Northern NSW Community Recovery Tour - Day 5 - Mungindi Memorial Hall

Date: Saturday, March 29th

Venue: Mungindi Memorial Hall

Numbers: 55

With the netball rings and surrounding net in place & no sign of a hall committee member, Sandy launched into action & rang an ambulance. This seemed a bit of an extreme reaction, but soon after local ambo Lewis turned up - disappointingly without his sirens blaring. Soon after the goals were down and my safety net removed.

Before he left I asked him about the local netball comp …

Lewis: Thursday night mixed netball is very popular.

Damian: Do you play?

Lewis: I used to.

Damian: Why did you stop?

Lewis: It got too violent.

Damian … I’ll give you a hand getting that net back up.

I did a broader inspection of the vast hall & made some more discoveries. The buckets were abjectly failing at capturing the water from the leaking roof …

… and they needed to prioritise getting some toys in the kids play area.

Mungindi (pronounced Mun-gern-die) has the unique distinction of being Australia’s only border town that has the same name on both sides of the border. They came out of an 8 year drought in 2020 straight into the pandemic with all the additional complications NSW/QLD border towns faced when the Palaczczuk Government closed the border. Then they had floods … Then half of the main street was gutted in a fire. It would be fair to say this community has had a rough patch. You hear the word resilience bandied about a lot these days: Mungindi has sand bags full of the stuff.

The town is still waiting for the supermarket to be rebuilt. In the interim, it has taken up residence in the abandoned RSL club.

They have leaned into the supermarket RSL theme with this week’s specials

• Kokoda Trail Mix - $12.99

• Lone Pino Cleen - $14.50

• Pearl Harbourio Rice - $8.50

The front, middle table was occupied by the unofficial female local council who arrived at the chambers with a head start on the rest of the gallery. The white wine was flowing and despite how fast they were drinking the stuff, they insisted on constantly topping up on ice. This would have been fine, but the esky was on the floor directly at my feet. Having to pause every time they needed cube replenishment, soon got old, so I told them I’d schedule ice stops into my set. This sounds onerous, but it was actually a lot of fun. There is no value in being a precious performer at these shows. They are community building events & that audience will likely recall the banter between myself & the ice queens, more than any other element of the show.

Mispronouncing a town name, in the actual town, is a self inflicted wound that many comedians fail to recover from. Even getting other towns in the area wrong can lose the crowd. I discovered to my horror, that misspelling the town name, is almost a lynch-able offence. This attempt at an alternative town sign was met with silence, then burgeoning indignance.

By the time the second sign went up, the gallows were being assembled …

Only mock tears saved me. My weepy defence of going to considerable effort to localise the material, stayed the execution, but they still defaced all of my show posters after the show.