Congratulations to Byron Bay on being voted Shit Town of the Year for 2021! The win marks a stunning double success for New South Wales, after Mount Druitt took out the suburb category. Here are the final results:
Byron Bay, NSW: 30%
Caboolture, QLD: 18.5%
Port Pirie, SA: 18% but still shit
Tennant Creek, NT: 12.5%
Moe, VIC: 12%
Kalgoorlie, WA: 5%
Queenstown, TAS: 4%
Check out our Byron Bay write-up here (hit the link and scroll down).
In this week’s newsletter: a brand new write-up for Campbelltown, a throwback to Wagga Wagga (the blazing turd of the southern universe), another sneak peak at our new New Zealand travel book, and a small selection of the bogan butthurt that flowed forth on Facebook following our Melbourne Cup review.
Don’t miss next week’s newsletter to vote for Australia’s Shittest City! 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: Campbelltown
Campbelltown is fully sick. Fully sick in that everyone there has type 2 diabetes, gout or hepatitis C. Campbelltonians have their residency revoked if they fail to register at least three positives in an STI test.
A Sydney satellite that wasn’t flung far enough, the City of Campbelltown exists mainly as a place for Greater Sydney to store its most embarrassing residents out of sight of polite company. Common hobbies of Campbelltonians include hanging ciggies out of the gap where their front teeth used to be, begging for change at the station for a train they have no intention of catching, and slipping their electronic ankle bracelets to go and burn down a pub.
Among Campbelltown’s worst suburbs is Airds, which has a primary school and a high school conveniently located next to a juvenile detention centre, allowing for a seamless transition. The high school is Australia’s only one with its own birthing unit, methadone clinic and parole office. Airds was named after Governor Lachlan Macquarie’s wife, Elizabeth, who had AIDS.
The biggest event on the Campbelltown calendar is the Festival of Fisher’s Ghost, when the hometown of serial killers Ivan Milat and Paula Denyer celebrates the murder of a local farmer by sacrificing a virgin to Satan. The arduous task of actually finding a virgin in Campbelltown begins the day after the festival and usually takes the entire year.
From our new book Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip, available to pre-order now.
Throwback: Wagga Wagga
Originally settled by illegal squatters, Wagga Wagga owes its continued existence to being a convenient piss stop on the deceptively named ‘scenic route’ between Sydney and Melbourne. The city’s features include being built in a big hole, salty soil that won’t grow a thing, a river that’s filthy when it enters town and even filthier when it exits, and a silty riverbank that locals refer to as a ‘beach’. Wagga Waggans are obsessed with the ‘five o’clock wave’, a batshit local legend that at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. each day a giant wave flushes a secret nutrient into the Murrumbidgee River which makes all the locals good at sports. By the looks of the river, the secret nutrient is diarrhoea.
Wagga Wagga is a keen sports town, if you count stealing and burning cars as a sport. Other local interests include drunkenly choking down a greasy kebab from JD’s, trying to root a roomful of barely legal students at Rom’s, and racism. It’s appropriate that ‘Wagga Wagga’ sounds like Fozzie Bear’s catchphrase, considering the place is full of muppets.
Desperate to shed its accurate reputation as a crime-riddled cesspit and encourage tourists to come and see its world-class array of abandoned warehouses, Wagga Wagga has co-opted the slogan ‘So Nice They Named it Twice’. However, this slogan loses weight when you consider that it could equally apply to shitholes like Woy Woy, Kurri Kurri or Albury-Wodonga. A more accurate version would be ‘So Much Ice They Named it Twice’.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Holidays: Hot Water Beach
Coromandel’s imaginatively named Hot Water Beach is, as you might imagine, a beach with hot water. In fact, the name is somewhat of a misnomer — the seawater isn’t actually any hotter than at a usual beach but due to a geothermal feature, around low tide it is possible to dig a hole and sit in it as it fills with vaguely warm sludge.
Few people have sat on Copacabana and thought ‘This is great but you know what would be better? If I could dig a big hole and sit in lukewarm water the temperature of that cup of tea I forgot about’. Yet Hot Water Beach is inexplicably popular with international and domestic tourists alike, which means on any given day it’ll be jam-packed with half-naked strangers just itching to share your pube-riddled paddling pool.
Hot Water Beach is billed as a ‘unique experience’, although being nailed to a donkey and flung out of a catapult could also be described as a ‘unique experience’. What the brochures don’t mention is that you will probably spend the better part of a day digging a hole big enough to bury a camel, but the time high tide rolls around it will only have filled with enough water to barely reach your ankles. It would actually be bad enough to suggest the whole thing were an elaborate practical joke if the local economy didn’t rely on a lucrative spade rental business.
Hot Water Beach is also known for its fierce surf, so if furiously digging a hole with your bare hands like a rodent on meth isn’t your idea of a good time, then getting sucked out to sea by a deceptively savage rip is also an option.
From our new book Shit Towns of New Zealand: The Great Kiwi Tiki Tour, available now.
Fan Mail: Melbourne Cup
Shit Town Power Rankings
Adelaide, SA — Siblings jailed after kidnapping, stripping, stabbing and force-feeding dog food and dirty bong water to vibrator thief; gronk arrested after crashing car before trying to set fire to fire truck; man bashed with breakfast bowl outside suspicious house fire
Perth, WA — 13- and 14-year-old girls charged with attempted murder after stabbing their teacher; anti-vax tradie accused of trying to firebomb cop shop with Molotov cocktail
Townsville, QLD — Woman’s lip cut off in horrific attack; hundreds of shitty nappies found dumped in environmental reserve
Inala, QLD — Woman charged with attempted murder after allegedly mowing down fences while chasing cyclist in 4WD, victim’s bike stolen during ordeal
Hawthorn, VIC — Drunk MP crashes car into family’s home
Geelong, VIC — Thieves steal 7-metre in-ground swimming pool
Sydney, NSW — Motorcyclist faces $77,000 in fines after cops allegedly find evidence of dozens of driving offences on his camera
Kalgoorlie, WA — Bloke fined after walking through Macca’s drive-thru in Halloween mask while holding homemade bong and pair of scissors
Boronia, VIC — Police seek blokes dressed as French maid and Queen of Hearts over theft of cop uniform
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)