Source/Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald
By John Huxley | March 7, 2011
ON THE morning after the Mardi Gras night before, the rubbish was still knee deep in places on Oxford Street, but at Dawes Point, overlooking the harbour, Alan Au's Clean Up Australia squad was having difficulty finding any.
His team - including chefs from the nearby Park Hyatt hotel carrying big plastic bags and children as young as two equipped with pink gloves and miniature tongs - picked their way across the tourist hotspot.
Eventually, after painstakingly removing piles of cigarette ends and plastic fish that once contained soy sauce, they were rewarded with more interesting finds: a metal spoon, a 50¢ coin and a skateboard helmet.
''That's not bad for a start,'' said Mr Au, who has put together a clean-up party for several years. ''It's important, I think, to get the children started early.'' On Friday, some of them had joined school clean-up projects.
Mr Au and co-organiser Wendy Cox were among more than 700,000 volunteers who tackled more than 7000 sites across the country yesterday.
The Clean Up Australia Day chairman and founder, Ian Kiernan, said interest was stronger than ever. ''Team registrations are higher than last year, and there is a new vigour.''
At Marsden Park, in western Sydney, about 250 members of the ''Cleanliness - Part of Faith'' group formed by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Association, met in the mosque car park.
''We are the biggest [volunteer] group in Australia,'' said co-ordinator Murad Khan. Yesterday, they set up three teams to clean 25 kilometres of roadside.
Mr Khan said littering had declined in the 20 years he had been involved in the clean-up, but people still did stupid things.
''We had a journalist from the local newspaper out here, and she was hit by rubbish thrown from a car.''
For yesterday's 21st clean-up, Mr Kiernan was in Brisbane, where thousands of volunteers tackled rubbish on river and creek banks and on beaches.
He warned volunteers they could expect to see dead animals, wrecked cars, fridges and other destroyed household goods exposed by receding floodwaters.
The campaign suffered the first fatality in its history, when a 55-year-old Melbourne man died on Saturday while scuba diving to remove rubbish. He became unwell and lost consciousness.
In Sydney, volunteers were left wondering again at the irony that the clean-up should coincide with the city's greatest assault from rubbish.
''I know it's fun, really spectacular and brings in lots of tourists. I've got nothing against gays and lesbians. But really the crowds have got to do better,'' said a dawn dog walker, Helen Carter, of Darlinghurst, surveying scenes of devastation in Taylor Square. ''Mate, the rubbish … it's like a tsunami,'' said one City of Sydney garbo enjoying a late breakfast after working in one of several teams that began the clean-up at 9.30pm on Saturday.
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Read original post here: City cleans up its act the morning after excess
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