MAYLANDS foreshore regulars James Kozak and June Winsome-Smith usually remove garden-variety trash from the Swan River shoreline, but this weekend they stumbled across a safe carefully hidden on the bank. 

The pair remove rubbish about three or four times a week for Keep Australia Beautiful, usually collecting “fishing line, fishing hooks/lures, drug paraphernalia, and other general trash,” Ms Winsome-Smith says.

But on August 15 during the Avon Descent, they found a safe in the wrong kind of bank.

It was “carefully concealed”, Mr Kozak reports.

Ms Winsome-Smith says it was in “a bright red Salvos bag, apparently stuffed with dirty clothing and a rope, hidden in a drainage ditch. 

“Inside was a small Sandleford safe,” the electronic panel peering at them out of the bag.

Believing it to be stolen, they called police who investigated the site and took it away for safekeeping.

Trash collecting

The pair’s regular trash collecting efforts have now resumed, and while the stream of litter seems unending they have had a win.

After hearing of a dead pelican being found with a golfball in its stomach last year, they began picking up the golf balls that’d accumulated in the wetlands surrounding the Maylands Peninsula Golf Course (‘Fore!’ Voice, August 15, 2020).

After their advocacy on the golfball matter, Bayswater council’s now agreed to do a quarterly collection to retrieve the stray shots that end up in the Baigup Wetlands.

by DAVID BELL