How to Repurpose a Politician

By Cybele McNeil

It says a lot about a party’s approach to democracy when so much of its money goes towards advertising. Campaigning and advertising expenditure by the two major parties during state elections is in the millions. There are no official figures for national spending during federal elections – a cause for concern in itself – but one can only imagine just how high they must be when surveying the debris of campaign material in an election aftermath. This is exactly what I found myself doing in 2010.

It was early December and I had just finished my degree at the University of Western Australia. It was time to pack up my things and move back east. Cardboard boxes were strewn around me in the living room as I looked out at the old Tuart tree in the backyard and the family of magpies that stalked beneath it. We had given each of those magpies a name, our lives intertwined with their daily routines, and the realisation that we were leaving them and the tree behind had suddenly sunk in. Our backyard at that time was covered in neat grids of polystyrene boxes sitting on salvaged wooden forklift pallets. From those boxes we had grown most of our own food for almost three years. That lovely temperate Perth climate had yielded strawberries, artichoke, fennel, beetroots, different varieties of greens and more. Within the maze of boxes stood three stools, their seats long since disintegrated, with pot trays standing on them, filled with water. They were our birdbaths. At either end of the maze stood cane clothes-drying racks, which were used as perches by the dozens of honey-eaters, ravens, magpies and kookaburras that bathed and drank in the baths almost constantly. These pollinators were our pest control and also ensured that the plants beneath were both watered and fertilised. Under our occupancy, that sterile, neat lawn had transformed into a thriving ecosystem. Just three years earlier I had arrived with only a suitcase but thanks to Perth’s frequent council curbside collections, we had managed to source almost everything we would ever need: a fridge, a television, a washing machine, study desks and chairs, armchairs, a sofa, bookcases, books, sun loungers, filing cabinets, kitchen utensils including pots, pans and storage jars, gardening tools, pegs, envelopes, packets of stamps, even shoes, whole pencil cases with pens, pencils, rubbers, and sharpeners inside, unused exercise books, plastic folders and ring binders. Many things were still in their packets and we found plenty of personal treasures such as a painting easel, and not one but three good quality Italian caffettiere for making coffee. It was an embarrassment of riches, yet it had been discarded as waste.

Every evening whilst taking the bin out for the weekly collection, I would look up the street I lived on to see garbage bins filled to the brim, their lids often bursting open, with only a passing attempt to get them closed. I would watch small units of ravens take to these bins with gusto, pulling out their contents, playing and tangling with it strewn all over the road. Of all our neighbours, households of only two, sometimes three people, most had a third bin which they had purchased at extra cost. Even with three bins they couldn’t seem to fit everything in. It’s unsurprising, then, that council clean-ups are so popular, and entire verges are transformed into formidable mounds. As I watched those ravens, I couldn’t help feeling how we much we behave like overgrown infants: we don’t deal with our waste, we hide it in bins, we flush it away, we have it collected so it can foul some other place. In doing so we remove ourselves from the ecological chain, and from facing the consequences of waste that doesn’t break down. Those native ravens were often spoken of as nuisances, but I loved to watch them on those evenings, and their distain for our trick of hiding our waste for the future to deal with. They unravel it all as if to say ‘here it is, for all to see!’

Scavenger species like ravens have long been valuable to the processing of waste, but even they can’t break down some things. Those election campaign placards everywhere were not made of cardboard or some other durable material, but of high energy plastics. My studies culminated in surveying some of the world’s oldest art in the Burrup peninsula and by then I had become accustomed to the knowledge that, of that which was left, the art was under serious threat of destruction from industry. Conversely, the robustness of those portraits of conservative politicians lasting through the centuries was a particularly depressing prospect. The suburb where I lived happened to be in one of the safest Coalition seats in the country, Curtin, and by all appearances the Coalition was fond of a strong advertising campaign. In the lead up to the federal election that year in 2010, placards of Julie Bishop were raised on practically every second telegraph pole. Some curbside clean-ups yielded whole strata of Liberal campaigns: in amongst the Turnbulls and Bishops were Howards too. As I stood there in my living room, I was trying to find a way to pack up my things into boxes in a way that they would survive the low-budget removals option in their bumpy ride across the Nullarbor. Those endless sheaths of election placards proved to be just the thing and every box had a politician to cushion its top and bottom. Four years on, we are still unpacking boxes and jump back in surprise to see Julie’s laserbeam eyes staring up at us.

Packing material turns out not to be the only thing those placards are good for. Over those three years and ever since, we have used them for pin-up boards, ‘beware of the dog’ signs, a scarecrow, as a deflector to an inconsiderate neighbour’s air-conditioning exhaust, and as seedling tags. There is a succinct beauty and elegance about the repurposing of something so symbolically and materially opposed to addressing human-generated climate change, into things for the germination of seeds. In cutting up, labelling and distributing the seedling tags, the future is imagined and engaged with. Many of the things I grow will outlive me, and I hope will outlive the generations to come, on a thriving planet we managed to save before it was too late.

Just before we left Western Australia, we managed to sell most of our reclaimed possessions in a garage sale, the irony being that some of the items had come from just down the street and buyers were often neighbours. It seemed as if people could only know the worth of something if it had a price tag. If something is free then surely it’s worthless? Though we always asked if we could take something, we were often met with perplexed questions: why would you want this? why wouldn’t you just go and buy a new one? At worst we were ridiculed for going through those piles, as if there was something slightly shameful about it. These people stood on their front lawns together and turned watching us into a kind of sport. Many other people, however, were delighted and eager that we take things and give them new life. Through conversations with their owners, those things came with their own manna, imbued with stories, and social connections – and often they were thoughtfully laid out in categories, or with signs explaining uses or faulty parts. Then there were the deceased estates in which once-beloved possessions could be seen turfed out onto the lawn by surviving family members or workers, in preparation for the selling of the house. Spending a little time at these piles brought you into the narrative of a person’s life: their weddings, their birthday, echoes of life during wartime. It was through these curbside collections that we got to meet our extended neighbourhood, past present, human and non-human – one lady in her 90s told us a detailed history of the areas most ancient Peppermint trees. I looked at the suburb so differently after that, and the trees became important to me too. The desire is there, then – we can do better than being a throw away society, and we’d be richer in more ways than one, for it. Once again in the aftermath of the state election of New South Wales, where I now live, discarded election material abounds. I’m busy finding uses for all those placards, and I urge you to do the same.