opinionNat Locke: This week I was the talk of the town, and it was all thanks to . . . a skip binNat Locke STMSun, 21 September 2025 2:00AMCommentsComments
There is no surer sign that you have plummeted into the mediocrity of middle age than the frisson of excitement you feel when a skip bin is delivered to your house.
There’s so much potential. The purging, the cleansing, the ridding of sins.
I do realise that’s pretty philosophical for a large rubbish bin, but hear me out.
First of all, I found that when you get a skip bin delivered, you are the talk of the town. Neighbours were intrigued. Strangers were seduced by the possibilities of treasures within. And Angela from the dog park asked important questions like “What are you going to put in your skip bin?” which is weirdly personal when you think about it.
I mean, the broad answer is “stuff” but I think Angela was hoping for a more specific response. Some sort of inventory, perhaps.
In reality, I had exactly a week to transfer the detritus from my garage to the four cubic-metre skip bin on the street in front of my house. You see, I share my driveway with two other properties, so I couldn’t put it there, and I have no verge to speak of. So I handed the local council 50 bucks and they handed me a piece of paper saying I could pop it on the street where I would normally park my car.
Those of you with previous skip experience might have spotted the problem with this arrangement already. That is, a street skip is vulnerable to two things: (a) the random depositor who is lured by the space in your bin and dumps their garbage in it under the cover of darkness, and (b) the skip rat who likes to sift through the contents of your bin looking for things of value.
I discovered a skip rat in my bin last Sunday, in that foul weather. I had been studying the radar intensely, waiting for a long enough break in the weather that would allow me to dump a few more wheelbarrow loads into the skip, when I was rather surprised to find a young guy sitting deep in the bin, forensically sorting through what I had thrown out.
Unfortunately for him, it was just proper junk accumulated over the last seven years and mostly covered in rat droppings. My garage currently only has three walls, which allows our ratty friends to entertain therein, and judging by the number of olive pits I found, they’ve got Mediterranean tastes. I do have an olive tree, so it’s not THAT surprising, but I digress.
I was actually amazed at the amount of stuff I had managed to just dump into the garage over the last seven years. But Marie Kondo would have been super proud of my capacity to toss it out. I hadn’t used it since before COVID, so it obviously hadn’t been sparking a whole lot of joy in my life.
And before you chastise me for throwing out perfectly good things, I would like to point out that some of the stuff was redistributed via my local Buy Nothing page, and now a family who have recently arrived in Australia will have some very pretty Christmas decorations, another family from around the corner scored some lasagne dishes and a 12-year-old kid got to put together his first flat-pack project. See, everyone’s happy.
Even the skip rat? I hear you ask. Well, yes. Because I panicked and gave him my bike.
I didn’t want him to have to sit in all that rat poop for nothing. So I offered him my very dusty, slightly rusty bike with two very flat tyres. It was a great bike in its day, but I’ve upgraded to an e-bike so I have something more stylish to fall off. Anyway, he was rapt with the bike and when I went to walk the dog a little while later, he rode past on it and yelled “THANK YOU!” so I guess everyone came out a winner.
The very public skip bin situation is a bit confronting though, because you feel the weight of judgment of everyone who passes by. Is it better to be shoving quality items in so strangers can treat it like a lucky dip? Or is it better for it to be filled to the brim with actual rubbish that has no discernible value?
I’ll admit that when it was picked up at the end of the week, I was relieved. I’m not cut out for this sort of scrutiny. And I had run out of bikes to give away.
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