From Messy Junkies, to Archeology of the Future.

Messy Junkies:

This little rant was kicked of by an unknown junkie. I had recently moved to Sydney and was living at a great place on Boundary Street in Paddington. I went out into the back courtyard one day to enjoy my morning coffee sitting in the sun. During the night someone had shot up in the back alley and had thought a good way to dispose of the used fit (syringe) was to lob it over our back fence.

So as I blearily stumbled, bear footed, out to greet the morning I was presented with the sight of an uncapped used fit; with that lovely dollop of blood in the end.

It is no surprise to say that I was not joyously happy at the gift that had been left. I reemerged with a pair of pliers and a used drink bottle to get rid of it.

The morning coffee in the sun was a ritual for me at the time. I was new in town and trying to make way into the photography business; was still not working much so most mornings were my own. Over the ensuing weeks I was again greeted with a couple of times with the same present from out thoughtful local user.

After the third or fourth time I took a walk up to the needle exchange at Kings Cross. Boundary Street, not surprisingly, was the dividing line between Paddington, Darlinghurst and The Cross. The exchange was not far from our place; they were a bit surprised when I asked for several of the small disposal bins, but now ‘works’. I didn’t bother to explain…

I placed one of the bins in the back alley outside our place and kept the rest.

In my wanderings around the area I started to notice the number of fits left lying around. The publicity campaign for Clean Up Australia Day was in full swing at the time. So I decided that my contribution would be to clear the local area, as much as possible, of used syringes. So on the day I donned my old pair of leather rigging gloves, stuffed several bins in a back pack and away I went. Two hours later, with four bins stuffed full I called it a day feeling I had ‘Done my bit’.

It didn’t take long for my clean up efforts to be replaced with fresh supplies. Ah, those junkies, they are a persistent lot. So, over time, what had been a once only gesture on my part evolved into a monthly ritual. Every couple of weeks I would don the gloves, go for a walk around the neighborhood and clear the current build up of syringes.

As I got to know the areas of high concentrations, the ends of several allies, small dark alcoves etc; Where the users could gain a little privacy while they shot up what I began to notice was not how many fits were left behind but how many were not there. Allow me to explain:

While about one third of the fits I would collect would have had the needles recovered with the little Day-Glo orange caps by the users I was amazed by the number of empty caps I would find. In some spots there would be hundreds of them but only a few needles. I realized that the number of fits that were being used was much higher than what I was finding. So many of the users were at least disposing of them, hopefully not into locals back yards as one had done and sparked this whole little adventure of mine.

The link to Archeology:

I came across an article in the Sydney Morning Herald about an Archeology dig that was going on in the rocks area on a site of a brothel from the early days of white settlement. One if the details that struck me was the discovery of old rags in the remains of a wall that had been used as menstrual cloths by the women and then shoved in the wall as way of disposal. The comment was made that it is usually the junk and detritus of past civilizations that is turned up in digs as it is the stuff that is lost or thrown away and forgotten that is preserved while things that are useful are not.

This rang true for me as what I had so often seen in history programs on the Mediterranean was the shards of broken pottery from amphora, the bottles, cans and plastic bags of the Ancient Greek world that had been used in massive numbers at the time. I started to think: “So, what would have the best chance of surviving from the current times for future Archeologists to dig up?”

Small, pretty indestructible, used in large numbers and considered worthless…

Then it came to me, the little bloody orange caps from used syringes!

All of a sudden I had a vision of a dig in the area, several hundred years in the future, and them uncovering hundreds of these little plastic caps and them wondering and speculation what we had used them for and why in such huge quantities? Also, why did they turn up in large numbers here and not at all in other digs, at sites relatively close by, all of which belonged to the ancient city of Sydney?

I felt two things:

1) Was I doing a disservice to future science by cleaning up the caps?

2) Should I leave some sort of time capsule to explain why they were here and thus make the job easier of any possible future students working on their Doctoral Thesis in Archeology?

Yes, I know, sometimes my mind works in very strange ways.