Over the years, I've driven through some towns with very tenuous claims to fame. It's kind of fun driving through a flat, dusty, boring landscape with that ghastly sense of anticipation of what claim the next town will try to foist on the easily impressed. This kind of thing:
Koroit, Victoria: Home of the World's Largest Potato (Red Pontiac, 9.7 kilograms, grown April 1957).
Smoko, Victoria: Bushfire Capital of the World.
Trundle, NSW: Consecutive Tidy Town Winner (Neatly Mown Lawns Division) 1975-6.
Junee, NSW: Where Henry Lawson Wrote his First Poem. And Part of the Second. In the Cafe.
Toolern Vale, Victoria: Where Bob Livingstone Hit a Hole in One Twice in One Day (Jan. 17, 1936).
Miles, Queensland: Tea Cosy Capital of the World.
Actually, only one of those is real. Answer here.
Know any more?
Koroit, Victoria: Home of the World's Largest Potato (Red Pontiac, 9.7 kilograms, grown April 1957).
Smoko, Victoria: Bushfire Capital of the World.
Trundle, NSW: Consecutive Tidy Town Winner (Neatly Mown Lawns Division) 1975-6.
Junee, NSW: Where Henry Lawson Wrote his First Poem. And Part of the Second. In the Cafe.
Toolern Vale, Victoria: Where Bob Livingstone Hit a Hole in One Twice in One Day (Jan. 17, 1936).
Miles, Queensland: Tea Cosy Capital of the World.
Actually, only one of those is real. Answer here.
Know any more?
Alliance, Ohio, home of the red carnation. Bred there in the 1800s by Charles Lamborn. Before that carnations were pink.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up there, is it any wonder I want a botany degree?
you know, you forgot places such as Golburn, NSW - the big marino.
ReplyDeleteAll those other big things we have too...big banana and pineapple (QLD) and the big prawn!
Really are any of these things necessary?
[from Steevil]
ReplyDeleteI've been to Gilroy and Castroville, both in California, respectively the Garlic and Arichoke capitals of the "world."
http://www.gilroygarlicfestival.com/
http://www.beachcalifornia.com/castrov.html
Also, Baltimore is known variously as'mobtown,' 'charm city,' 'monumental city.'
The previous mayor came up with the slogan, "the city that reads." Within nanoseconds somebody thought of, "the city that bleeds."
(there has been a murder per day so far in 2007).
Vegreville, Alberta, CANADA...home of the Easter Egg. The town (lots of Ukranian people live here) has constructed a HUGE Easter Egg model that stands at least 30 feet tall!
ReplyDeleteJulie, why can't people leave flower colours alone? Pink was nice.
ReplyDeleteD.U.Dani, there are too many Big Things to count. I have a photo of myself and a friend, Daphne, standing beneath the Big Koala at Dadswell's Bridge near the SA border taken in 1993. I'm not sure why. I think it's because we were there.
Steevil, if Gilroy is the garlic capital of the world, why does most of our garlic come from China? (I notice they are importing it from Mexico now as well.) Baltimore sounds like a nice place to drive through.
Carmen, I grew up in a suburb with a large proportion of post-war Ukraine immigrants. I fell in love with a Ukrainian girl in Grade Three. I was eight. She had golden hair and olive skin and her name was Helena ...
Let's not forget Bendigo, home of the Chiko Roll. And for those of you who aren't Australian and don't know what a Chiko Roll is - count your blessings!
ReplyDeleteSudoku, the best thing about Chiko Rolls is the vast legacy of seventies advertising art it bequeathed to fish and chip shops everywhere, some of which exists, yellowing and greas-stained, to this day.
ReplyDeletePlus the occasional frog.
Woy Woy. World's only above-ground cemetery.
ReplyDeleteCleveland used to be referred to as the Mistake on the Lake (not by me!). And it's also known as the City Where the River Caught Fire (it only happened once!).
ReplyDeleteSpike, is there where your Milligan namesake's mother is buried?
ReplyDeleteLucette, a US journalist who came to Australia to cover the America's Cup in the late eighties and decided to stay was always making jokes about Cleveland. Now I know why.