Next door to the rubbish tip is a place where you can purchase salvaged junk. It’s a great place for photos, but I found it quite depressing. Lounge suites, computers, bookshelves, beds, kitchen appliances – everything is there. And almost all of it must have at one time been somebody’s pride and joy. Would anybody ever have thought that their favoured armchair or carefully chosen lampshade would end up rotting at the tip? What about the golf clubs, bicycles, skis and children’s toys? Was anybody sorry to see them go? They’re left out in the elements to disintegrate now. Maybe that’s as it should be.
Then there were the people picking through everything. Me, I was just there to take pictures. But others were there – shopping. There was the fat lady trying out exercise bikes. The pregnant woman examining plastic baby baths. The old man sifting through whipper snippers, looking for a particular part. Maybe there is life in all that rubbish yet….
More pictures are over on Flickr.
The Purple Giraffes 
Great photos, Tanya. The stuff may be all out in the weather but at least it is sorted better than at any other recycling centre I’ve ever seen.
I used to walk around one here and wish that I had the creativity and skill to make something useful with lots of it. I visualise all those toilets and basins overflowing with flowers. I’ve usually found though that whatever I took home from a recycling centre usually found its way back there before too long.
Shame about the old Singer sewing machine – but the skis in Townsville ….surely they would rot in cupboards anyway!!
makes me feel kind of sad to look at it.
Having said that … we have two bikes that we are ready to take to the dump. I hope someone finds them and takes them home.
There is a great shop in Brisbane called Reverse Garbage – much nicer than going through the tip and amazing what you can find!!
Design your own climbing frame and be happy!
I love the one with the skis, the colours against that sky are amazing – the whole atmosphere you’ve captured is so surreal.
Reminds me of a picture I took of a ‘fly-tip’ http://www.stephanieboon.co.uk/narrativeself/index.php/2008/02/on-the-scrap-heap/. Looking between my photo and yours, yours definitely speak of ‘order out of chaos’, whereas my tip is just abandonment!
Great photos, thank you!
your photos are amazing!!!!
So does it cost to buy that stuff? Or do you just take it? B/c it’d be cool if you could just take it and make some interesting stuff that the pieces weren’t designed for…you know? Otherwise, I wouldn’t want a rusty fan in my house…or electronics that get dew and rain on them…
Interesting, we don’t have anything like that around here I don’t think…