GARBO’S JOB
IN A different suburb each day, like clockwork, Townsville’s garbage collectors unostentatiously flip wheelie bins into their trucks, clearing the city’s streets of thousands of tonnes of rubbish.
It’s a job Tommy Cunningham has been doing for 45 years.
Technological advancements and workplace health and safety laws mean the job is a lot safer; he hasn’t had to hop over fences as fluids leak through large hessian bags and down his back or dodge moving vehicles for decades.
But the longest-serving member of Townsville City Council’s waste collection team reckons this has made garbos faceless to the community, and the work they do is less appreciated as a result.
“It’s impersonal now. Before we were on foot so we were going through their yards and they get to know you,” Mr Cunningham said.
“I used to run up all them hills in town, over all of them, and jumped in everyone’s backyard.”
In the ritzy suburb of Yarrawonga, during the hot summer months, a younger Mr Cunningham would have been invited in for a glass of water or a sandwich.
During the weekly run along Bowen Rd in the 1970s the boys would stop by Lanskey’s Saddlers, a business that still operates today, and go through the back door that had been left unlocked for them.
“He’d (Jim Lanskey) keep cold beer in the fridge for us and we’d go in, get three beers, go around the corner and just drink them there and then,” Mr Cunningham said.
And there were the “naked ladies” who would rush out of their homes at 3am to get their bins out when they heard the trucks pull up.
Christmases were different too, as parties would still be kicking on when the garbage collectors started their shifts.
Residents would leave out cartons of beer as gifts for the men too.
“They’d invite us in. It was nothing for us to go into three or four houses during the course of our run and have a drink with them,” Mr Cunningham said.
“You’d end up bloody drunk by the end of the run, that’s the way it was.
“All that stuff used to happen then but that doesn’t happen now.”
Townsville City Council’s modern-day, enforceable zero drug and alcohol policy likely played a major role in ending that practice.
As the team’s greenest garbo, Justin Donald, 25, admits “nothing that interesting” has ever happened to him since starting the job in January 2019.
Before compactor trucks came into existence in the late 1970s, garbage men would hop fences from home to home with a 50-litre hessian bag slung over their shoulders, filling it up with people’s trash before running back to the truck and emptying the load.
Technological advancements mean waste collection is more automated than ever before.
The garbos sit in an airconditioned cabin and control mechanical arms that pick up the bins and tip them straight into the truck.
They only catch a glimpse of what goes in through a camera but the sound of unwelcome items like concrete blocks, steel pieces or gas bottles hitting the bottom of the truck is unmistakeable.
One particular item is known for ruining shifts: vats of waste oil or old cans of paint.
“When the compactor squeezes it, a small hole (is