Lo all these many and varied years ago, I was blessed to visit the sleepy little town of Southern Cross in Western Australia, as part of a Perth Highland Pipe Band performance at an agricultural show. In fact, I think I visited the place two or three times in my years with the band. Chucky Reports, right here on this very blog, detail some of the more memorable events.

 

Agricultural shows are the best, mainly because of the food but also because of the booze and other entertainment on offer. Camel races, ute-doughnutting, f*ck-off big bonfires and The Lamb Van.

 

 

If you couldn't buy it there, then it simply couldn't be made out of a piece of a sheep.

 

One of the downsides of agricultural shows is the audience - not because I dislike or feel I am superior to the average hick redneck Australian - on the contrary, they are very entertaining - but because they generally have better things to do than watch a bunch of bagpipers faffing about in the 40° heat. They're not exactly your fun-time crowd, like for example a pub crowd, who buy you drinks and make you feel glad you bothered. Marching through an agricultural show beer tent is always fun and we took the opportunity to do so on almost every country performance I remember, but then I also remember being able to thank our applauding audience by name on at least one occasion.

 

Another favourite was the Southern Cross Hotel, the bar of which was a mass of carvings and engravings made by drunk or madly artistic people of bygone days. They didn't actively encourage bar-carving (or 'barving', as I am now coining the phrase), but they obviously didn't mind it, and by the sheer amount of it you could tell the bar was more of a feature to them than an eyesore. When asked, the bar staff said we could go ahead, as long as we weren't too obvious about it and didn't write or draw anything too profane.

 

I improved the bar in my own way.

 

 

You may notice, as I believe I did at the time, that this is one of the few coherent things carved on the bar, let alone correctly-spelled.

 

This picture was taken by a Perth Highlander by the name of Monty, returning to the SXH some ten years down the line. He was evidently pleased to see that our legacy remained, and I'm pleased to receive a copy of it way the Hell up here in the soon-to-be frozen north.

 

Good times.