About Us

The Sewer Side Company is about having some tongue in cheek fun about the water and wastewater industry. Most people who work in these fields have a sense of humour otherwise they wouldn’t spend their days looking in septic tanks, sewerage lines, or researching the lives of faecal coliforms. Sewer Side produces a range of funny t-shirts (and other promotional products upon request) that aim to put a smile on people’s faces while having them ponder the nature of the water and wastewater industry.

Sewer Side products are of a high quality, with good grade shirts and professional printing. There is no fun for us in producing a poor product.

The Sewer Side Crew is an eclectic mixture of people comprising 4 Australian directors and 2 Scottish directors (currently residing in the Great Southern Land). Most of us are in some form associated with the water and wastewater industry and the erstwhile ring-ins either have the misfortune to be married or someway related to one of the others.

The Directors consist of Ben Kele, Donna Hobbs, Ted and Matthew Gardner, Billy and Christine Sinclair.

Ben Kele is a PhD scholar with the Centre for Plant and Water Sciences with the Central Queensland University. He has a warped sense of humour and often portrays his job description as Turdologist. For somebody who never planned to work in the wastewater industry he seems to have turned it more into an obsession than a career. Ben’s love of faecal related shirts, and his tendency to wear them in the most unlikely of places, is somewhat responsible for the ‘rebirth’ of the Sewer Side t-shirt company in its current form.
Donna is Ben’s partner and is the powerhouse behind Sewer Side. If there’s a form to fill in, or create for that matter, or an order to process, Donna is on-hand. Donna has a great deal of patience to match her sense of humour, otherwise she wouldn’t successfully live with Ben….

Ted Gardner is a ‘guru’ in the Australian water and wastewater industries. Ted is a winner of the Order of Australia medal for his devoted service to the Queensland Department of Natural Resources and Water (in its many forms and name changes over the years). Ted brings with him an aura of respectability to the Sewer Side company and a passion for high-brow humour and subtle wordplay (excluding the occasional memorable lapse with such slogan suggestions as “You can’t Polish a Turd”). Needless to say Ted’s sense of humour is always appreciated, not only for its wit, but its sharpness.

Matthew Gardner is a specialist butcher in Brisbane and to the best of our knowledge often wonders why his Father roped him into a weird faecal t-shirt company. He does make an excellent Christmas ham though.

Christine the ‘other’ respectable person (well she is Dr Christine after all…) in the Sewer Side crew, if a sensible suggestion is needed or a practical decision to be made, odds are Chris will bring it to our attention. With an exceedingly refined and penetrating sense of humour which she thankfully expresses most often in relation to her husband (Billy), Chris provides Sewer Side with some of its edginess. As a word of advice don’t stand between her and the latest Katherine Kerr novel (that’s assuming she gets of her bum and writes another one soon…)

Dr William Sinclair aka Billy sometimes wonders why he ended up working with wastewater at all (especially after that huge cockroach in the Torres Strait almost took off his arm). Billy’s work in Scotland focused pretty much on trees (and certain brands of single Malt whiskey). However in his first weekend in Australia he was abducted by Ben Kele (and Barry Hood, Hood by name Hood by nature) and taken to a traditional Queensland fishing hut located adjacent to the Great Barrier Reef. As Billy is both a keen fisherman and SCUBA diver, Ben and Barry turned him away from the beauty of molecular genetics of trees, and brought him down to their level, the Sewer (from which he is yet to climb).