Welcome to another issue of the Shit Towns of Australia newsletter.
In case you missed it, last week Townsville was named Australia’s Shit Town of the Year based on your votes. We’re now running an equivalent poll for New Zealand — vote here.
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P.S. Shit Towns books make great Christmas gifts for grumpy grinches everywhere — find them in all good book stores (and some shit ones) or grab them online here.
Shit Town: Ballarat
Founded during the gold rush, Ballarat began life as a ramshackle shanty town populated by thousands of grubby diggers. Around 150 years later it has completely transformed into a ramshackle city populated by thousands of grubby housos.
In its early days, Ballarat earned the moniker ‘the Golden City’ due to locals’ fondness for golden showers, while residents also referred to it as ‘the Athens of Australia’ due to their predilection for anal sex. The deviance continues to this day with the city lending its name to the ‘Ballarat cravat’, a euphemism for the popular Ballarat activity of shotgunning a blast of diarrhoea all over another person’s neck.
Ballarat is perhaps best known for the Eureka Rebellion, when a bunch of gold-grabbers took up arms against the government because they couldn’t be fucked paying tax. Ironically, these violent immigrants who refused to assimilate are now lauded as heroes by rednecks across the country, with the Eureka flag enduring as Australia’s second-favourite white supremacist icon after the Southern Cross tattoo.
Ballarat’s proudest feature is Lake Wendouree which half the time has no water in it, making it more of a hole than a lake. Wendouree was originally called Black Swamp before being renamed after an Aboriginal word meaning ‘go away’.
When it’s not baking hot enough to evaporate a lake, Ballarat defaults to freezing cold. It’s also known for its poor air quality, being smoky as a bogan’s breath in winter and dustier than your mum’s muff in summer, ensuring it is a truly terrible place to visit at any time of year.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia, available in stores and online.
Shit Town: Ararat
Originally a gold rush town, Ararat has reinvented itself as a thriving dumping ground for the socially unacceptable. There are three types of people there: fatties, perverts and nutjobs—although these groups are by no means mutually exclusive.
The main reason ‘Ararat’ was chosen as the town’s name is that it’s the easiest word to pronounce with a mouth full of KFC. Araratbags’ reputation as gluttonous chubsters is so renowned that the producers of The Biggest Loser wisely chose to film there in 2014. It’s no wonder the salad-dodger city is widely known as ‘Arafat’.
Ararat is also inextricably linked with wankers, diddlers and other sex pests. In a remarkable display of foresight by its founders, the town’s name can be typed using only the left hand, which is handy as people from Ararat are invariably using their right one to furiously masturbate whenever they are anywhere near a computer. ‘Analrat’ even hosts Victoria’s premier paedo prison, the Hopkins Erectional Correctional Centre.
‘Ararat’ also happens to sound like someone with a brain injury trying to say ‘Ballarat’, which is apt as it’s also famous for its mental health facilities. The city formerly hosted the Aradale Mental Hospital and J Ward, a ‘lunatic asylum for the criminally insane’. Both institutions closed in the 1990s, with their inmates released to blend seamlessly into the local community. Incredibly, Aradale was the site of a reported 13,000 deaths in its 130-year history. It is now used for ghost tours, with common reports of visitors fainting, feelings of nausea and disturbing smells, although these complaints are also common among visitors to anywhere in Ararat.
From our book Shit Towns of Australia: The Great Aussie Road Trip, out now in stores and online.
Shit Town Power Rankings
Mandurah, WA — Woman allegedly attacks mourners with machete after being kicked out of wake at pub; pest puts live crabs in letter boxes
Albany, WA — Grub jailed for throwing cups of poo on 2 different cops
Bondi, NSW — YouTuber’s house firebombed
Adelaide, SA — Gronkess T-bones car while on meth, flees scene, returns and flees again in stolen car while victims still trapped in wreckage; GnR fan injured after Axl Rose hiffs microphone into crowd
Melbourne, VIC — Funeral director accused of nicking clothes and jewellery from corpse; homicidal cockatoo chucks pot plants off apartment balcony
Alice Springs, NT — 4 kids under 12 hospitalised after crashing stolen car while racing quad bike
Byron Bay, NSW — 3m python drags 5-year-old boy into pool
Townsville, QLD — Nurse accused of stealing $700k from disabled brother’s super; gronk busted drink-driving car with 3 wheels
Collinsville, QLD — Brand new bridge washed away by light rain
Port Macquarie, NSW — Christmas ruined after council erects sloppy mess of a tree
You have it all wrong, about Lake Wendouree. It will never be empty again. They have a constant supply of primarily treated sewage water going in there now. 24/7. The phosphates, and other 'nutrients', in this effluent, have now made the job of keeping the lake weed under control absolutely impossible. The late Neville Greenbank, had one weed harvester on the lake back when, and kept things under control. Now the council have three, and not a chance of keeping a grip on it. Plus this brilliant bunch of losers in the council here, want to completely destroy the lake by putting up hundreds of lights, big fucking towers, all around the lake. And it's all going to be done by a mob from fucking Bendigo. Haven't we got ANY industrial capacity here, anymore? I've never heard about the cravat idea, but I know some low fucks here, I'd like to plaster with one. For some stupid reason, I came back here after nearly 40 years. And strange as it may seem, I do kinda like the joint. Some of the residents should be painlessly put to sleep, but that's just wishful thinking.
As always.....this is good..