Adelaide - AUSTRALIA

Back in 1984, Salman Rushdie had the opportunity to spend some time in Adelaide, and he was quite taken with the place. At the time, he described the town as "... an ideal setting for a Stephen King novel, or horror film."

Since then it's become pretty popular to bash Adelaide, and with good cause. But there's no need to film a horror movie in Adelaide, because Adelaide is the horror movie: a dull zombiescape, peopled by elderly conservatives, suburban mouth-breathers and drug-addled recluses, where bizarre homicides take place with alarming regularity (about one really creepy mass murder every decade).

HOME OF THE FREE AND THE BLAND: PEOPLE AND CULTURE

Free settlers, Adelaideans (or addlebrainers) are proud to disclose, were the foundation stone of Adelaide. Not common convict stock, sentenced to a life of hard labour and unrequited buggery in an uncharted land for petty theft, as were common in the rest of Australia, but free, adventurous spirits who actually chose to come and live there. It sounds ridiculous now, but there you have it. Just like when Erik the Red was singing the praises of his newly found "island paradise" (read: shitty, frozen wasteland – Greenland, that is) to his Norse brothers sometime in the late 10th century, and you get the impression that some level of false advertising must have been employed to encourage this migration.

At any rate, the area is inhabited now – a sleepy white-bread town, masquerading as a city, in an arid valley in the arse-end of the world.

And the aforementioned free settlers have ensured that this particular enclave of Australia would not follow the base cultural trends observed in the rest of the country – for example, social equality, multiculturalism and the ability to rhyme "dance" with "pants" – but rather enforce a fairly rigid social hierarchy (judged on the basis of which private school each denizen attended), an unspoken white-Australia policy, and a twee, clipped pseudo-British accent to distinguish themselves from the rabble. People in Adelaide stand in single file, infantry like when they wait for a bus. They ask you which school you went to as a way of gauging your level of human decency. These things don't happen in the rest of Australia, except for, perhaps, the bureaucratic death camp of Canberra. They are also very surprised to deal with outsiders. The most common question a tourist will usually encounter is: "Why are you here?"

And that is a good question.

FIRST IMPRESSIONS: NAVIGATING THE ZOMBIESCAPE

It was a Thursday when I arrived in Adelaide. The bus from the airport drifted through wide, deserted streets labelled with the names of dead monarchs. The handful of people I saw from the window all looked either homeless, lost or insane. The sensible thing to do at this point would have been to turn around and leave. Instead I dumped my bags at the hostel and went searching for the action.

First of all, searching for the action in Adelaide is a bit like searching for casual sex in Bahrain. Fruitless and frustrating. The sun was setting and there wasn't a soul in sight. Two large metallic spheres stacked on one another – the sculptural equivalent of hotel room art – form the centrepiece of Rundle Mall. In their sheen a distorted reflection of a very neat, spacious, brick-paved mall, utilitarian and dreary, complete with sale signs and store mannequins, and similar in all respects to any other mall in the universe, other than the complete deficit of people. The shops were all closed and an eerie stillness had settled. It brought to mind images from mid-'50s newsreels: ideal suburban settings, with grinning mannequins manoeuvred into awkward domestic settings, seconds before being obliterated and atomised by a government-sponsored nuclear bomb testing. With slow-mounting panic other scenarios began to occur to me: mass evacuations, ebola outbreaks and zombie holocausts. Should I be looking for somewhere to hide, or a gun?

I breathed a sigh of relief to see two straggling tracksuit-pants-and-flannelette-shirt-clad bogan/homeboys (the weird subcultural mix so prevalent in small towns, where Eminem has touched the hearts of so many) stumbling past, evidently at the tail end of a several day-long ice (crystal meth) binge. I was not the only survivor.

Months later, I relived the horror and gnawing anomie of that first encounter with the city that would become my home for more than a year. Lurching into the late afternoon light after a particularly harrowing and icky one-night stand I was confronted by the sight of Glenelg Beach at its worst: flat, grey and endless – the sea vibrating to the drone of the wind and joining invisibly in the distance with a sky the colour of despair. The beach itself was deserted, dregs of dried seaweed and chip packets danced spastically along the shore, and a pier shunted abruptly into the murky water like an amputee's stump. The end of the world stretched out in front of me, and for all I knew the bombs could have fallen in the space between my feebly feigned orgasm and my sudden waking panic.

But ... away from my tawdry sexual misadventures and back to the town for a minute ... Leaving Rundle Mall and crossing King William Street, the visitor next finds themselves in Hindley Street, the flip side of the nightmare. A jumble of all-night strip clubs interspersed with small tribes of Aboriginals sprawling on the pavement, drinking from crinkled goon sacks and hurling gleeful abuse at passersby, and, in response, wilfully ignored by all. The home of underage illegal export strippers and shiny-suited Russian businessmen who give the distinct impression of owning guns and knowing where to shoot to incur maximum pain.

Outside of this vibrant epicentre there is very little going on in the city. At least half of the CBD remains unused, and this is strange considering that the city itself is only about a square mile in area. Empty shopfronts imagined as junky squats and smoky tyre yards make the southern half of the city particularly depressing. There are some design flaws.

THE GRID OF BOREDOM: LAYOUT AND HISTORY

The city plan for Adelaide was the brainchild of its founder, Colonel William Light, a well-respected lunatic, in a misguided attempt to create Australia's own utopian colony. Of course one person's utopia is not always everyone else's cup of tea – Pol Pot's Cambodia, for example, was a bit of a downer.

Here are the basics: the centre of Adelaide is more or less a square divided into equal quadrants by two intersecting main roads, with each quadrant further subdivided until the street map resembles an autistic child's Lego creation.

Surrounding the city, in lieu of medieval walls, is a perimeter of parklands, as similarly unpeopled as the rest of the town. Rapes are much more popular on these dry brown fields than picnics are.

So categorically paranoid was the great visionary, Colonel Light that he determined the exact width of the parklands by setting up a mortar (weapon) at the city's edge and firing as far as possible. Where the bomb landed became the boundary for these paradisiacal gardens, and would also serve as the measuring stick for the city's defences. So when the marauding hordes of pagans and foreigners conspiring to get their grasping dirty little fingers on Adelaide's golden honeypot of cultural riches came galloping across the fields, smeared in gore and their own faeces, the Colonel and the good Christians of Adelaide town would know when to start firing, making their last valiant stand against the godless heathens and the forces of evil.

In the end, nature finds ways to counteract any rigid order being enforced upon it. In Adelaide's case life drained from the centre and suburbs began sprouting outside the parklands organically, then blooming, producing shopping malls and Cash Converters and new undefinable life forms.

THINGS TO DO

Take drugs: Drug use is a popular and state-sanctioned pastime, marijuana is decriminalised in Adelaide, which means it is pushed on the populace as a way of pacifying them and relieving the soul-crushing tedium of having to live in a place where nothing good ever happens. If the state were to ever stop the flow of the wacky weed the townsfolk would soon awaken from their soma-like induced stupor and go on a literal rampage, burning and violating everything and everyone in sight, the roads would run with blood, which would be the most traffic they've experienced in perhaps their whole existence.

Crystal meth is also regularly handed out to the populace at taxpayers' expense.

See a live polka band: The invasion Colonel Light was dreading did happen, as it turns out, but it was silent and went unnoticed by the general populace. It's no surprise, really, that it was the fun-loving Germans who were first attracted to the carnival atmosphere of the "city of churches". In the mid-19th century they came in droves, enticed, no doubt, by the calming uniformity of the streets and the general attention to order. Strangely, no other nationalities followed suit, and soon there were entire German-speaking villages in the hills surrounding Adelaide.

The German Club on Flinders Street was built towards the end of the century as a meeting place for these ruddy-faced settlers, and later became the headquarters for the Australian Gestapo, who were under orders to keep a check on the activities of German migrants in Adelaide (one can only imagine the intense importance Adelaide held in the eyes of the Third Reich. Those reports must have been the reading highlight of Heinrich Himmler's week). Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday was celebrated in the German Club, and a great time was had by all, even though the big man himself couldn't make it, being otherwise occupied with Poland. (Later, post World War II, there was another mass immigration from Germany, but it has to be said that these new settlers were not, categorically not, Nazis fleeing justice. Not a chance.)

Nowadays membership is a little less stringent, in fact, you don't even have to be Aryan to gain admission to the club. Meine Güte! any old Jude or Schwarz can get through the door now and enjoy a stein of beer, half a pig on a plate and the live polka antics of the house band, although it might be hard to get some elbow room when Hitler's birth date comes around.

Watch an Erykah Badu concert: In response to accusations of being a cultural wasteland, once a year Adelaide hosts the WOMADelaide music festival in Australia, and the Adelaide City Council pays a group of extras to walk around the city dressed in the style of various démodé subcultures in order to dupe gullible outsiders that they are visiting an actual living city. Nothing but a cheap ploy to ensnare new blood. One week later the extras are put to death in the town square to ensure the hoax will never be discovered.

Be exposed to skip-hop: Australian hip-hop. It's as bad as it sounds. Adelaide is the home of Australian hip-hop.

Catch the tram: There is one tram to catch.

Be murdered and stuffed into a barrel: Weird murders are part and parcel of the Adelaide experience, and while the actual murder rate is lower than or at most on par with the rest of Australia. Adelaide is clearly aiming for quality over quantity: child abductions and teen murders by clandestine and influential paedophile rings, homosexual academics murdered by over enthusiastic police thugs, serial killings (including Australia's worst!) and even the odd mass murder, are just a few of the highlights in Adelaide's rich and colourful history all combining to help rename it with the bright and breezy moniker as the "city of corpses".

In 1999, eight decomposing bodies were found stuffed in six barrels sitting in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, just outside Adelaide. All the victims came from the grim outer northern suburbs, where prospects and entertainment options are limited. By the time their remains were discovered, several years after the fact, very few of the victims had actually been reported missing, and the killers were continuing to collect welfare payments in their names, which means any number of serial killers could still be operating out there, cheerfully carving up the ranks of the dispossessed without a single person noticing. A comforting thought, and one, which should help to maintain cheap real estate prices in Salisbury.

Many theories have been put forward to account for Adelaide's long tradition of particularly unsettling killings: poverty and disenfranchisement among the troglodyte classes, geographical anomalies and mystical vortexes, the impurity of the tap water and maybe even a big-hearted attempt to get Adelaide noticed, but the most convincing argument is a lot more banal. There's very little to do in Adelaide, so killing people certainly helps to pass the time. And to finish the earlier quote from Rushdie: "You know why all those films and books are always set in sleepy conservative towns? Because sleepy, conservative towns are where those things happen."

Leave: Everyone does eventually.

* Written by a ghostwriter and edited by myself.

Summary

Adelaide, Australia, is described as a dull zombiescape where bizarre homicides take place. The city's layout, designed by Colonel William Light, is criticised for its grid plan and surrounding parklands. Adelaide is known for its drug use, German migrants, and the WOMADelaide music festival, but is really considered a place of boredom and despair.