Kate Emery: Verge collections may be going with way of the Dodo, but they are part of our cultural fabric

Drive down your average Perth street and you will notice something disgusting. Clear verges. Junk-free kerbs. Nature strips in which grass or native plants are clearly visible. What you’re increasingly unlikely to see on one of Perth’s suburban streets is an assortment of semi-functional furniture, board games with most of the pieces missing and aging whitegoods with a sticky-taped paper sign reassuring any interested parties that the item in question STILL WORKS. WA councils have been turning their back on verge collections for years — the City of Wanneroo is about to become the latest — in favour of offering residents passes to the tip, scheduled collections or vouchers for skip bins. The reasons for doing so might be valid: verge collections are invariably messy, encourage illegal dumping and they’re also apparently not so great at diverting rubbish from landfill. But, in losing them, we are losing a piece of our culture. The true point of verge collections is not just about a chance to offload old appliances, kids toys too well-chewed for the Salvos bin and those three broken bikes you’ve finally admitted to yourself you’re both unable and unwilling to fix. They’re about something more human than that, a simpler impulse that’s somehow both universal and specific: the desire to go through our neighbours’ junk for crap we don’t need, which can then become our junk, which in turn can be discarded in a future verge collection. It’s the circle of suburban life. Having your neighbourhood resemble one of the gentler warzones for a couple of weeks is a small trade-off for the joy of stumbling onto the perfect chairs to match your dining room set, learning that your neighbour once believed the AbCrunch 5000 was a good investment or watching from behind the curtains as a couple of burly guys haul your old table-tennis table into the back of their Hilux. I’ve written before about my own nostalgia-tinged childhood memories of verge collections. There were the Christmas decorations scavenged from a neighbour’s verge collection, so pristine and plentiful that, up until the day they moved, we worried they’d been discarded by mistake and our inadvertent crime would be discovered when next door popped over for a cup of sugar on December 24. There was the go-kart, shoddily constructed from other people’s discarded pram wheels and wood offcuts and, which, in no world, would I allow a child of mine to ride today. Mine is not a lone voice in the wilderness. There are signs that others are rising up against the oppressors who would rob them of an opportunity to spend a Sunday morning doing 10 km/h up and down the local streets in search of they-don’t-quite-know-what. Bring us back our verge collections, or bring us death, they cry. Or, something like that. In July, the City of Subiaco voted to bring back bulk rubbish collections after trialling the verge valet service, which is also used by Fremantle, Vincent, Mosman Park, Peppermint Grove and Cottesloe. That went against a recommendation from the city’s administration (which pointed out that verge valet was more environmentally friendly and efficient) but was backed by Subiaco councillor Rosemarie De Vries, among others, who pointed to a survey showing 67 per cent of residents wanted the old system back. “One person’s waste is another person’s treasure, and we should allow treasures to continue to be recycled and shared within the community through the bulk waste collection,” she said. In August, a City of Stirling councillor led an attempt to bring back on-demand verge collections to Perth’s biggest council. Councillors voted 7-6 in favour of a trial but it failed because the proposal needed at least eight votes to get up. In October, the Town of Bassendean said it would review its policy of offering skip bins in place of verge collections, after complaints from residents. Admittedly the residents’ complaints focused on the bins being misused or available for too short a time — nobody mentioned nostalgic yearnings for death trap go-karts — but surely some of them also longed for the old, scavenging ways. The future of verge collections remains shaky. Will they go the way of betamax, punch cards, phonographs and the Coolgardie safe? Quite possibly. Then again, not everything obsolete is gone for good. In a world in which most of the music ever made can be streamed, for free, online, Australia is in the middle of a vinyl revival, with sales of physical records up more than 20 per cent last year. Maybe verge collections could dodge the fate of the abacus and go the way of vinyl records instead: theoretically old-fashioned and arguably unnecessary but, where they can be hunted down, still passionately loved by their fans.