Welcome to another edition of the Shit Towns of Australia newsletter.
This week, Facebook’s army of defective RoboCop moderators deleted our Ulverstone review for alleged ‘hate speech’. When jokes about colonoscopies and rooting possums constitute ‘hate speech’ but scammers, racists and peddlers of fake news can operate with impunity, you know that Facebook is fucked. It’s conceivable that one day the Shit Towns of Australia page could go the way of its New Zealand predecessor, deleted without warning or explanation — so it’s a good thing you’re on our mailing list. Make your mates sign up at this link: shittownsofaustralia.substack.com/subscribe
If you missed the Ulverstone review, you can read it in last week’s newsletter here.
Today also sees the opening of the trans-Tasman travel bubble. To mark the occasion, we’ve reviewed New Zealand in this newsletter — and we’ll be sharing more important information about ‘East Australia’ in the coming weeks.
Also in this issue, we’re running a Shit Town Showdown poll to find out Adelaide’s Shittest Suburb, from a shortlist of ten based on your suggestions on Crapbook. The suburb with the most votes will represent South Australia in the poll for Australia’s Shittest Suburb later in the year. Scroll to the end of this email to vote!
Fan Mail: Ulverstone
Shit Country: New Zealand
In many ways, New Zealand is a shit knock-off of Australia. Auckland is New Zealand’s version of Sydney, a heaving shitropolis beset by twin housing and traffic crises and featuring beaches that might be all right if they weren’t covered in cunts. Wellington is New Zealand’s Melbourne, a pretentious hipster haven full of cafes, craft breweries and wankers. Christchurch is known for its churches, dull grid layout and sky-high murder rate, making it New Zealand’s version of Adelaide but with way more earthquakes. The incest hotbed of Southland is Tasmania if it managed to attach itself to the mainland.
Other lowlights include the tourism and crime mecca of Rotorua, famous for hot mud and STDs. The southern ripoffolis of Queenstown has become the exclusive domain of Silicon Valley squillionaires building doomsday bunkers in anticipation of a nuclear apocalypse and lousy with European backpackers shitting on the pavement. Several centres including Waiheke Island and Coromandel battle it out for the title of New Zealand’s Byron Bay, where grubby hippies who call themselves ‘artists’ because they don’t have a job live incongruously amongst garish billion-dollar holiday homes. In between is an endless parade of miserable villages where ‘fashion’, ‘cuisine’ and ‘romance’ all centre around sheep.
New Zealand’s two national obsessions are homoerotic ball sports and a tedious film series about medieval midgets, both of which are celebrated to a painful degree. Another favourite hobby is promoting New Zealand’s ‘clean, green’ environment while simultaneously pumping fuckloads of cow shit and chemicals into its rivers. Kiwis are fiercely proud of their country — enough to wank on about its dubious merits to anyone in earshot — but not quite enough to stop them all moving to Queensland. All things considered, New Zealand is undoubtedly one of the worst parts of Australia.
For more information about New Zealand, see our Shit Towns of New Zealand books, available in stores and online.
Throwback: Adelaide
Adelaide is known as the ‘City of Churches, Pubs and Serial Killers’. The city’s roll of gory crimes includes a series of gruesome murders committed by a shadowy cabal of paedophiles, a series of gruesome murders committed by a bunch of drongos on the dole, and Jimmy Barnes’s musical career. Despite its delusions of cityhood, South Australia’s capital is essentially an overgrown country town complete with high unemployment, shit public transport, shops only opening for a few hours per weekday, undrinkable drinking water, rampant racism and an almost Tasmanian level of cousin-fucking. Adelaide is populated by an array of junkies, thugs and gronks, as any Adelaideans resembling normal humans waste no time in moving to Melbourne or Sydney.
Adelaide is a favourite spot for the federal government to house its expensive fuck-ups, including a submarine fleet that had difficulty submerging and an expensive desalination plant that does fuck-all. The city’s most cherished invention is the Hills hoist, which is a type of clothesline that was originally dreamed up as a mechanism for tanning the hides of flayed hitchhikers. Farmers Union Iced Coffee is considered a local delicacy and has been known to outsell Coca-Cola in Adelaide, despite the fact that it tastes like an ashtray full of Nescafé.
Adelaide Zoo is proudly home to Australia’s only pandas. This pride is somewhat mitigated by the fact that in true South Australian fashion the pandas refuse to mate, dedicating their days to the standard Adelaide pursuits of getting on the goon and going late-night shopping at Westfield Marion. Another hot shopping spot is Rundle Mall, a classy establishment adorned with statues of pigs rummaging through bins and a pair of giant gonads known as ‘the Mall’s Balls’.
Very few tourists ever visit Adelaide intentionally, with the largest number of visitors citing ‘got shitfaced on a stag and my mates thought it would be funny to put me on a plane’ as their reason for travelling.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Homebush, NSW — Two teens suffer knife wounds in Easter Show brawl
Launceston, TAS — Spate of random shootings
Alice Springs, NT — Gang of kids reportedly rob sleeping hospital patients; 14-year-old girl gets uncle’s car impounded after doing burnouts and leading cops on car chase
Cairns, QLD — Gronk allegedly caught driving stolen scissor lifts through the streets two nights in a row
Hervey Bay, QLD — Naked pest caught jerkin’ the gherkin in Macca’s car park
Townsville, QLD — Gang of youths smash windows at Macca’s; teen tackled by staff after running amok with fryer scoop at different Macca’s
Darwin, NT — Naked gronk with pickaxe wanders around busy shopping centre
Seymour, VIC — Man sentenced to two days’ jail after stealing roast chicken and milk because supermarket staff told him to leave for smoking in store
Woolloomooloo, NSW — Furore over sexy twerking dancers at naval ship launch
Ulverstone, TAS — Still shit
Vote: Adelaide’s Shittest Suburb
Click/tap on a suburb’s name below to vote.
Notes: Voting closes Monday 26/4; winner announced Tuesday 27/4. Only your first vote is recorded, so don’t fuck it up.
What is Adelaide’s Shittest Suburb?