Welcome again to the Shit Towns of Australia newsletter.
This week, we’re running a poll to find the shittest town in New South Wales, and it’s our longest shortlist yet with a whopping 40 crapholes to pick from. Note that larger shit pits like Sydney, Newcastle and Wollongong will instead feature in the city category, coming up next. Scroll to the end of this email to vote!
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Pre-order Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip:
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Shit Town: Ballina
Ballina boasts that it’s the gateway to Byron Bay—or in other words, an ideal spot to pick up some bongos and measles en route to a dirty hippie fuck-fest disguised as a surf camp, yoga retreat or cult meeting. The Northern Rivers shitter is the site of the Ballina Byron Gateway Airport—the ‘Byron Gateway’ bit was added to the name in 2005 in a bid to trick more people into visiting Ballina. Unfortunately for Ballina, it only encouraged throngs of tourists to fly into the airport before fucking off to Byron as quickly as possible. Fortunately for Ballina, most of the people flying in and fucking off are pseudo-hippy boofheads and aspiring social media influencers anyway.
In contrast to the OnlyFans content creators passing through, Ballina’s resident population has an average age of about 100, thanks to old people’s irresistible attraction to sand. Common local activities include losing your teeth at the beach, getting into a road-rage incident on your mobility scooter, and having a heart attack while yelling at some young people.
Ballina’s premier landmark is the Big Prawn, one of Australia’s most butt-ugly Big Things. There’s a good reason why prawns are small: so people don’t have to be confronted by their creepy features at full size—until now. Plonked unceremoniously in the car park of Ballina Bunnings, the gargantuan fibreglass and concrete crustacean is enough to put any home handyman off their Sunday sausage sizzle.
From our new book Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip, available to pre-order now.
Throwback: Byron Bay
Renowned as Australia's easternmost point, Byron Bay is also the country’s biggest dickhead magnet. Every type of fuckwit under the sun gravitates to Byron: smelly hippies spilling out of their housevans, tattooed surfers fighting each other for territory, barefoot bogans fighting each other for fun, cashed-up boomers flittering between overpriced organic cafes and bullshit galleries, and overseas millionaires buying up the entire town for holiday homes. It’s the sort of place that corporate shills on their second divorce fantasise about moving to so they can open a yoga retreat and root a dreadlocked barista on the beach. Byron Bay is Disneyland for dropouts, or the Gold Coast for people who prefer their Meter Maids to have hairy pits.
Overrun by tourists and littered with their half-eaten takeaways and used condoms, the only people who actually live in Byron Bay are pretentious trustafarians who turned up for Splendour in the Grass and forgot to fuck off home after the mushies wore off. These private school plastic hippies use their old man’s money to live the ‘Byron dream’ and subsidise their supposed ‘free spirit lifestyle’, which actually consists of wearing cheap jewellery they bought in Bali while complaining about other fake hippies, catching herpes from German backpackers and generally doing large amounts of serious fuck-all. Byron Bay gained national notoriety for rejecting fast food giants McDonald’s and KFC under the pretence that junk food didn’t fit with the ‘Byron lifestyle’—maybe if Macca’s started serving kombucha and lentils and giving away hacky sacks in their Happy Meals it might have got the Byron seal of approval.
Byron Bay is known for its nightlife, which consists of drunken drongos and schoolies smashing each other’s teeth out and projectile vomiting at passers-by. It’s also a prime spot for spotting whales, which is why Byronites were still slaughtering humpbacks as recently as the 1960s. A popular feature is the Cape Byron Lighthouse, which serves the vital purpose of warning passing seafarers away from the complete wankeropolis of Byron Bay. We suggest you heed its warning.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Port Pirie, SA — Smelter fined $35k for toxic acid spill; kids’ blood lead levels rise again to decade high
Devonport, TAS — Four thugs break into house, stab occupant and steal ute
Mildura, VIC — Everyone has syphilis
Rydalmere, NSW — Brothel fined after allegedly operating during lockdown
Hervey Bay, QLD — Woman mows down man in her car after claiming she won his house in a raffle
Townsville, QLD — Pervert pinged for filming his mates in the shower
Dural, NSW — Bad grandpa accused of dealing meth, LSD and weed from retirement home
Alice Springs, NT — Kid breaks into quarantine facility, steals resident’s wallet
Mount Gambier, SA — Gronk jailed after fleeing cops in stolen KFC delivery car
Bourke, NSW — Still shit
Fan Mail: Fortitude Valley
Vote: NSW’s Shittest Town
Click/tap on a town’s name below to vote. Voting closes and winner announced Monday 13/9. Only your first vote is recorded, so don’t fuck it up.
What is NSW’s Shittest Town?