Welcome to the turd edition of the official Shit Towns of Australia newsletter.
We’ve got all your favourite segments this week including a brand new shit town review, this week’s shit town power rankings, and the best of the week’s Facebook feedback from the lovely folks of Port Lincoln.
This week we’ve also decided to let our newsletter readers pick the next town for us to review. It’s a shit town showdown between Queensland crapholes Emerald and Roma. Scroll to the bottom to vote!
Shit Town: Horsham
Horsham’s greatest cultural contribution is the ‘florrie’, a flat, crumbed piece of horse steak wrapped around a slice of ham and drowned in gravy. This innovative combination of horse and ham is actually how Horsham got its name. Coincidentally, Horsham is also Old English for ‘whores’ home’, an unkind yet not entirely inaccurate label.
Aside from florries and dicks, Horshamites’ favourite thing to shove in their gobs is crack pipes. In fact, the city’s Second Amendment guarantees all of its citizens the right to carry a crystal pistol at all times. The only people in Horsham not munted on meth are those who are both underage and pregnant, who take it easy by sticking to binge drinking.
Horsham is a hub of intellectual pursuits like gossip, bigotry and fighting with baseball bats. Its most educated residents are young women with diplomas in hairdressing, who harbour lofty dreams of moving to somewhere fancier like Shepparton and making it on OnlyFans. These ambitious overachievers are the exception, however — most Horshamers are just happy if their welfare cheque covers their ice bill.
The town was once visited by literary icon Mark Twain, who was left with an abiding impression of its overwhelming flatness. Unfortunately, Twain wasn’t referring to the terrain but rather the locals’ pronounced lack of cleavage — Horsham is notorious for its flat-chested floozies (which sadly has a serious impact on those aforementioned OnlyFans dreams).
Nearby Dadswells Bridge is home to the Giant Koala, a gigantic red-eyed, hairy-eared replica of the only creature with more chlamydia than a local youth. The Giant Koala is the perfect mascot for the area — awkward, disfigured and looking like it’s been up for three days straight on a JobSeeker-funded meth binge.
Throwback: Port Augusta
Port Augusta is known as a working-class town, which is ironic because no one there has a job. The city has been redundant since its port ceased to operate in 1973, making half of its name a lie. Attempts to resuscitate ‘Portagutter’ by kickstarting a new economy predicated on polluting the atmosphere with copious amounts of carbon ended with the closure of all of its coal-fired power plants in the last decade. Now little more than a blight on the South Australian desert landscape, Port Augusta exists purely so people can confuse it with Port Pirie and Port Lincoln.
Port Augusta’s most famous feature is its putrid stench, courtesy of a dried-up tyre-filled mud puddle called Bird Lake, which makes the entire city smell almost as bad as its residents. The place is cursed with a punishing climate that sees the mercury push 50 degrees, forcing feral locals to cool off in the flooded rubbish tip known as the Spencer Gulf. Five hundred algae-encrusted shopping trolleys were recently fished up from waters near the wharf to prevent jumpers from landing on them, but a sizeable trolley reef remains.
Aside from a derelict disused port, Port Disgusta boasts a world-class collection of abandoned buildings, towering razor-wire-tipped fences, beaches with more broken glass than sand, and patches of dirt in lieu of lawns. It’s also home to the Australian Arid Lands Botanic Garden, which showcases all of the nothing that grows in the outback. A former hit with overseas visitors was the now-closed Baxter Detention Centre, which attracted tourists from all over Southeast Asia and the Middle East and must have been incredible because most visitors stayed for years.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Claymore, NSW - Mad bitches charged with kidnapping after woman’s hand seen waving from hole in car boot
Ballarat, VIC - Pregnant mother of 6 bites woman’s ear off
Adelaide, SA - Dickhead beats up woman in middle of bubble tea store; gronk arrested after threatening people with samurai sword
Gold Coast, QLD - Arsonist sets himself on fire while torching brothel
Caboolture, QLD - Gronk caught hiding 15cm knife between his arse cheeks
Townsville, QLD - Stolen car ploughs through middle of soccer game
Torquay, VIC - Vandals burn down playground
Leeton, NSW - Dickheads ram-raid Soldiers Club, steal nothing
Geelong, VIC - Teen gets trapped in sand after digging big hole
Port Pirie, SA - Still shit
Fan Mail: Port Lincoln
Vote for the Next Shit Town
Which shit town should we review next: Emerald or Roma?
Note: only your first vote will be recorded, so don’t bother mashing that mouse button to a plasticky pulp. Voting closes Sunday 14 Feb.
So fxxxxx funny,thank you gave me the best laugh I've had in ages
Emerald