Wednesday, August 24th …..

I’ve stopped buying the local paper. It caters for the lowest common denominator with big pictures and simply explained stories. I’ve read somewhere that most newspapers can be understood by 12-year olds; The Examiner must be written for children of 8. One particular gripe I have is that there are always more pages devoted to football than to real news. How can football reporters find enough stuff to write about, day after day, about the same handful of teams in the AFL league? Certainly, the big pictures help to fill the space but the words don’t add much to the sum of human knowledge.

The other thing which offends me is the parochial and self-congratulatory nature of the stories. Obviously local people like to read about themselves but a newspaper devoted to positive stories about Tasmanians is not much fun.

However, I always glance through the paper when Marilyn and I stop for coffee or lunch. Yesterday, I noted a tiny story at the bottom of a page which admitted that Tasmanians are Australia’s biggest litterers. What? Can this be true? Are the residents of God’s Own Country prone to throw their rubbish around?

There wasn’t much detail in the story but I gather the researchers marked out an area on the ground, perhaps 100 m2 or 1000m2. Then they carefully gathered and counted all the waste: plastic, paper, cigarette butts, etc. Tasmanians scored the highest in each of these areas, particularly in the case of cigarette butts – 53 butts in Tasmania compared to around 40 in the next most grubby state. The researchers also commented that Tasmania’s score might be artificially low as there had been a lot of rain before the count and many butts might have been washed away.

When we had finished lunch yesterday, Marilyn left me to carry out some Secret Women’s Business so I thought I would carry out my own survey. From where I was standing, without moving my feet, I counted 13 discarded cigarette butts, plus this nice little cluster in the flower bed I was standing beside. It makes you proud, doesn’t it!

The afternoon presenter on ABC TV picked up the story and encouraged people to ring in. Most callers were people who wanted to say that, of course, they weren’t litterers but they had seen lots of people discarding their rubbish. Several things were agreed; most throwaway rubbish comes from Macdonalds, many people don’t see cigarette butts as litter, blame the schools who don’t teach anti-littering, litterers are bogans, and if we had penalties like Singapore, we wouldn’t have a problem. Simple, isn’t it?

When Marilyn and I were in Nepal, we were shocked at the amount of litter but, in reality, we would be the same here if the councils didn’t provide people to pick up after us.