Congratulations to Capital Hill on being voted the ACT’s Shittest Suburb for 2021! Parliament’s postcode beat a strong field of Canberra crappers to take out the title, in an apparent rebuke of all the wankers who work there. The bullshit pretend suburb will represent its bullshit pretend territory in the poll for Australia’s Shittest Suburb later in the year. A dishonourable mention to Charnwood for being voted the worst of the inhabited suburbs. Here are the final results:
Capital Hill: 23%
Charnwood: 17%
Gungahlin: 12%
Oaks Estate: 11%
Kambah: 8%
Coombs: 5%
Bonner: 5%
Calwell: 4%
Moncrieff: 4%
Richardson: 4%
Wright: 4%
Page: 3%
Don’t miss next week’s newsletter to vote for Tasmania’s Shittest Town! If you know any Tasmaniacs who’d want in on this vote, get them to sign up with both their heads at this link: shittownsofaustralia.substack.com/subscribe
Shit Town: Burnie
Once home to a paper mill, a paint factory and an acid plant, the Tasmanian turd pit Burnie was for many years Australia’s most polluted city, famous for its obnoxious odour and stained red sea. In fact, it was such a polluted hellhole that it inspired a Midnight Oil song, putting it in such illustrious company as the asbestos wasteland of Wittenoom and the nuclear nightmare of Maralinga. Fortunately, Burnie’s belching plants have since closed, taking with them the majority of the town’s jobs. Nevertheless, Burnie lingers like that stubborn nugget that refuses to flush, and remains a major exporter of woodchips and bogans.
One of Burnie’s greatest achievements was somehow tricking cruise ships into docking there for the most disappointing stop of their tour. In Burnie it rains for approximately 26 hours per day, and is so cold that thousands of sheep imported by settlers in the 1820s promptly froze to death. Local sights are limited to an unsightly port and a boring boardwalk along a rugged, penguin-infested coast. It’s essentially Queenstown without the rustic charm. Strangely, it is impossible to find a parking space in Burnie even though all of the shops are boarded up.
There is no nightlife or normal entertainment in Burnie — as locals will tell you, the only thing to do there is your cousin. Residents thus resort to the traditional Tasmanian pastimes of incest, cannibalism and doing burnouts while high on ice. Burnians are also known for their rampant homophobia - if you want to root a relative, you’d better make damn sure they’re a different gender.
Burnie: Not Worth the Journey!
Throwback: Canberra
Existing solely as a last resort capital compromise between Sydney and Melbourne, Canberra somehow manages to be Australia’s smut capital and most boring city at the same time. It’s known for being the country’s only ‘planned’ city, with the unfortunate consequence that its neatly ordered streets and sprawling suburbs that stretch halfway to Sydney have rendered the nation’s capital an antiseptic bore with all the charm of a failed Soviet state.
The planned city received a whole slew of idiotic proposed names that somehow made ‘Canberra’ seem like a good option, including Home, Austral, Andy Man, Unison and Frazer Roo. One joker even proposed the horrific portmanteau Sydmeladperho, a name so massively shithouse it might have actually been able to accurately reflect Canberra's shitness. Instead, the powers-that-were plumped for Canberra, a name derived from the Aboriginal ‘Nganbara’ meaning ‘boobs’, an appropriate nod to its sleazy reputation.
Populated entirely by overpaid and underworked bureaucrats, parasitic scandal-embroiled politicians, ex-prime ministers, soon-to-be ex-prime ministers, sweaty porn barons, Chinese spies and kangaroos, Canberra is a town that celebrates flagrant corruption, rampant nepotism and beige blandness. The boring burg is renowned for revelling in the sort of culture that people only pretend to like so they can root uni students. The most prominent attractions are snooze-inducing dusty museums and stuffy art galleries, great fun for pseudo-intellectual dryballs (of which Canberra has an abundance) and punishment for everyone else. Canberra’s lack of nightlife means they are only able to attract rugby league players who aren’t interested in hanging out with outlaw bikie gangs or getting into public brawls, which is probably why they haven’t won a comp since 1994.
There are only three reasons to visit Canberra: for a mandatory school trip, to roll the prime minister, or on a nefarious mish to Fyshwick. Originally built as a concentration camp for German prisoners in 1918, the eerily uninhabited suburb of Fyshwick is a great place to buy a used car to do a drive-by, a shipment of no-longer-legal fireworks or a bale of hardcore pornography. Fyshwick was Australia’s undisputed porn mecca in the days before the internet or personal defoliation, which is why Canberra is known as the ‘Bush Capital’. The sordid suburb is also home to a shopping centre called COC, appropriately located on Iron Knob Street. Fyshwick’s influence is evident throughout the city: Belconnen proudly hosts an infamous penis-shaped owl sculpture, while Canberra celebrated its centenary in 2013 by commissioning a giant hot air balloon covered in tits.
Canberra: Pyongyang in the Bush.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Perth, WA — Bungling burglars jump through closed window, suffer severe facial injuries and get arrested after cops follow trail of blood; grub charged after allegedly breaking into multiple cars and smearing shit and piss on the interiors
Melbourne, VIC — Nine people stabbed at wild party
Mount Gambier, SA — SUV driver fined after letting 2-year-old steer
Cairns, QLD — Grubby woman charged after allegedly making pet dog lick peanut butter from her genitals
Shalvey, NSW — Uniformed school girls and grown woman brawl outside shopping centre
Townsville, QLD — Pair of gronks sit on couch in middle of busy intersection drinking and flashing traffic
Mount Isa, QLD — Idiot girls live-stream themselves stealing ute
Shepparton, VIC — Woman flashes gash after being caught trying to steal bourbon; school locked down over gel blaster
Adelaide, SA — Mum calls cops on son doing drunken burnout
Port Pirie, SA — Cops reportedly confiscate Aboriginal kid’s own bike and appeal for ‘rightful owner’ to come forward; still shit