SATURDAY 7 JUNE     ADELS GROVE

I was on tents, John on amenities/rubbish.

John asked D to fix the brakes on the old truck used for the rubbish run. Its brakes had been almost non-existent since last year, but now something major had broken. D said it would be u/s for a week.

It had been a risky job, dumping the camp rubbish in the distant five metre deep rubbish pit, with no brakes to speak of. The theory was to back the truck up to a small log laid at the edge of the pit, then tip the rubbish out of the tip truck. Then the driver would go down into the pit, to set fire to the day’s offerings. Burning it deterred some of the wild pig scavengers, as well as reducing the size of the accumulation.

Last year, F miscalculated, and managed to dump the truck, as well as the rubbish!

Because the nature of the rubbish was largely unknown, and could be volatile, the men had gotten a competition going amongst themselves, to see who “set off” an object that flew the furthest from the pit. So far, John was winning – a camper put a discarded gas strut in the rubbish, and it nearly took John’s  head off, as it flew off a great distance, like a rocket.

To save themselves the unsavoury trek down into the pit, this year the guys had taken to lighting the rubbish fire in the truck, before it was tipped – potentially a risky practice!