Night Soil: Briggs Road Depot (Transcription)

Melanie: So, you would take the cans back to the depot? This was always Briggs Road?   Peter: Yep, always Briggs Road, yeah. Melanie: What actually happened to the waste?   Peter: There was trenches dug up in the paddock, so there were trenches backhoed bucket wide, they were probably twice the length of this room maybe about this deep and you would drive the truck up alongside it have a piece of timber across the trench you pull the thing out you one foot on the piece of timber and smack the can onto the piece of timber to drop the waste into the trench and then when the trench started to get filled they would just back fill that one and dig another trench beside it. Jeff: Next day and you'd get one beside each day the next one up that's the way it worked. Melanie: So how far apart?   Jeff: Oh it wasn't that much, say about yay far apart. That paddock out there, Briggs Road, I reckon while I was out there, it would have gone over about four times the whole what's been dug up about four times, easy. Peter: Very rich soil.   Jeff: I said I know what it'd be great for farming it would be.   Peter: That up there what you get on that notice board, is a layout of the the depot where all the trenches were dug that's what that is. Now this over here all these sections you can see that was started on the 30th of the sixth (June) 1976 through to 77.   Melanie: So each line is that's one of the trenches?   Peter: That's where they dug a new pit each time. Melanie: Do you know how long Briggs Road was used for that purpose? Jeff: Oh, way before my time, because my grandfather worked out there. Peter: 1800s?   Jeff: Yeah, I was telling my grandfather worked out there on the garbage there for a little while. Peter: That's even where the garbage truck, the garbage trucks when the horse drawn, come from there. That's where all the stables were and everything out there. Peter: Yeah that's the washing plant [Peter demonstrates how the washing plant worked] Jeff: We used to put disinfectant on that in the wash water when we used it yeah.   Melanie: How clean would they come out? Jeff: Oh, reasonably clean. Sometimes there'd be a little bit of poo or something stuck to the bottom but sawdust used to cover it. [Laughing] Melanie: Seems like sawdust used to cover everything. Then you re-tar them after that? Peter: After a process, after every so many months they would get re-tared, because obviously the waste going into them just broke down the tar just ate it away. Jeff: Plus the banging and bashing, it here just to bust the tar off.