This winter we’re burning Mark Titmarsh’s house.
Mark’s been our Callan Street neighbour and an artist/activist confrère for years. He’s helped fuel local exhibitions at our place and (more recently) the campaign against WestConnex across the inner west. Our kids, now young adults, have grown up together. This winter century-old hardwood posts and heavy floor joists along with bowed Oregon rafters and battens salvaged from the rear of Mark’s corner bungalow are keeping us warm. A major reno (by the Bull brothers) is in full swing, and it’s well known that I rarely say ‘no’ to a dangerous-looking pile of old timber replete with rusty nails.
Fuel like this, for our slow-burning combustion stove, is gold. Because you see no-one uses hardwood (eucalypt) or Oregon (softwood – pine, originally from the north-west US coast) to build any more … the former too difficult to nail, the latter prone to white-ants and weathering. These days it’s more-often-than-not treated pine, and laminates – which you can’t burn. Prefab steel frame and concrete are of course also on the rise. So our days of urban-foraging for fuel (around 10,000 since 1991!) are numbered.
Which is a shame, because (although you may find it hard to believe) there are few things I enjoy more than an hour or so in the late afternoon wielding a circular saw and an axe safely in thongs on the street … pausing and chatting to neighbours and passers-by, then carting and stacking a fresh supply of patinaed old timber inside, replete with its belted-in nails, bruises, splinters and stains … its freshly revealed inner hues, grain and ‘story’ set to deliver further pleasurable rumination and affordable warmth over the darker, colder months to come.
The burning of salvaged timber, I might add, also saves it from going to landfill, where – I’m reliably informed by Malcolm, a retired engineer who lives around the corner – it would in time emit more CO2 than it does as seasoned, dry fuel for a regularly-cleaned slow-combustion stove. The particulate emissions, however, even from a highly-rated unit such as ours, are of potential concern. Although flickering hearths are pretty much a thing of the past around here (where gas, reverse-cycle aircon and under-floor-heating rule) I suspect that we’ve only a couple more halcyon wood-fired winters left here in the factory, before slow-combustion stoves are outlawed.
Funnily enough, though, as I write, WestConnex is constructing a massive unfiltered road tunnel stack at the top of our street. It will (medicos and scientists assure us) belch out countless tunnel-kilometres of vehicular-exhaust-pipe-emission concentrate, some of it carcinogenic, much of it dangerous-when-inhaled particulate matter (PM10s, PM2.5s) and, of course, tonnes of CO2.
To chart a pared-back, recycled and sustainable life against a backdrop of rampant consumerism, over-development, global heating and pestilence is becoming, I imagine that some of you might agree, quite a challenge. We well-meaning, community-minded, car-driving, coal-fired-appliance-loving inner-city ‘progressives’ stand today somewhat uncomfortably, our every move knowingly compromised, elaborately laced with minute hypocrisies and inconvenient truths.
As Mark’s magnificent old hardwood joists conflagrate and gently warm us through this cool July, it’s salutary to remember, to mourn and to honour the grand eucalypt forests and delicate eco-systems (in northern New South Wales?) from which they were ‘won’. And to be horrified by the fact that in recent years St Gladys Berejiklian’s LNP government* has overseen unprecedented levels of land clearing/species loss across NSW, having learnt – it would appear – next to nothing from the appalling ‘custodianship’ of our settler ancestors.
* Gladys Berejiklian entered NSW parliament in 2003, was Treasurer 2015-17, and Premier 2017-21.