We’ve all got skeletons in the closet. If you dig deeply enough into anyone’s past you’ll find a dirty little secret. With this in mind, and in light of unfolding events in the pop-culture sphere, I’ve decided to come clean with mine. My name is Bryce Corbett and I am from The Shire.
I know, I know, it’s hard to believe. Certainly, if we take the fine models of Shiredom being peddled in Channel 10’s new “reality” show The Shire as a guide, I don’t, at first glance, appear to fit the mould.
But appearances, as any Shire person will tell you, can be deceiving. After all, if were you to scratch beneath the surface of my bottled ginger hair, my spray-on pale skin and the laughable pretence that I can string a sentence together, what you would really find is a perma-tanned, walking six-pack with the IQ of a mollusc, a Southern Cross tattoo and a clinical aversion to baklava.
Related: A Shire boy’s review of The Shire
Because, and as per the mantra that all Shire schoolkids are made to chant each morning as we gather at assembly and face Northies, “You can take the boy out of The Shire, but you can’t take The Shire out of the boy”.
There were plenty of stereotypes trotted out on Monday when The Shire hit the airwaves. Not since Craig Emerson immortalised Whyalla in song has a region of Australia been so cruelly, discordantly maligned.
And so, in the spirit of heading off an avalanche of gross generalisations and ensuring the price of my parent’s property doesn’t take a nose-dive (we’re talking about my inheritance here, people!), allow me to set the record straight in advance.
If you chose to tune in, one of the impressions you would have come away with is that The Shire is about as multicultural as a Pauline Hanson family barbie — a peculiar little Caucasian ghetto to the south of Sydney in which everyone is blonde.
This, I can proudly report, is patently untrue. There’s a fair smattering of red-heads down there as well. There was even a Chinese-Australian girl at my primary school. And she had a brother.
You would have also been left with the mistaken impression that we all have ridiculous names like Vernesa and Beckaa. This is also untrue. Some of us have perfectly normal names. Like Bryce, for example.
The show may try to convince you that all Shire women are vacuous shopaholics, interested only in nabbing a bargain at Dotti and bagging a tradie for a husband.
To that I would simply reply: the presence in The Shire of what was once proudly declared “the second-largest shopping centre in the southern hemisphere” is pure happenstance, and wouldn’t we all be better off if we had married a tradie? I mean, who’s laughing now?
Finally I would add to anyone who sat there watching and sneering, safe in the knowledge that whatever fame whores the producers lured out of the woodwork for their so-called “dramality” (it’s reality, but it’s drama — see what they’ve done there?) are safely contained in that leafy enclave to Sydney’s south, don’t be so cocky.
Because like the Church of Scientology, The Shire occasionally sends emissaries out into the wider community to blend in and live among you.
Under the cover of night and across the Georges River they go, to drive your trains, make your sandwiches or assume jobs in the office cubicle next to you — getting under your skin in ways you would never suspect.
ABC TV presenter Adam Hills might look for all the world like a worldly young man, but he also hails from The Shire.
I know this because we spent our youth together hunkered down in the 1st Loftus Scout Hall hatching plans to use a combination of clove hitches and reef knots to bring down Tom Ugly’s Bridge and thus preserve The Shire’s unique way of life. Dib-dib, dob-dob.
Related: Why we should leave the body image debate to teens
So no, I didn’t watch The Shire. Ever since Sutherland Shire Mayor, Carol Provan declared a fatwa against Channel 10 (but only after her attempts to set up road-blocks on the three bridges connecting the Shire to the rest of Sydney were ultimately deemed unworkable) no card-carrying member of The Shire is allowed to tune in.
So bring it on Channel 10. Do your worst. For as the program goes to air each night, rest assured the real residents of The Shire — hard-working, decent folk one-and-all — will be sitting in their neat little homes on their tidy quarter-acre blocks in their tree-lined streets having the last laugh.
Because we learned to laugh at ourselves long before you came along.
Video: Mayor tears into The Shire
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