Any old iron...

In Britain if you chuck an old TV on the pavement out the front of your house you're likely to be arrested as a fly tipper. In Australia, you're making a valuable contribution to the community.

[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="500" caption="This would never happen in Australia"][/caption]

Hard rubbish day is a hallowed part of the calendar in any Australian suburb. This is the day, usually once a month or once every few months, when the council sends a bunch of blokes round in big vans to pick up any hard-to-dispose-of rubbish that people have left out on the grass verge outside their front doors.

The days leading up to hard rubbish day feel almost like the preparations for a festival. It's like Christmas decorations season but with knackered Lay-Z-Boys and bust DVD players. Crucially, a decent proportion of the rubbish never makes its way into the council vans, because locals tend to treat this bounty as a sort of giant, free flea market. This piece from the Melbourne Age, based on hard rubbish day in the trendy inner-city suburb of Brunswick, gives you a flavour of the thing.

One thing that's striking about this sort of public recycling is how astonishingly efficient it is. When we were clearing out our UK house we had a bunch of things which we were unable to sell or take with us, so we put them as free items on Gumtree, an internet small-ads site. Everything we advertised had been picked up by the end of the day - old barbecues and bikes, a filing cabinet, a folding card table...

Hard rubbish day is clearly coming up around here, although I've not checked the calendar. In the past few days we've seen:

• One large television with the corner kicked in


• One art deco three-door wardrobe, doors removed, some scratching on one side


• One kitchen chopping-block trolley thing, with a castor missing


• One flatscreen computer monitor, left under a hedge close to Bondi Beach


• A mattress spring frame, with a few wisps of foam attached


• Two sofas, both without cushions


• Several 80s-style tube-and-wicker dining chairs, all smashed in different ways

Of course, it is possible that hard rubbish day is nowhere near and this is just the general informal recycling that goes on much of the time in Australian suburbs. The spirit of hard rubbish day certainly spreads year-round: I remember when we were last leaving Sydney, Kate left a couple of dozen Buffy review videos she'd received from work in a box outside the house with a sign saying they worked and were free. They were all gone within a couple of hours.