Snowtown

By the time you read this my beautiful wife and I will either have, or be very close to having, our very own small person. So, understanding the possibility that there may be a subsequent reduction in the amount of time available to drop everything and go on holiday, we decided over summer to, well, drop everything and go on holiday.

Given the size and mobility of my beautiful one, we quickly ruled out destinations that involved long or uncomfortable journeys and tedious living conditions (so not north of the Yarra!). Eventually we decided on a driving holiday to visit some old friends in Adelaide. However, given that we had the best part of two weeks to undertake said holiday, we decided to take in a bit more on the way there and back. This saw us heading to the magnificent Flinders Ranges in outback South Australia on our way. I won’t go into detail about the Flinders Ranges here, this is not that sort of travel guide, but if anyone has a week to kill and feels like a bit of a jaunt, it’s well worth the effort.

However, as I said, the idea of this story is not to extol the virtues of all the nice things we saw on our trip. You see, it just so happened that, should one want to travel from the Flinders Ranges to the Barrossa Valley (another totally worthwhile place to visit), one would almost certainly pass a quaint little hamlet called Snowtown. Yep, you remember that name. A madman in the early nineties decided he didn’t like people who were gay or paedophiles and (whether they were or not) started brutally killing folk he deemed as such, and stored them in barrels of acid in a bank vault in this little road-stop town in South Australia’s gulf country. His antics stood out in this tiny town where not many people pass through, and the good folk of Snowtown immediately informed the police that there were nefarious Goings On, after which he was captured and convicted.

Beautiful wife and I were aware that this little town was on the route for the day and were toying with the somewhat voyeuristic option of going in to have a bit of a gander. Maybe take a cheesy photo parked in front of the town sign, or see if we could find the bank vault where all those poor bastards were dumped. You know, normal tourist stuff.

In actual fact we were probably going to give the whole place a miss until we saw the sign for Snowtown’s pride and joy tourist attraction. As we know Australian towns love the Big Thing. The big banana, the big pineapple, in fact, within two days we would find ourselves at the big lobster. Not to be outdone, Snowtown has their very own Big Thing.

First a bit of background though. Snowtown understandably has been through a bit of an image problem since the police found all those pesky barrels. It seems people don’t want to go near the place anymore and something needed to be done. So, in what absolutely smacks of a committee decision, a number of options were floated. They toyed with the idea of renaming the place Rosetown, then obviously realising that sounded totally crap went back to the old drawing board. So, what did they come up with?

In a move that should be truly applauded, it seems the South Australians have embraced the notion of renewable energy with a fervour. I’m not sure if it’s because the South Australians have realised that wind farms actually make no noise, or if South Australian parrots are not retarded enough to be struck by the slowest moving windmills in the world. Either way, the highways and byways of South Oz are rife with these monuments to man’s ability to harness the power of wind for conversion to electricity. The highways leading into Snowtown are no exception, and the “What the fuck to do about the joint” committee were certainly not oblivious. “Why not”, they cried, “turn the whole thing into a bit of a tourist attraction”? Brilliant idea. It’s a fairly new thing, people are interested and it might encourage other parts of the country to take up the technology. But how to make it happen? Museums are hardly a reason to veer off the main drag and stop for an hour, and “Windworld” had a bit of a cheesy ring to it. No, the good folk of the Snowtown Civil Preservation Society had a much better idea. They decided to grab a bit of one of the windmills and have their very own Big Thing. The only flaw in such a clever plan was the naming. You see, those big propellers on a wind turbine are called blades. And so, the brains trust of Snowtown have now installed in tier municipal park, “The Big Blade”. Not only that, little brown tourist attraction road signs for miles around the place beg the drive to come to Snowtown to see the Big Blade.

Not really what I would have thought was the best option for getting people to forget brutal murders when they hear the name Snowtown I would have thought. But hey, it sealed it for beautiful wife and I. Let us know if you want to see the pictures!

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