Mimmo Cozzolino

FLUSH: URBAN ARCHEOLOGY SERIES 30+ SCANS

A plastic soft drink container discarded somewhere in metropolitan Melbourne in the 1970s turns up 40 to 50 years later on the banks of the Yarra River. Where has it been hiding all this time? Where was it discarded? How many tides has it bopped on?

If only I could read the container’s history graffitied, by the passage of time, into the soft plastic. Instead I can only imagine, from the patina, what the journey may have comprised. A couple of droughts. A few floods. The gouging of time, the rubbing of tides, the action of sunlight, the accumulation of grit, silt, sand, minerals and toxins. These actions of time and environment give each item a unique colour when I scan it. If the plastic is relatively new or has experienced little travel stress or sunlight, it scans blueish. If it has been lingering in the environment for years the silt inside can make the object scan like it was made of gold.

More than photographs, the high resolution digital scans pick up a lot of surface detail. The resulting images are not photographs: they are scans. I am fussy about this point but no one else seems to understand, or care, about the subtle distinction. Sure there is a lens in the scanner. But for me the lighting provided by the cold cathode fluorescent lamp attached to the moving scan head creates a very special effect.

Nearly all the soft drink containers in this series were collected between 1990 and 2011 underneath Westgate Bridge where it spans the Yarra in the Port of Melbourne. The containers range in height from 11 cm to 24 cm and hold between 150 ml and 250 ml of cordial. ‘ARTIFICIALLY COLOURED AND FLAVOURED. PRESERVATIVE ADDED’ is embossed somewhere on most containers together with other legal guff such as company names or codes. There are some containers with no identification at all. These may have had labels or wrappers when sold. I have yet to pick up a container from the river with a label or wrapper, not even a badly damaged one.

The containers were inexpensive summer treats bought at supermarkets and frozen at home for children on a hot summer’s day. Today, versions of this product are still available in supermarkets year round. The shapes they come in are nowhere near as interesting or inappropriate as earlier examples. Gone are the hand grenades and guns, replaced by ‘tubes’, ‘dinosaurs’ or ‘fire (thirst) extinguishers’. This morning (27 Aug 2011), in amongst the flotsam and jetsam, I pick up a plastic container with the words ‘SKY DIVER 4.5 FL OZ’ embossed on its front. At other times I have picked up the same shape container with ‘SKY DIVER 130 ml’ embossed in the plastic.

Although metric weights and measures were introduced in Australia in 1974, it is not unusual to still pick up containers marked in the old ‘Imperial’ fluid ounces. That’s why I assume these objects have been floating around for such a long time.

POSTSCRIPT. I have collected dozens of some shapes, and only one or two samples of others. I have a box full of hand grenades but I left thousands more behind. The popularity of the hand grenade astounds me. From the frequency of the finds, I estimate that this must have been the most popular shape ever sold. I find the hand grenade the most inappropriate and spooky of all the shapes sold, followed by the hand guns where the kid could suck the frozen cordial from the barrel of the gun. I have only ever found a couple of hand guns. Perhaps there was more resistance by parents to buying the gun shape for their children. Kangaroo and Hoppy Pop (also a kangaroo shape) were common and so was Sky Diver. But Koala and Rabbit are very rare: I have two of each. I have only ever found one sample that looks like a spaceship, or is it a submarine based on Jules Verne’s Nautilus, as my friend Andrew Budge suggested? At times I have not found anything new for months. And then, as if by magic, in amongst all the flotsam and jetsam, something new appears at my feet. I smile.

19 September 2010: (Ford) FALCON 8 FL OZS–the first one ever.

30 July 2011: SKITTLE 8 FLUID OZS–the first one ever complete, not broken.

The drought years haven’t been good for this type of urban archaeology. There is always more rubbish flushed out after heavy rains. It’s always a good time to go hunting for quality rubbish from the streets of Melbourne after it has rained. I am not a religious person but in the drought years I prayed for rain.

I first exhibited prints from the Flush series in 2003. My preferred print size is to exhibit the containers at around 200 cm tall. I also exhibited an edition of prints 80 cm tall. In 2006 ABC TV Collectors Episode 27 featured a segment on the search for the cordial containers and the process of scanning them to create the Flush series. In June 2011 the State Library of Victoria included 16 images from the series in their Changing face of Victoria exhibition program.

This article features scans of the initial 22 containers exhibited in 2003 plus new containers found since then. Some cordial plastic containers (both full and empty) have already appeared in antique shops. In the late 1990s a friend brought back two full containers for me from a Brisbane antique shop. He paid $25 for both. These two early containers feature a reusable plug, like the idea of a screw top. The cordial has turned cloudy but the plastic is in excellent condition. In Brisbane in 2010 I paid $10 for an empty container in the shape of a clown . I have yet to find the clown design in the Yarra.

After consultation with trusted and experienced collectors, my best guess is that these containers were probably first marketed in Australia in the 1960s. The plastic used in the earlier containers is thicker and more durable than the more recent containers. And anything marked in fluid ounces, I assume, would have to have been made before or about the mid 1970s.

Venturing further afield, when I was in Vietnam in 2006 I picked up a plastic corn cob while walking across a rice paddy. When I enquired at the shops, it seemed to be the only shape on sale. In South Korea these products are also available but come packaged in extremely bright and colourful outer sleeves which when opened reveal bland bottle shapes. Back in Melbourne, when I have time, or need to unwind, I continue to go searching for the elusive, uniquely shaped cordial containers. Over the years this activity has become almost a meditative process for me. While I come back home from the Yarra empty handed fortynine times out of fifty, I am forever hopeful of new finds. mc 2019