“YOU’RE sort of getting double value – you're getting your exercise and doing something useful.”
This is how Strathbogie’s Di Mackrell describes her practice of picking up litter as she treks to Euroa and back.
The 73-year-old makes the 30-odd kilometre trek along Euroa-Strathbogie Road two or three times per year, in intervals of about one-and-a-half kilometres per day.
Each morning she drives to where she left off the previous day and starts afresh, until she has beautified every bit of the road.
When The Euroa Gazette met Ms Mackrell at 9am one mid-April morning, she had already filled two bags with rubbish.
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“I woke up early, so I thought it was such a nice morning I'd get started,” she explained.
Wearing a high-vis yellow vest, the retired Euroa Secondary College teacher and librarian was a ray of sunshine on an already sunny morning.
“I wouldn't do it on a terrible weather day,” she said.
“And the other thing that's quite interesting is sometimes you meet really interesting people along the road, which you wouldn't think, but you just never know what might crop up.”
Ms Mackrell said she began the practice after her son once suggested a “spring clean-up”.
“We were only going to do it to the bottom of the hill, and I sort of thought, ‘well, I've come this far, I may as well continue on in’,” she said.
When she has filled a bag, she leaves it on the roadside to collect as she drives past later.
But this once exposed her to the wrath of the internet.
“I’d picked up a few bags, and the property just over the hill had their rubbish bins at the gate,” she said.
“And people came along and took my two bags of rubbish and put it in her rubbish bin.
“And the next thing she's posting on the Euroa Community Noticeboard [Facebook page], ‘who's putting stuff in my rubbish bin?’
“It would have only been there for, at a max, half an hour.
“I had to laugh.
“So, I owned up and I said, ‘look, it was me, but I didn't put it in your bin’.”
Ms Mackrell said most bags end up in her household rubbish, but Strathbogie Shire Council has given her a fee waiver to take rubbish to the tip when she needs to.
“I asked for that 'cause I sort of thought, ‘well, I am sort of doing a service’,” she said.
She has a simple message for those who litter.
“It's our space, and we like it to look good, and there really isn't any excuse for it,” she said.
“Because, I mean, you can easily take it home and put it in your rubbish.”
But she mentioned not all rubbish has been littered intentionally.
“Sometimes people throw rubbish in the back of their utes and don't secure it… and it flies out,” she said.
“I also find quite a bit of styrofoam.”
Ms Mackrell said she had been “imported” from North Dakota, USA in the early 1970s to plug a shortage of teachers in Australia.
She moved to Strathbogie in 1978, where she lives with her husband, sheep farmer Dennis Mackrell.
She leads a local choir, The Strathbogie Singers, and another singing group, Euroa Vocal Nosh, which meets four times a year.
She also volunteers at the Euroa information hub, the Euroa Community Cinema, and plays harp for and entertains residents of Euroa’s GraniteHill aged care facility.
Until recently, she ran a ukulele group, and taught young people badminton for over 30 years.
Her friend Nola Dudley called her “the best volunteer in Euroa”.
Strathbogie’s Fiona Townsend said she is “a pretty dynamic woman”.
“She doesn't want anyone to take any notice of her picking up [rubbish], I don't think – she just thinks it needs to be done,” Ms Townsend said.
“The volunteering that she does everywhere is extraordinary.
“She doesn’t sit.
“She just does.”
