TV

The commonest item I see dumped curbside in Canberra is old CRT televisions. They will be fairly useless, unless hooked up to your Betamax player or the like, when the switch to a digital signal is complete.

For some reason, there is no hard rubbish collection in Canberra and you actually have to pay a specific fee for dumping these things. Although plenty of people seem able to afford a cheap new LCD television, no-one is particularly eager to then fork out more money to dispose of the CRT. When dumped, these televisions gather into small groups and demonstrate their instinctual herding instinct.

As a testament to say, rampant consumerism and materialism, you could build a wall out of them at least a few metres high, stretching for miles, but CC came up with a better, slightly more practical idea: using paint pens to decorate them with song lyrics and faces.

Seeing as they were dumped and had been there over a week, I don’t see the crime involved. Defacement of rubbish perhaps? In the balm of a daylight-savings lit Friday evening we sat down and got to it. CC executed her planned drawing with precision, whereas I felt the need to make it up as I went along.

CC

Me

While we were working, I said to CC, “This is making me feel like a hipster and it’s not a good feeling.”

The odd thing was that the televisions disappeared the next morning. I was surprised that a council ranger would pick them up on a Saturday, seeing they had been there a week already. Perhaps they were eager to prevent a fad from starting. The other possibility is that someone decided they would make nice objet d’art.

I can see they might look interesting on top of 9 foot perma-pine poles.