Victoria

Title: How things have changed

I grew up in Ballarat in the 1950’s. Back then water was not an issue, no one thought about the reservoirs or when it was going to rain next. The only thing that was thought about was the price of the water which was still very small. On a hot day there was no hesitation about using water to cool down. We would run the sprinkler for hours without worrying. Most houses would have had a nice green lawn with lovely gardens as well. Being able to have a nice garden was one of the best things about having no water restrictions. For years I had green lawns and nice flowers growing everywhere.

All of this has changed now. My garden is tiny and my lawn is dead except for some little patches of green. Now any water that I can use on my garden is collected from the washing machine. This has had washing detergent in it. Using this is good because less water gets wasted, but it would be nice just to be able to use a bit of clean tap water on my flowers. I think that I use about half of the water I used to but my bill has doubled. This annoys me because I’m getting charged for all the ideas and plans to get more water but none of them work. That’s the major change for the worse in the environment that I have noticed.