Australian Country Towns

 

Balaklava, SA

In my younger life I used to travel regularly by road between Australia’s capital cities. I never had any interest in stopping in any country towns along the way. My young arrogant self assumed there was nothing or nobody in these towns that would be of interest to me. I would rush through them to get to the next big city as quickly as possible. I was usually planning to see friends in these cities and these visits would typically involve live music, drugs, alcohol, and long stimulating conversations.

I, and my friends were typically educated – often to university level, intelligent, articulate and often left-leaning politically. We called people who were conservative – perhaps right-wing voters and who did not take drugs – ‘straight’. This was not just a descriptive tag – it was also a derogatory slur. It was assumed that we had little in common with such people and there’d be little point in spending time with them. And it was assumed that country towns would be full of such people. And I think too there might have been a feeling of superiority: we thought ourselves better than them.

In the 1970s there was a significant divide between urban and rural Australia. There is still a divide, but it is no longer a vast chasm. As a traveller in the 70s for example you wouldn’t find a café with decent food or coffee in the towns along the highway. There would be the roadhouse with pies, pasties and chips and not much else. Country towns were for filling up with fuel, bad food, and perhaps a short walk to stretch the legs.

As I grew older (and perhaps smarter) changes were afoot in rural Australia. Increasingly a more engaged and socially aware cohort took up residence in country towns. Food outlets with decent food and coffee started to appear alongside the trusty roadhouses. Art and craft shops proliferated and served as small galleries to display local goods and art works. Some towns like Kimba in South Australia put more effort into making their towns destinations in their own right rather than just transit locations. Accommodations improved and provided more choice than just  the bog-standard hotel or motel.

The outward appearance of towns became more interesting. Older buildings with possible heritage appeal were restored, plants appeared on footpaths, statues, works of art, and information boards became more prominent and were more intent on conveying the town’s story. There was more focus on offering meaningful distractions to coax the traveller to stay a while. Larger towns had cinemas or theatres suitable for live performances.

And the people started to look different. Country towns began to have some residents who looked as if they could fit right in in places like St Kilda or Paddington. They started to look like places where someone used to city life could feel quite at home and find people there who they could identify with. The gaping chasm between city and country life was closing.

Then some smart person hit upon the idea of silo art! Many Australian towns are dominated by these very tall concrete towers that store grain. It turns out that the surfaces of these vast structures make ideal canvases for telling a story in pictures. So, in small towns like Coonalpyn between Adelaide and Melbourne, for the first time ever tourists would stop to view the silo art and maybe have a coffee or lunch at the café that sprang up across the road from the silos. As other towns jumped on the same bandwagon the concept of Silo Art trails was born, where one could now visit a chain of towns in reasonable proximity and view all the different types of silo art available.

The arrival of the COVID-19 virus was a further step towards the gentrification of Australia’s country towns. As people were encouraged to keep their social distance from others many quickly realized that the best place to do this was in country towns. Together with the technology that made working from home an option for more and more of the workforce, many urban dwellers upped sticks and relocated to the country.

I don’t know if rural people feel any resentment towards these city interlopers, but the net result of these incremental changes over the last 5 decades and this more sudden COVID induced population transfer means that for me country towns are now far more worth a visit. I don’t feel they’ve lost their soul or too much of their rustic character, and they have become places where  I no longer feel like an alien when I walk down the main street. I did once.

I acknowledge that this in part may be because of my youthful insecurities, and a somewhat biased blindness towards country life that lessened as I grew older. Perhaps country towns always had these attractions (theatre, food, culture etc) and I just never stayed long enough to notice.

The Ugly One

Famous Last Words Theatre
Slingsby’s Hall of Possibility

Fri 9 May, 2025

Staging a play called The Ugly One in this sensitive age when you may no longer call a spade a spade seems a little provocative.  It must be some kind of metaphor surely? Well yes and no – as we shall see.

Entering Slingsby’s Hall of Possibility is a treat in itself. It was good to be there early and soak up the atmosphere of a space that could indeed make many things possible. Four vertical lighting strips shone on the performance space and left enough ambient light for your eyes to roam around the intriguing space.

The cast of four each make their separate entrance down a tall stairway. Three of them will take on multiple roles but the ugly one, Lette, plays himself throughout. The grandest entrance is reserved for Lette’s boss, Scheffler, who strolls down the stairs like the belle of the ball.

Between her, Lette’s wife, Fanny, and Karlmann, his assistant, they need to address the delicate issue of telling Lette that he will not be presenting his company’s latest breakthrough at an upcoming convention because his face is a liability. That is, he is extremely unattractive.

It’s excruciating to witness as everyone squirms around this unfortunate reality but eventually the truth is out and Lette immediately insists on undergoing reconstruction surgery. Which as it turns out is fabulously successful and unleashes a chain of events that have you questioning who here is really the ugly one and other relevant questions about identity – how important is it that we look good? Or at least, feel like we look good? If you had a ‘better face’ would you be a different, or better person? Do others treat good looking people better? Are good looking people more likely to be more successful in life?

Rather than directly confront them these serious existential questions are inferred in the mayhem that follows Lette’s miraculous surgery. There’s plenty of humour embedded in the dialogue and a wonderful irony in the fact that the players themselves don’t realise how shallow they’ve become. Virginia Blackwell is near perfect as the supercilious boss and unscrupulous surgeon floating around on an air of superiority completely oblivious to things like ethics and feelings.   James Starbuck does a great job of playing a Lette who is initially hooked on the idea of being beautiful but undergoes something of a redemption as he comes to realise there may be other more important things in life. And his sexy presentation on connector plugs was hilarious!

The play skips along at a good pace. I really enjoyed the simulated surgery scenes. They managed to be brutal, humorous, artistic and elegant all at once. Just one example of some clever direction from James Watson.

So yes – ugly can be seen as a metaphor here, and that it’s not just something we see on the outside of a person. And while some may be gorgeous to look at, perhaps the old cliché is true that beauty really is only skin deep.

A fine piece of thoughtful, entertaining theatre in a great venue.   

This review also published in The Clothesline.