From dusty desert sh*tholes to free-range bogan breeding grounds, to the bin-chicken playgrounds of our megacities, Sh*t Towns of Australia is a guide to the concrete, fibro and methamphetamine wastelands that we like to call home.
From Coober Pedy to Canberra, from Ballarat to Broken Hill, from Logan to Launceston, Sh*t Towns takes us through the veritable f*ck-tonne of crappy towns and cities that make up the 'Lucky Country' - profiling all the best places not to visit or, heaven forbid, live.
The sixty towns and cities reviewed in this volume have been carefully selected using an exacting set of scientific criteria developed at the prestigious University of Nimbin, combined with extensive field research, a desire to offend, and where possible a sense of humour."
And that's just the blurb on the back of this little book by Rick Furphy and Geoff Rissole, two of Australasia's leading self-appointed experts on sociology, travel and culture. Below it is DYMOCKS' price sticker of $19.99 which I didn't have to pay as I got it for a mere gold coin from the local op-shop. I'm only including it in this blog so that I can quote the description of Cairns to which a friend relocated some years ago:
Cairns was inexplicably built on a swamp in uninhabitable Far North Queensland, making it a sweltering shitbox with a million per cent humidity year-round. The city experiences two seasons: the wet season, featuring an unrelenting torrent of rain and tropical cyclones, and the even wetter season. Temperatures range from far too hot to face-melting. Even taking a dip won't cool you off as the water is frequently warm enough to boil a baby. Nevertheless, the punishing heat forces many poor bastards to brave the water, presenting them with the choice of cavorting with crocs and box jellyfish in the sea or paddling between toddler turds and blobs of backpacker jizz in 'The Lagoon'.
Despite featuring a climate unsuitable for human life, Cairns has managed to leverage its proximity to the bleached remains of the Great Barrier Reef into a thriving international tourism industry, which means the town is now lousy with heat-stricken backpackers rooting in public, fighting in the street and getting high from Gatorade bottle bongs. Other popular tourist activities include being the victim of car theft, getting mauled by psychotic cassowaries and being left stranded in the middle of the ocean by a Great Barrier Reef dive tour. Cairns's most iconic landmark is a humungous statue of Captain Cook giving a Nazi salute in a nod to Australia's race relations record.
The town's slogan is 'We Don't Know How to Pronounce it Either!'"
I won't even quote what this little book says about Mooroobool! For that you have to buy the book yourself. Unfortunately, Cairns being such a sh*tty town, the nearest DYMOCKS store is 1,400 km away in Bundaberg.
P.S. After standing erect for fifty years, the controversial Captain Cook statue was removed from Cairns' main street and sold for a token $1. Calls to remove the statue gained prominence in 2020 as the Black Lives Matter movement led to a removal of statues commemorating colonial figures around the world. A petition by First Nations artist Emma Hollingsworth - who??? - describing it as "a slap in the face to all Indigenous people. Since 1972, the James Cook statue on Sheridan Street has stood as a symbol of colonialism and genocide", she wrote, to which member for Leichhardt, Warren Entsch, replied, "Let’s get rid of the pyramids and all this other stuff. That’s the same sort of nonsense that we’re talking about here." For once I agree with a politician!
