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The rubbish reached such a height that the gate and fence could no longer contain it with some spilling onto the footpath. Source: DailyTelegraph

HOARDERS Mary Bobolas and her daughters Elena and Liana are so attached to their rubbish they kept guard over it through the night following an incident involving a good Samaritan, a repossessed truck and the police.
Dressed in black, perched on garden chairs or sleeping on the ground, half hidden by rubbish, the Bobolas family spent a cold on Wednesday night watching over the hoard on a grass strip next to a busy intersection in Alexandria, in Sydney’s inner-west.

The piles of rubbish are just a fraction of what has been building up for years at the infamous hoarders’ Boonara Ave, Bondi, family home.
The family found itself camped out in Alexandria, 15km by road from their Bondi home, after a rental truck they were using was repossessed.

Since the NSW Court of Appeal approved Waverley Council’s bid to clean up the house in Boonara Avenue, the family has been camping out in the cab of a pantech hired from rental car company, Thrifty.

The truck was actually rented by a good Samaritan, moved by the family’s plight and their need to move their belongings and hundreds of kilos of collected rubbish from their house.

The good Samaritan handed over the truck to the Bobalas on Thursday March 13, believing they would hand him back the keys when the two-week rental agreement ran out.

When the man, who Thrifty declined to identify, went around to the house last Monday to pick up the truck, the Bobolases allegedly refused to hand over the keys.
They had even used their own padlocks to lock up the truck’s rollerdoor.

The good Samaritan then called Thrifty and said he wanted the contract terminated immediately.
At 8pm on Monday, a Thrifty staffer went to the house and, using a spare set of keys, repossessed the truck and drove it away to an undisclosed location so the family could not use the original set of keys to get the truck back.

A Thrifty spokeswoman said the truck, and its cab, was jammed packed with the family’s belongings.
“Our driver even had to pull stuff out from under the accelerator pedal so he could drive the truck away,” she said.

Early on Tuesday morning the family turned up at the Thrifty rental depot at Alexandria, demanding their property be returned.
Thrifty staff told the Bobolases they could remove their belongings from the truck, which they did, and stacked it on the footpath near the corner of Garderners and Bourke roads.

“The family said it was going to get another van from another company and move their stuff, but they ended up sleeping the night next to their belongings,” the spokeswoman said.

Yesterday morning, when Thrifty staff turned up for work, the belongings had been separated into a number of piles and spread around the depot’s forecourt, preventing vehicles from moving in and out.

“We asked them to move it and they refused. We told them we would put their belongings into an empty skip and they could take them out of the skip when their van arrived.

“But they got angry and called the police.”
The police told the family to remove their property from the Thrifty yard. It took them two hours to stack it on the footpath.
Today Elena Bobolas was still sitting with the belongings.

When asked what the family was going to do with it, she replied with a curt “No comment”.
In April the Land and Environment Court is expected to set a date, probably in mid-April, for council contractors to begin cleaning up the Boonara Avenue property.
It will be the 15th clean-up since the family moved in during the 1970s. — AFP