Downsizing without adding to landfill? I’m giving it a red-hot go

April 7, 2026 — 7:30pm

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I’m standing at the counter at Reverse Garbage in Marrickville (kinda like Reverse Art Truck in Melbourne) and I’m bawling my eyes out. If you’ve never been there, I recommend a visit, although it usually inspires wonder, not woe. It’s what you call a creative reuse centre. You drop off stuff you no longer need. Someone else turns it into magic. Just like Julia Gutman who won the Archibald Prize a couple of years back with her fabric collages, ingredients all from “reverse garbage”.

But here I am handing over my entire collection of Sydney 2000, my old tickets, old programs, clippings from the stories I wrote at the time. I’ve always had a thing for the rings, and now all of that was going to a new home, at least temporarily.

We are moving house after 30-odd years. In my mind, as we both considered sorting through the home we shared at various times with one parent, three kids, four grandkids, other relatives, strangers, four British hockey players, three family members of Sydney 2000 Mongolian wrestlers, one Ghanaian PhD student and a host of others, I guess I thought we’d just hire a skip and dump what we no longer needed.

Not that I wanted to do that. I didn’t want to send it to landfill, but I didn’t have a better idea.........

© The Sydney Morning Herald