Welcome to Sydney, a glittering coastal metropolis that has finally birthed something more substantial than a property bubble: a subterranean leviathan of congealed lard. Beneath the feet of the brunch-obsessed masses in the city’s south-west lies a fatberg the size of four commuter buses. It is a disgusting, calcified tribute to the twin pillars of human progress: corporate negligence and administrative incompetence. While the rest of the world worries about rising sea levels, Sydney is more likely to be drowned in a tidal wave of its own recycled deep-fryer oil.

Sydney Water, an entity that manages to make the act of moving liquid through a pipe look like high-stakes quantum physics, is currently pointing its trembling, grease-stained finger at some 12,000 food businesses. They claim these purveyors of lukewarm chips and overpriced burgers are illegally discharging fats, oils, and grease into the Malabar catchment. It is a shocking revelation for anyone who has never seen a restaurant or understood how gravity works. The agency is shocked—simply shocked—to find that if you stop inspecting businesses and loosen the reporting regime, people might actually do the wrong thing to save a buck.

The year 2017 appears to have been the golden era for the fatberg. That was when the reporting regime was changed and inspections were reduced. In the world of the bureaucrat, a problem you stop looking for effectively ceases to exist. If you don't check the grease traps, the grease traps are theoretically infinite in capacity. It’s the Schrödinger’s Cat of sewage, only the cat is made of rancid bacon fat and wet wipes. For years, the authorities sat in their air-conditioned offices, presumably marveling at how smoothly the system ran when they stopped bothering to check if it was actually working. Now, they are confronted with a four-bus-sized reality check that cannot be filed away in a 'later' tray.

But let us not place the entire burden of our collective disgust on the bureaucrats. The small business owners, those sainted 'backbones of the economy,' are playing their part with a level of sociopathic entitlement that would make a Gilded Age industrialist blush. Their response to the news that they are clogging the city’s arteries? 'If it’s a problem, it’s their problem.' It is a magnificent distillation of the modern social contract. I pay my taxes, therefore I should be allowed to treat the public infrastructure like a trash compactor. Why bother with a grease trap and a licensed waste collector when the taxpayer provides a perfectly good hole in the ground for free? It is the ultimate expression of the 'not my backyard' philosophy, applied to the very pipes that keep the city from smelling like a medieval open sewer.

There are 12,000 of these businesses, apparently. Twelve thousand little factories of coronary heart disease, all pumping their liquid waste into a system that was never designed to handle the sheer volume of our gluttony. As the number of food outlets has surged to meet the demands of a population that has forgotten how to boil an egg, the infrastructure has remained a relic of a more optimistic time. We have the technology to deliver a burrito to your door via a drone, but we lack the collective willpower to ensure that the burrito’s byproduct doesn't eventually form a geological deposit in the bowels of the city.

The fatberg at Malabar is not just a plumbing issue; it is a mirror. It is the physical manifestation of every corner cut, every inspection skipped, and every 'not my job' uttered by a middle manager in a high-vis vest. It is what happens when a society prioritizes the immediate convenience of the individual over the long-term survival of the collective. We are literally building a monument to our own waste, a massive, stinking wall of tallow that will likely outlast the Sydney Opera House. Future archaeologists will find the Malabar Monolith and conclude that we were a people who worshipped lard and were eventually consumed by it.

Sydney Water is now promising more 'engagement' and 'education.' Because surely, what a restaurant owner needs to stop dumping oil is a pamphlet. They don't need a massive fine or a shut-down order; they need a PowerPoint presentation on the viscosity of lipids. It’s the standard institutional response to a crisis: more talk, less action, and a desperate hope that the problem will wash away with the next heavy rain. But the fatberg doesn't wash away. It grows. It hardens. It waits. It is the only thing in this city that is actually growing faster than the cost of living, and frankly, we deserve every cubic meter of it.