I saw a picture of Shepparton’s old drive-in at Kialla pop up in my Facebook feed this week.

A wave of nostalgia swept through my body as I remembered many warm summer nights there, getting dizzy on the spinning roundabout in the playground before heading back to the family car as the late daylight savings sun dropped, signalling that the movie would soon begin.

Then later, when I was all grown up, I remember driving there myself, sitting with friends in camp chairs beside our cars, getting eaten by mozzies, and then cosy winter nights bundled up in warm blankets and pillows in the back of my boyfriend’s Sandman.

I moved away from Shepparton soon after. When I returned, the drive-in was permanently closed.

As a child, the site — where Riverside Plaza sits today — had also been the destination for another regular family outing: Sunday’s trash and treasure market.

Each week we’d visit, pocket money in hand, hoping to find treasures in among the other things sellers no longer had use for.

Someone in our family of five always found something that made the visit worthwhile.

Whether it was us kids finding treasure, Dad finding a tool, Mum finding a plant, we’d all at least find some friends there every Sunday, giving us a boost of weekend socialisation.

Our gold-coin entry fee also supported a local Scouts club.

That one picture in my Facebook feed set off an avalanche of thoughts, from drive-ins, to shopping centres, to how forms of socialisation have changed, to the market itself being much like a real-life Facebook Marketplace.

Only people really did get social, not just on media, and the marketplace was, in fact, a singular place where all the market goods were found.

We didn’t have to worry about scammers; what we saw was what we got.

We exchanged cold, hard cash for cold, hard products that we could see existed, because they were right there before our eyes.

No-one asked if they could PayID you.

I’ve donated many things someone else could breathe new life into that I could have made a buck or two from, purely because I can no longer be bothered with the BS that comes with selling second hand goods online anymore.

Even the work that goes into setting up a garage sale and packing up all the leftover junk is never really worth the pittance you make from one.

I heard a whisper that a hard rubbish collection is coming, which is welcome news.

But, in the meantime, the nature strip isn’t a bad place for getting rid of any items in decent condition that you have no use left for.

It saves a trip to the transfer station and the often steep tip fees, while at the same time saving another family some money.

On the odd occasion I’ve put a variety of things out at once, it’s been surprisingly the poorest conditioned item or the one I think would be least popular that disappears first.

It’s proof that one person’s trash is another’s treasure.

I too have stopped and picked up things placed on the nature strip of other homes, once restoring a beautiful old wooden-framed chair and reupholstering it in newspaper-print fabric that I’d had custom-made.

The chair was someone else’s trash, but it’s now a statement piece in my lounge room.

Instead of chucking out broken parts from items, or other ‘trash’, I’ve recycled them in creative ways, embellishing skulls into steampunk versions of themselves, making flowers from aluminium cans, turning leftover foreign coins from trips into souvenir rings, bending worn cutlery into jewellery, making thick art paper from torn up catalogues, turning bottle caps into pictures and pallets into Christmas trees, creating keyrings and earrings from broken keyboard keys.

If I can donate something to a service, give it away to a friend or stranger, or create art with it, I will.

But while we’re talking about recycling, can we bring back a drive-in?

The old one might have been a little worn and ‘trashy’ in the end, but the inflatable modern moonlight cinemas just don’t have the same treasured vibe.

Climbing into the back of a Sandman restored to its former glory and warming myself with a quilt made of all my vintage T-shirts seems like a better time to me.

With the exception of recycling the old boyfriend, of course.

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Saturday, 22nd May 2027

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