Opinion Articles

SOUL MATTERS: Shopping Trolleys
By Tracey Edstein

Slowly but surely, the streets in our town are being taken over by shopping trolleys.

Some are individuals, making their way in solitude down sloping avenues or tripping awkwardly over obstacles. Some are herd animals, congregating sociably, albeit with little regard for other pilgrims on the road. Some belong to couples, locked together in relationships that are tenuous by definition, as a bicycle, scooter or child could easily separate them, perhaps permanently.

Like footballers, their colours betray their loyalties, although powers greater than they have dragged them way beyond their ancestral lands. Their only response to this cruelty is to lock wheels in silent protest, but it is never enough. Many suffer deep humiliation, exposed to all weathers and often forced into ungainly positions. For most they are a temporary form of short haul transportation of goods, for a few an irresistible temptation.

Why do their owners make no attempt to rescue them and return them to their rightful place in the scheme of things? If physical retrieval from ditches, parks and the sad side of town is too difficult, why do retailers not offer a reward for the safe return of wanderers?

If aliens from another world visited our town, what conclusions might they draw? That as a society, our much vaunted care for the environment is as hollow as an abandoned shopping trolley? That rampant consumerism demands more and more trolleys to convey goods that are often neither needed nor even really wanted? That for many, our modus operandi is ‘use then abuse', with no thought for the short or long term consequences? That there's little point in decrying the use of plastic bags if the ‘green bags' are carried in trolleys that are frequently abandoned?

In Melbourne last year a priest mounted an energetic protest against the abandonment of supermarket trolleys, saying that he feared that the trolleys ‘attracted' other rubbish and lowered the appeal of neighbourhoods. A report claimed that the local council was engaged in talks with local retail giants, which seemed an unnecessarily time consuming exercise.

Why does the government not simply legislate so that consumers are offered an incentive to return trolleys? It would surely be cheaper, and better for the reputation of retailers, than the high annual cost of replacing trolleys.

Les Murray's poem “The Hypogeum” says, “supermarket trolleys hang their inverse harps, silver leaking from them.” A hypogeum is an underground chamber; in Murray 's context, the ubiquitous underground car park becomes a hypogeum. One of the poet's gifts is to see beauty in ugliness, or banality. I struggle to see beauty in streets littered by trolleys in various states of decay, bearing mute witness to people's readiness to shop then drop – the trolley.

Tracey Edstein is the editor of Aurora, the magazine of the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle.