Much of the joy of the Big Lap is the incredible camaraderie that travellers share, and the respect they show for the places they visit and the ‘locals’ they interact with.
At the centre if this, of course, is trust.
Ill advised or not, there are very few places in the world where campers feel as confident as they do here to leave belongings like campchairs and fishing rods laying outside their caravans while they take a walk or swim.
Similarly, the very existence of ‘honesty boxes’ is somehow a reassuring message that we live and travel in a wonderful country. The same can be said for roadside produce stalls where travellers are asked to leave behind a few coins in exchange for fruit or vegetables or similar.
It’s particularly sad then when these testaments to the warmth of our way of life are threatened. Somehow when someone steals from someone’s annexe or cash for an honesty box it feels personal.
So it is then with the reported theft of 20 bags of manure from outside a property for rescued horses in Belgrave in Victoria. Obviously, in this instance, the most likely culprit was a local gardener and while it is hardly the crime of the century in terms of value, the fact that the dung, priced at $2.50 a bag, was stolen at all is desperately sad.
The Herald-Sun reports that the owner of the semirural property, Carolyn Blake, was selling the manure to help pay for rehabilitation and vet bills of the horses she has rescued from being sold to dog food companies.
She said someone had already offered to replace the manure, but it was the principle of the theft.
“If anyone knows the not-so-lovely people who keep pinching our horse poo without paying … tell them thanks very much, NOT!” she said on Facebook. “This poo is lovingly collected by volunteers to help support the rehab of nine rescue horses.”
the biggest problem for this is that these new fangled phones don’t work on chained down honesty boxes Obviously grey nomads in their caravans needs lots of manure to keep things going.
I think it stinks…