Welcome again to the official Shit Towns of Australia newsletter.
This week’s Shit Town Showdown poll is for Tasmania’s Shittest Town. With the help of your suggestions on our Facebook page, we’ve shortlisted ten Tasmanian turd pits for the title. The town with the most votes will join Tennant Creek and the other state/territory winners(/losers) in the poll for Australia’s Shittest Town later in the year. Scroll to the end of this email to vote!
Next week’s newsletter will be on Tuesday due to Easter — we’ll reveal Tasmania’s Shittest Town and review Geraldton, WA.
If you have mates who are keen to vote in future polls or stay up-to-date with all our content, get them to subscribe at this link: shittownsofaustralia.substack.com/subscribe
Throwback: Hobart
Founded as a human shit pit for Britain’s surplus riffraff, Hobart soon grew into a town after becoming a major centre for the murder of endangered sea creatures. Today, Tasmania’s capital is populated by 200,000 seal clubbers, ‘chiggers’ (bogans, but more inbred) and pseudo-hipsters who think they’re cosmopolitan because they live in their island’s biggest city even though they have never left Tasmania. The main industries in Hobart are freeloading off the mainland, poisoning the water with zinc, clear-felling primeval rainforests, whinging about mainlanders, and crying about not having an AFL team.
Hobart’s proudest feature is its historic buildings, built using convict slave labour. The main tourist attraction is the Museum of Old and New Art, which is lucky because most Tasmanians can’t read. Another feature is the ruins of the Hobart Zoo, complete with suicidal-looking cartoon animals adorning its dilapidated gate. For unknown reasons, fleets of norovirus-afflicted cruise ships choose to dock in Hobart for the saddest stop of their journey.
Hobart is a ‘fusion city’, in that it marries big city problems with small town facilities. Despite being completely shit, it’s the only place in Tasmania with any jobs and has thus been inundated by hordes of Tasmaniacs, causing a rental crisis that has forced despos to live in tents at the showgrounds. ‘Slowbart’ also has a horrendous traffic problem, with no public transport beyond buses and somehow more cars than people. The turd-filled Derwent River is massively polluted by heavy metals from the zinc works, meaning it’s unsafe to eat certain fish. Zinc leaching has also contaminated the groundwater, making homegrown vegetables poisonous in some suburbs, disproving the claim by millions of mums that broccoli can’t hurt you. Clearly, the only good thing to do in the toxic joint is leave.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Townsville, QLD - Man stabbed by group of thugs outside shopping centre; man bitten in nightclub while trying to break up fight; man set on fire by mad gronk
Stuarts Point, NSW - Poonami alert: homes evacuated after yards and streets flooded by torrent of turds
St Clair, NSW - Grub charged after wanking outside neighbour’s window; gronk bites off man’s finger and earlobe at wake
Brisbane, QLD - Mad kid attacks old man with axe outside supermarket
Albury, NSW - Four arrested after brawl ends in woman throwing shoes at police
Rockhampton, QLD - Comedian punched in face during live show
Shepparton, VIC - Drunk driver steals electronic road sign trailer, crashes into other road signs, drives up embankment and gets bogged
Darwin, NT - Vandals trash school
Logan, QLD - Teens film themselves running amok in closed IKEA
Port Pirie, SA - Still shit
Fan Mail: Burnie
Some of our favourite Facebook comments from our Burnie review:
And one from our inbox:
Vote: Tasmania’s Shittest Town
Click/tap on a town’s name below to vote.
Notes: Voting closes Monday 5/4; winner announced Tuesday 6/4. Only your first vote is recorded, so don’t fuck it up. In this competition, the ‘town’ category is for towns, cities or satellite suburbs with a population of between 1000 and 100,000 — so Zeehan is too small and Hobart is too big. Instead, Hobart gets a free pass directly to the national finals in the Shitty City category, coming later this year.
What is Tasmania’s Shittest Town?
Love your cynical and witty views on Straya’s best (worst) bogan farms. Why was Snowtown not included in SA though? Remember they made a movie about how fucked up that place was. Surely Rockingham WA will win the biggest shithole in Straya though. I lived there for twenty years it will certainly get my vote.
Do some research on Black Bob's near Hobart.