waste.

“I was attracted to it not just because it was recycling, but because there was a history embedded in the materials already,” he says.

Vaughan began Nearly Roadkill in 2006, using a “mega-industrial sewing machine that can go through anything”. He savours the thrill of the hunt for materials. “(The motor trimmers) don’t know what they are going to be throwing out every week. It’s always a surprise. When you find gold it’s really like, ‘This is going to be so much fun’.”

So what’s the message behind all these artisans’ thrifty flair? “The resources are non-renewable, unless we do it ourselves,” Vaughan says.

FASHION

“When you have limited resources,” says Ellie Mucke, “you’re pushed to come up with better designs.” In her hands, a man’s business shirt, nipped, tucked and turned back-to-front becomes a halter-neck dress.

The 28-year-old designer makes clothes from discarded shirts and slacks. “People buy them without actually knowing that they’re recycled,” she says. Fashion can be frivolous. Take this: according to a 2005 estimate by the Australia Institute, we spend $1.56 billion every year on clothes and accessories we don’t wear. Thankfully, a slew of local designers such as Mucke are making good from our mistakes. For their A Name Is A Label brand, Nicole Fausten and Lina Didzys make one-off clothes and jewellery. “(We use) any sort of materials we come across: anything from old clothing to tablecloths and curtains, pillow cases, ribbons or stockings,” Fausten says. “We believe in trying to utilise resources around us rather than going out to buy new things.”

Bird Girl – Sophie McAlpin and Anita King – share the lost-and-found ethos. They sew outfits on the spot in their Fitzroy store. McAlpin hails from a family of recyclers. “My grandmother was a dressmaker so, to pass time, she’d say, ‘Oh take these scraps and there’s a needle’. When I was really young I used to do lots of costumes. I’d be like, ‘Mum, can I have an old sheet? Dad, some fencing wire?’.”