Trampoline venues, sausage rolls, pubs serving beer in handle glasses, mini golf courses, playgrounds built out of rusty farm equipment and surplus artillery. Some things just invariably improve the farther you get from the big city.
The all-purpose ornamental park and public toilet is another one of those things! Look at this excellent specimen in Berriwillock—you can positively smell the 1970s community spirit.
One look at this precinct and it is no wonder that Berriwillock is best known as the winner of the 1986 ‘Big Borrie’ award, bestowed by the Keep Australia Beautiful Council (Incorporated) for a combination of general tidiness and a willingness to erect a poo-shaped rock in the vicinity of the town public toilets.
Some say that a town must inevitably peak and decline once it wins the Big Borrie, but this small Mallee farming town of 150-odd people has been around a while, and is not going away anytime soon.
The Berriwillock time line chronicles the town’s rich history, including such events as:
- the explorer Edward Eyre venturing into the Mallee, and hating what he saw so much that he turned around and went home
- Berriwillock’s first building—a wine shanty made of bags
- the Great Mouse Plague
- relocation of the tennis club from one premises to another
- construction and inauguration of the public toilet block in 1977
Why read past there? The End!
