Congratulations to Port Pirie on being voted South Australia’s Shittest Town for the second year in a row! Pirie will once again represent S.A. in the poll for Australia’s Shittest Town later in the year. Here are the final results:
Port Pirie: 38%
Whyalla: 14%
Port Augusta: 13%
Murray Bridge: 8.5%
Coober Pedy: 8%
Mount Gambier: 8%
Ceduna: 6.5%
Port Lincoln: 4%
Scroll down to revisit our Port Pirie review. We’ve also included a brand new write-up for Yeppoon in Queensland, as well as some recent fan mail and the latest Shit Town Power Rankings.
Don’t miss next week’s newsletter to vote for Western Australia’s Shittest Town! If you know any Sandgropers who’d want in on this vote, get them to sign up at this link: shittownsofaustralia.substack.com/subscribe
Celebrate Port Pirie’s win our ‘Still Shit’ merch (shirts, hoodies, masks, stickers & more), available here.
Shit Town: Yeppoon
Yeppoon couldn’t decide whether it wanted to be a sleepy seaside village or a bustling tourist mecca so it did neither, resulting in a big fat nothing. The town is completely devoid of jobs so its few employed residents are forced to commute 50 minutes to Rockhampton, making it ideal for people who made a sea change so they could enjoy the mind-numbing boredom of living in a comatose coastal carbuncle but also still enjoy the soul-destroying tedium of driving nearly an hour every day to a job they hate. The town is also overrun with silver-haired septuagenarians biding their time until someone lowers a pillow over their face with the comforting lap of the waves on the shore. Anyone who willingly lives in a town that’s a second-rate Rockhampton has clearly given up on life.
Nightlife in Yeppoon consists of getting some Yeppoontang at The Strand Hotel, passing out on the Keppel Kraken or pouring your pension into the pokies at the sailing club. The town’s most popular feature is the Yeppoon Lagoon, up there with such other famous rhyming tourist attractions as the Bangkok Wok and the Innisfail Gaol. Another attraction is Shell World, housing 20,000 shells, which might prove fascinating if you are an old, old lady. Yeppoon is also home to an abandoned Japanese tourist resort that was welcomed to town in the 1980s in true redneck fashion: with a bombing by racist war veterans. There is no affordable accommodation for backpackers, which is okay because no one under 80 wants to go there anyway. All things considered, the Yeppoonese have done an impressive job of turning a spectacular natural location into an all-round awful place.
Throwback: Port Pirie
Sitting (and shitting) on a polluted tidal river replete with lead-poisoned dolphins, the seaside smelter town of Port Pirie possesses all the charm of a soiled man-nappy. Port Pirie is home to the world’s largest lead smelter, an operation so significant that its stack is the highest structure in the state, billowing clouds of toxic fumes like a bogan Eye of Sauron. The smelter employs 10 per cent of the town’s population, making lead manufacturing the second most common job in Port Pirie after ‘unemployed’ at 11 per cent. Another 4 per cent work in animal husbandry, which in South Australia is exactly what it sounds like.
Aside from producing copious amounts of heavy metals, Port Pirie’s smelter also poisons the town’s sea, air and drinking water, resulting in a population of brain-dead lead-heads. This is one possible explanation for the Bridge to Nowhere, a road bridge that leads to a completely empty patch of land for no apparent reason. It also possibly explains Port Pirie’s problem with antisocial behaviour, from the elevated levels of racism and country music to the large lady who famously flashed her K-cups at the Google Street View car. Low-lying Port Pirie proves that you don’t need hills to have hillbillies.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Fan Mail
Shit Town Power Rankings
Townsville, QLD — Man stabbed in his home; woman tasered after threatening cops with hammer; 16-year-old boy charged after allegedly rummaging through cop car; Pakistani national absconds from docked livestock ship; blokes caught rooting in bushes at beach
Perth, WA — 17-year-old girl charged after cops allegedly find $16m worth of heroin in her bedroom closet; recycling plant workers charged after allegedly pocketing $40k cash found in waste
Adelaide, SA — Driver with six-year-expired licence and on bail arrested after running red light in front of cops in crash-damaged homemade convertible
Wattle Grove, NSW — Elderly man suffers severe burns while trying to set his family’s house on fire
Albury, NSW — Gronk leads police on 48-hour, 360km manhunt before ramming two cop cars; arrest after man shot in the face
Rockhampton, QLD — Tavern staff threatened with needle during attempted robbery
Bentleigh, VIC — Armed carjackers thwarted by not knowing how to drive a manual
Wodonga, VIC — Couple caught rooting on side of main road
Yass, NSW — Local IGA cancels chocolate giveaway after being mocked for its hashtag #igayass
Port Pirie, SA — Still shit