I’m sitting on the main drag of Queensland’s Julia Creek (population: 300). It’s the morning after the annual Dirt n Dust festival – a celebration, as I like to call it, of the three Bs: bogs, butts and bulls.
Usually the wide streets of this outback town are quiet. But this morning there’s a man strumming his guitar, families chewing the fat in the shade, and even a queue at the town’s coffee bar-cum-grocers – a rarity, as many a local stops to remind me.
Launched in 1994 as a local fete, Dirt n Dust has grown to become a calendar highlight for country folk. This year, 2,300 people attended between 7 and 9 April, many driving hundreds of kilometres from surrounding properties to take part in the gruelling sprint-triathlon and blow their paycheques on the horses.
There are live bands, food trucks, a country tastes luncheon (think juicy hams and salads) and a fashion show, where women parade in colourful dresses like chattering parakeets, showing off sky-high heels and flamboyant hats.
It’s the novelty acts, though, that set Dirt n Dust apart, including cowpat throwing (harder than it sounds: the pat can’t be too slushy), bog snorkelling, professional bull riding, and the crowning joy of Saturday night: Australia’s Best Butt Competition.
“It’s the biggest event to hit town,” the shire’s get-up-and-get-at-em mayor Belinda Murphy asserts, as we chat overlooking brittle, sun-scorched fields. Years of severe drought have left cattle-rearing communities such as Julia Creek in north-west Queensland struggling.
“Camp dinners, rodeo, paddock-to-plate lunches – they all provide economic stimulus. We wouldn’t have survived otherwise,” says Murphy, pointing out that Julia Creek’s shops, from the country butcher proudly selling “full sheep” to the country hairdresser and hardware store, remain open and operating.
This is the kind of town where the best place to stay – or at least the most colourful – is the 1906 Julia Creek hotel, otherwise known as Top Pub. Partitions, a publican somewhere down the line decided, are literally a waste of space: in my room, the open toilet is steps away from the bed.
But this turn-of-the-century inn also gives a sense of the vast space that surrounds it. Upstairs a door opens to a large, windy veranda overlooking seemingly endless land. Long cargo trains screech past, part of the Great Northern Railway, 1000km of track linking Townsville to Mount Isa.
Dirt n Dust attracts a motley crew. There are the ranch hands dressed in skinny blue ties and collared shirts tucked into jeans, topped off with wide Akubra hats; girls in cut-off shorts with flowers in their hair; kids running riot clutching cans of soft drink. The odd cowboy letting off steam, one of whom we are told is “coalminer by day, professional bull rider by weekend”.
Then there’s Fred Schneider. The 81-year-old has become a local legend, thanks to a pair of red budgie smugglers.
Every year Schneider drives the 512km from his home in Charters Towers, camping along the way, to take part in the triathlon. A good seven decades separates him from the youngest runners in the children’s events. Yet, despite surviving bowel cancer and a heart bypass, he’s still going strong.
“I took me shorts off and got me budgie smugglers underneath and we never went 10ft before, ‘Oh, can I get a photo?’,” he says the next day. “Getting our photo taken all the way. It’s the budgie smugglers.”
Schneider disapproves of the bull ride. “After you’ve seen about four blokes tossed off that’s good enough,” he insists. And the butt competition: “I don’t think people should be doing stuff like that, no modesty. It’s not ladylike.” But he appreciates that the races give “the girls a chance to dress up and the boys too. It’s a meeting place”.
The triathlon, for the Keough family, is also a chance to raise awareness. Jodi and her husband Laine lost their baby, Cash, in 2015 on the family’s cattle station to a rare brain-eating parasite. This year, 15 members of the same family ran together to honour his birthday, which lands on the same weekend as the event.
“We thought what better way to celebrate Cash … By living life to the fullest,” Jodi elaborates at the luncheon, nursing her new baby daughter and keeping an eye on her two toddlers scampering, ice-creams in hand, between tables. “I’m sure he’d be having a bit of a crack if he was here. One woman [competing] shouted out, ‘I’m running for your boy.’”
That’s what makes Dirt n Dust worth visiting. Not the bog snorkelling – although watching a man in hot pink speedos dive into a murky strip of water before becoming a human “crumb sausage” (method: roll wet in soil and wrap yourself in a swag) is no doubt amusing. Not the bull riding – although the baying crowd is worth a look. It’s the people. Dirt n Dust is all about celebrating country life. As one woman tells me, this is a place “of go-getters and doers – they don’t wait for someone else. Everyone gets involved and helps out. People want to see people succeed”.
• The author was a guest of Dirt n Dust festival
