We got a flyer in our mailbox advertising the opportunity to have an aerial photograph taken of our property. The homes on the flyer looked like wonderful examples of a holiday resort, or perhaps a Mater prize home in the Gold Coast hinterland. Why not have a framed photo of that, if your place was such a showpiece of modern architecture and detailed landscaping?

However, the flyer - strangely – didn’t show a photo of a property like ours. Many people in the bush have a ‘hundred-acre shed’ where they store all their recycled building materials, fencing wire, perhaps a few decrepit vehicles and maybe a rusty old rain-water tank as well. And I make no apologies for hoarding these items, for we are upholding the time-honoured economical tradition of recycling, something that saw this country through the WWII years of poverty and restricted commodities. (Did you know it took 36 pairs of nylon stockings to make one parachute?) Throughout history, mosaics, rag-rugs, bread and butter puddings, patchwork quilts, and billy carts have been fine examples of objects that were developed or improved upon in the inventive spirit of having to ‘make do’ with what was available. In fact, the Warwick Art Gallery recently awarded a prize to a lady (Helen Newton) who created a bag made out of ring pulls from aluminium cans.

Meanwhile, the pile of metal, timber and indefinable lumps continues to grow while you wait for creative inspiration on what to actually do with it all. If you organise well over the years, you can cunningly hide these bits and pieces down the back behind some stringy-bark trees and over a bit of a rise, so that visitors need not see your open plan storage system when they first arrive at your house for a cuppa.

But not so, if you invite the aerial photographer to have a sticky-beak at your place, for then it will be recorded for all to have a perve at. So who in their right mind would want that? What sort of business is this, exposing all our hidden secrets to the world?

But what about Google Earth? you say. Well, for those who live closer to the towns, you could be already snapped and put up on the internet. Lucky you. But fortunately, in our neck of the woods, our Google Earth picture is a fairly distant, pixellated shot, and zooming in to see what’s on the washing line is just not possible. Phew! ‘Cos, sometimes, you just don’t want your old school teacher to see what sort of underwear you ended up buying after passing through your troubled high school years. (So what if Grandma Undies only come in white - they sure are comfy.)

Meanwhile, Clean Up Australia Day is coming up soon, and I pondered out loud if we should do something in our local community. Hubby reminded me that a more pressing area was our back yard. Clean Up Your Back-Yard Day, it should be. I can see the subsequent newspaper report now – “ …and the Johnstone family managed a whopping 527 bags of rubbish on Clean Up Australia Day, all from their own yard. Well done, Johnstones.”

Although I’m not sure how we can stick an old hot water system into one of those yellow rubbish bags. I’ll let you know how that works out. And maybe we’ll get the aerial photographer over after all the tidying has been done. 

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