Interview with Cara Sandys
12 March 2012

It is all about just trying to change the world.
I think it is not as difficult as people sometimes think it is.

My mother was very aware of waste and recycling. Because she was brought up in the Second World War she had that mentality of ‘make do and mend’.

She was always telling us to turn lights off, to iron the Christmas wrapping paper from last year so we could use it again, and she made our clothes.

I thought it was a bit ‘nutty’ at the time, but subsequently realised she was right. Of course these principles and ideas are more acceptable now than they were in the more extravagant ‘80’s.

For the last fifteen years I have been self-employed as a jewellery designer, which enabled me to get involved with environmental and social justice issues in my spare time. It means I am not caught up in this whole - ‘hamster wheel’ - I call it, of consumption; having to earn money to pay for stuff, most of which you don’t need.

Once you get off that, you don’t have to earn so much money, which means you don’t have to work so hard, which means you have a lot more free time to spend on things you consider to be important.

I set up a shop in the UK with a charity that gives away books that would otherwise be pulped or sent to be land-filled. These are books that have gone through the second hand shops or charity shops and haven’t sold.

This particular charity called Healthy Planet buys these books and puts them in circulation again in empty commercial spaces that are up for rent. Healthy Planet offers tooccupy the space until a tenant is found. There is no rent as nothing is being sold and no money is made. It is not just books that are given away; it is records, records, cassettes, DVD’s as well.

You can give all sorts of things away once you start operating in this free economy world, as opposed to the consumer driven world we are all caught up in at the moment.

I came back to Australia - I have dual nationality - at the end of last year with a view to setting up something here where I could give books away for free.

The first thing I tried to do was to find sources. I went around to charity shops, second hand bookshops and even some of the discount bookshops. I tried to find out if people would admit that they pulped books.

Most were a little bit cagey. Those who admitted they did, I approached with my proposition.
I told them that I had been doing this in the UK, giving away books that would otherwise be destroyed and asked if they would be prepared to donate books to me to give away. They agreed. I got some beautiful expensive books, too.

The biggest donation came from the Brotherhood of St Laurence. They don’t pulp books and wanted to promote this. They sell them online now. I thought that was a fantastic initiative. They donated about fifteen boxes of books to me to give away. We put bookmarks in so people knew where they came from, where they could purchase books from and where they could donate books to.

I did this as part of the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne. We had an information hub that operated in Bourke Street, in the City Centre for three weeks. I set up a wooden palette with a sign saying:

‘Books For Free’;
‘These Books Have Been Rescued’;
‘Give These Books a New Home’.

It was just a case of encouraging people to come up, and engaging them in conversation. We live in an era where talking to strangers seems to be happening less and less, people are more plugged into iPods and conversing with their screens. It is actually very nice to have a chat with someone you don’t know. You make some interesting connections; you have some lovely conversations.

We also did it at Federation Square. I placed some books on rocks by the river. There were thousands of people walking past the rocks.

I just had a sign there. First I would explain what the initiative was about. Then I would go away – I left it mostly unattended. Then I would come back and replenish the books from the stash I had hidden away so there was always a changing display on the rocks.

Again, you would have these lovely conversations with people. Again, it was about issues of waste and recycling but I think you had a greater impact than just that.

The idea is something anybody could do. Books are a resource that shouldn’t just go to waste. There is a movement called Collaborative Consumption which is all about sharing and swapping and exchanging things. Everybody has books sitting on their shelves that they are not going to read again, so why not just give them to someone else and let them share that experience?

As a by-product you may find it creates a stronger sense of community. It certainly did in the City Centre. Friendships developed there. When you don’t have to worry about making money, and about how long it takes to serve your customer, then you have that liberty to just have a chat.

So much activism is about protesting, and campaigning, and asking people to do or not do something, this is just a direct, practical demonstration of one way of saving resources. But it is also an example of how you can operate outside the traditional economic system so driven by the need to consume and purchase.

I think we have to come up with different ways of functioning on an economic level. This move towards collaborative consumption, of valuing things rather than just using and disposing, is perhaps the way to go.

My mother is eighty five now and still doing her thing. She volunteers at our shop in Southampton and also teaches knitting there. God willing I will still be doing my bit at that age.

It is all about just trying to change the world. I think it is not as difficult as people sometimes think it is.