Tescos and pound shops and chavs, oh my!
Or, the crappest towns in Australia.

There's plenty of places in the Colonies that equal some of the evil places I've heard about in The Old Country (my sister told me stories of Pikey Sundays in Cinehell in Cambridge when she lived there).

However, there's much, much worse than hooded teenagers and methadone and industrial waste. You can find that in plenty of places - from Croydon and Frankston and St. Albans in Melbourne to Mt. Druitt and Camden and Mayfield in Sydney, Elizabeth in South Australia (populated by ex-patriate English who emigrated in the 1950's - sort of proto-chavs) and a fair slab of Perth.

However, there's much, much worse stuff out there.

Lemme tell yez about Ceduna, South Australia.

South Australia's a bit of a shithole anyway - its only claim to fame is it's the only State in Australia not involved in the 18th century's answer to chavs: convicts.

Anyway, Ceduna's about 800 or so km west of Adelaide, and home to a fishing fleet, a big fuck-off export grain silo, a lot of gypsum, a railway, and not much else.

Ceduna's also south of a place called Maralinga. Now, for all of you who may not know, Maralinga's where the British dropped a few atom bombs in the 1950's and 1960's and promptly made that scrub pretty much uninhabitable. No major problem: it's too far away from civilisation - except for the local Aboriginal tribe that lived there and got forcibly relocated.

Anyway, the main street (or the bit of the main highway betwixt Adelaide and Perth) is on a crossroads.

On one corner is a supermarket of sorts. Directly opposite is a park, with a few swings. To the left is a CES (a benefits office) and diagonally opposite is a bottle shop (sells packaged alcohol).

Was there three days (looking at the Gawler Ranges, and someone else we were travelling with found out that their best friend had died in a head-on car accident and was a bit too grief stricken to continue travelling where we wanted to go).

The first two days - the bottle shop was closed until about midday. Fairly normal for alcohol outlets.
The third day - the bottle shop was open. Why?
The benefit office opened up, and the bottle shop opened early purely to prey on the large amounts of Aboriginal families who were alcoholics. As well, the Aboriginals would travel from up to 500km away to get drunk, as there still existed something called the colour bar. That's essentially a rule saying no-one with black skin could be served alcohol. Whatsoever.

The way around this was petrol-sniffing. No-one gave a rats when you'd see kids aged 10 with petrol tins around their necks, with rusted wire cutting in their skin and what looked like burns from all the fumes buying petrol from petrol stations.
(This has changed now - the petrol out in the bush has a large numbers of aromatics removed)

There was no effort to rehabilitate them - just the existence that a bunch of people who depend so much on where they live to define their existence since forever reduced to drunken wrecks or sniffing petrol.

Length: about 6 hours' drive in some cases.
(Ethelbert Q Humpington Ho, ha, guard, turn, parry, dart, spin, ha, thrust, Thu 5 Nov 2009, 9:14, Reply)