IN-Focus

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact Locals from our nation's snowfields are demanding answers from Jetstar today after yet another busload of loud, drunk and casually racist Japanese ski tourists arrived in the skiing gateway town of Jindabyne this afternoon. Earlier this month, the Qantas' discount airline offered bargain basement airfares to Australia from the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido where the majority of the archipelago's...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact "What's it to you, you putrid mutt?" she yelled. The driver was taken aback but responded firmly. "You need to pay like everyone else!" It was a standard Tuesday morning on the D32 bendy bus coming in from Betoota Downs to the Old City District. Office people, tradespeople and other assorted serfs just trying to escape their collective realities on the...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact The small farming community of Betoota Downs in the Development Road to Windorah has welcomed the arrival of a Red Rooster restaurant over the weekend - a sign that the satellite town has moved up in the world. Betoota Downs has grown rapidly over the past two decades; it's population and size swelling to that of a medium-sized desert...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact In a survey conducted by The Advocate this morning, all nineteen of our respondents didn't know that England has been thrashing Australia in the cricket - and neither of them particularly cared. While some expressed shock that the national sport was now at rock bottom, all of them conceded that is wasn't particularly surprising given...

Louis Burke | Culture | Contact In a bold move to make sure independent hardware stores are gone forever, Bunnings Warehouse have opened a concept Betoota Ponds store where they will be debuting a new system of selling hose pipe by the centimetre. Bunnings CEO Michael Schneider claims this is an exciting time in the companies history and he cannot wait to start giving back...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact Australia's peak scientific body has released their findings into the ongoing debate about what is Kanye West's best album - and not everybody is happy. Released just three weeks after Barack Obama's historic election win in 2008, Kanye's fourth album, 808s & Heartbreak, has been scientifically proven to be the best Kanye album to date and 'any other opinion is inferior...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact As snow falls across Betoota this week, one brave man has told friends and perfect strangers that he doesn't get cold - something he likes to punctuate by heading out without a coat to keep him warm. Stellan Sorensen told reporters this morning that it's a combination of his personal gumption and Noric blood coursing...

TRACEY BENDINGER | Culture| CONTACT Ava-Rose Sprawley worked damn hard at constructing a professional persona at her first real job. However, on Friday night the young grad may have ruined whatever facade she’d managed to build up. Not one to shy away from a drink in her social circle, Ava-Rose promised herself early in the night that she would try to keep a lid...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact "I've even been over to the mosque and prayed for rain there as well," he said. "I'll do bloody anything." Johan Pendergast says he's been running sheep and cattle on his 40-odd thousand hectare block an hour north of Betoota for 40-odd years - he says times are tough right now. He's never been a man of...

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact "There wasn't even a result, bruz," he said, handed extended out toward the television. "I don't think anybody in this house appreciates just how much I don't like soccer. It's the most boring thing in the world. They don't do anything other than kick the ball around in circles and fall over when people run...