Congratulations to Mount Druitt on being voted Shit Suburb of the Year for 2021! Incredibly, Mounty County beat Caboolture by a single vote, in the closest result in Shit Towns of Australia history. Here are the final results:
Mount Druitt, NSW: 25.5%
Caboolture, QLD: 25.5%
Frankston, VIC: 19.5%
Elizabeth, SA: 14.5%
Armadale, WA: 8%
Capital Hill, ACT: 7%
This week we review the Wollongong shitellite of Dapto, revisit the Melbourne shitellite of Geelong, and give you another sneak peek at our new New Zealand travel book (just in case that travel bubble ever reopens). Plus some reader feedback from Werribee, and a massive week for the Shit Town Power Rankings.
Don’t miss next week’s newsletter to vote for Australia’s Shittest Town! If you know anyone who’d want in on this vote, get them to sign up at this link: shittownsofaustralia.substack.com/subscribe
Shit Town: Dapto
Dapto is shit. Wollongong is shit. As the worst part of Wollongong, Dapto is a shit within a shit — a Shitception, if you will. If someone ate a shit and then shat it out again, Dapto would be that second shit. In mathematical terms, shit times shit equals Dapto. It’s the shit in a shit pie if the pastry was also shit.
One of the shittest things about Dapto is the people. Dapto’s dubious denizens include deadshits, deros, drongos, dipshits, drug dealers and dropkicks. The derelict dump competes with Albion Park Rail for the title of Greater Wollongong’s bogan capital, with flannos, trackies and bikie beards adorning every resident (both genders). Dapto is surrounded by suburbs with names like Kanahooker and Whoresley, in reference to the local women. It also features a number of streets that hint at its unsavoury reputation, including Bong Bong Road, Compton Street and Coward Punch Terrace.
Dapto’s premier tourist attractions are the Dapto Dogs, Dapto Traino and Dapto Leagues Club. The greyhound club’s dogs are honed for racing by being released on Bong Bong Road, where they are forced to survive by chasing down and eating pedestrians. The train station was famously the inspiration for animated YouTube duo Damo and Darren, the answer to the question ‘What would happen if Beavis and Butthead were Australian and addicted to crack?’ Another local attraction is Mullet Creek (named after the suburb’s prevalent hairstyle), a popular spot for kids to jump off a bridge and break their legs on a dead cow.
Dapto: It’s Crapto!
From our new book Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip, available to pre-order now.
Throwback: Geelong
Geelong is renowned for having more terrible nicknames than any other city in Australia, including ‘The Pivot’, ‘Sleepy Hollow’, ‘Gateway City’ (due to its proliferation of gateway drugs), ‘The Small Smoke’ and ‘Shit Melbourne’. It’s also known as Victoria’s ‘Number Two City’ because it’s the state’s second-largest, it’s home to the second-oldest Aussie Rules football club, and it’s a big pile of shit. The phrase ‘second place is the first loser’ was invented for Geelong.
Geelong is home to a staggering array of bogans, hicks and rednecks. It has a lively nightlife scene, if by ‘nightlife’ you mean ‘packs of pissed-up drongos rampaging down Moorabool Street’. The suburbs of Corio and Norlane are two of the world’s largest open-air bogan sanctuaries, where visitors can watch yobbos get a Southern Cross tattoo, shoplift a case of VB and spend their Centrelink on meth in their natural habitat. Geelong also features an impressive collection of lead-contaminated water fountains—the city is so bogan that even its bubblers are filled with heavy metal.
Geelong’s status as a cultural wasteland is highlighted by its best attempts at visitor attractions: a wool museum, an abandoned car factory, and an army of truly nightmarish bollard people. The city’s favourite sports team is the Geelong Cats, an AFL club that borrowed its nickname, team song and playing squad from a girls’ under-nines football team.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Holidays: Hobbiton
In the early 2000’s, New Zealand surrendered its collective self-esteem to a punishingly long trilogy of films about a homeless bloke assembling a gang of midgets, a fairy and a gnome to go on a really long walk to hiff some stolen jewellery into an angry volcano. For some inexplicable reason these films became a global phenomenon, and ever since then the country has made a decent living bilking tourists based on the delusion that Aotearoa is actually Middle Earth and that if they visit they might get a tug job from a centaur or something.
A key attraction for Ringholes is Hobbiton, a crucial set in both the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit trilogies, which has the unfortunate situation of being lodged in the Waikato effluent production facility of Matamata. Despite preconceptions, Hobbiton isn’t so much an immersive fantasy land as it is a bunch of house facades stuck to some hills in a cow paddock. Featuring all the ambiance of your local garden centre, Hobbiton gives touring geeks the chance to hand over a small fortune to gawk at a door leading nowhere.
For its part, the town of Matamata has leaned into its role as the home of Hobbiton, and has now banned any residents above the height of five feet to help preserve the illusion that the whole place is overrun by furry-footed midgets.
From our new book Shit Towns of New Zealand: The Great Kiwi Tiki Tour, available to pre-order now.
Fan Mail: Werribee
Shit Town Power Rankings
Wollongong, NSW — Passenger train derails after hitting stolen van abandoned on tracks
Kalgoorlie, WA — Rat-tailed creep breaks into man’s house, sucks him off and gets chased down street by naked victim
Maroochydore, QLD — Gronk bites cop and tries to eat bag of meth before needles fall out his arsehole
Townsville, QLD — Gronk with spear gun fights gronk with sword in middle of road; cops catch alleged serial cafe masturbator; pair of little kids allegedly steal scissor lift; driver throws Zooper Dooper at police
Bourke, NSW — Youths take stolen ambulance for joyride
Ipswich, QLD — 4 hospitalised and man stabbed after car crash descends into mass brawl
Rockhampton, QLD — Gronks brawl with animal bone outside police station
Penrith, NSW — Drunk gronk jumps on cars and clings to moving vehicle at Krispy Kreme
Albany, WA — Graffiti vandal somehow caught after etching his name and date of birth
Port Pirie, SA — Still shit
New Book
Pre-order Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip:
Booktopia (Australia)
Mighty Ape (New Zealand)
Book Depository (worldwide)