Opinion
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Forget Botox or adult colouring books or anything Kris Jenner does to try to look like a sister to her daughters. There is one true fountain of youth, and it is the Sydney Royal Easter Show.
Take one step over the threshold into its barnyard fumes, take a single sip of overpriced but utterly delicious lemonade sold by a sullen teen, and you will immediately be transported back to being an 11-year-old trying to convince your parents that a gag bag with plastic excrement is a prudent, nay necessary, purchase.
Since 1823 the Sydney Royal Easter Show has been ostensibly delivering raw rural realness to us urban city slickers through activities like fireworks and watching woodchopping. But before you think that I am some sort of shill for Big Farma, what I actually love most is the weirdness of the Easter Show.
Where else can you celebrate the wildly underappreciated papercraft of quilling? See local fruit and veg turned into enormous portraits of agrarian life? Look at a bunch of almost identical cows and become heavily invested in which one is your favourite?
The chaos extends to the culinary pavilion, which is possibly the only place in the world where you can follow up a platter of freshly shucked oysters with a Devonshire tea. The ladies of the Country Women’s Association are a sheer delight; one year they were giving out hand-knitted teddy bears for free to the children waiting to chomp on scones at their tearoom.
The Show has also embraced TikTok virality, with this year featuring stalls selling quirky snacks such as rainbow toasties, one-metre-long meat skewers and animal-shaped fairy floss. And is there a better place to get into a debate over whether it’s a Dagwood Dog or a Pluto Pup? (If you call it a corn dog, please turn in your Aussie passport right now.)
The Easter Show is also an incubator of family traditions, like every year walking past the Bertie Beetle show bag stall and saying, “It’s so great that show bag has been here since 1972” and then not buying one.
As a child, I used to live for when the show bag catalogue would arrive in the newspaper and spent weeks poring over it, considering what I would petition my parents to buy. To see my nine-year-old son’s Gen Alpha version of this – looking through the Easter Show website and creating a Google document titled “What show bags we want” (with a hilariously optimistic 32 entries) for himself and his five-year-old sister – swells my heart with maternal pride.
We’ve instituted a one-show-bag-only policy since they started attending, for both economic and environmental reasons. It can be tough to enforce when you stroll past a parent weighed down with a half-dozen bags on each arm, ruining it for the rest of us. But in the post-show weeks when you aren’t accidentally stepping on tiny plastic detritus, the righteousness tastes sweeter than the all-day sucker you also declined to buy for them.
I’ve heard all the complaints about the Easter Show, that it’s crowded and expensive and involves queueing, and to that I say, yes, you are absolutely correct. But so are sporting events, and half those people go home sad because their team lost, whereas almost all children leave the Easter Show full of joy and an unholy amount of sugar.
The ultimate hack is simply not to attend on a public holiday and to go midweek if you possibly can. If you decide to go to the Easter Show on the long weekend or the final Saturday, that is on you, not the Easter Show.
Perhaps the GOAT of the Easter Show is, naturally, the farmyard nursery. It’s filled with critters that roam freely as little ones mill about. But really it’s a chance for milquetoast inner-city and suburban kids to learn some grit, as these animals are tough as nails. Forget billy goats, these are bully goats. Time to learn it’s a goat-eat-oat world, children!
As soon as the sheep and goats see a new youngster enter, they surround them, purposefully butting closer and closer to get whatever food they might be holding. My children usually immediately scream in terror and drop the cup full of hay and oats I have just purchased for them. But we persevere and by the end they will dutifully stand on a straw bale and let me take a photo of them surveying the caprine kingdom. Truly character-building stuff.
At the end of the yearly trip to the Easter Show you will be sticky and exhausted, but with a camera roll full of memories, in touch with not only your inner child but with your actual children. And know that if you’ve prepared them to conquer a feisty goat, they will be able to tackle anything.
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