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Forget Botox or adult coloring books or whatever Kris Jenner does to try to look like a sister to her daughters. There is one true fountain of youth, and that is the Sydney Royal Easter Show.
Take one step over the threshold into its smoky barnyard, drink an overpriced but perfectly good-tasting lemonade sold by a burly young man, and you’ll be instantly transported to being an 11-year-old trying to convince your parents that a freezer bag and a plastic stool are a sensible purchase, not a necessity.
Since 1823 Sydney’s Royal Easter Show has been showing the raw rural reality to us urban nerds through activities like fireworks and gravel viewing. But before you think I’m some kind of shill for Big Farma, my favorite is the sophistication of the Easter Show.
Where else can you celebrate the underappreciated paper craft of drilling? Do you see local fruits and vegetables turned into big pictures of agricultural life? Look at a group of cows that are almost identical and invest heavily, which one do you like the most?
The frenzy extends to the culinary pavilion, which may be the only place in the world where you can follow a plate of freshly shucked oysters with Devonshire tea. The women of the Women’s Association in the country are very happy; one year they were giving out free hand-knitted bears to children waiting for scones in their tea room.
The show has also embraced the virtues of TikTok, this year with stalls selling quirky snacks such as rainbow toast, meter-long meat skewers and animal-shaped feathers. Is there a good place to enter the debate about whether it’s a Dagwood Pup or a Pluto Pup? (If you call it a corn dog, please put away your Aussie passport now.)
The Easter Show is also a source of family traditions, like every year walking past the Bertie Beetle show bag booth and saying, “It’s great that the show bag has been here since 1972” and then not buying one.
When I was a kid, I lived for when a list of show bags came in the magazine and spent weeks poring over it, thinking about what I would ask my parents to buy. Seeing this Gen Alpha version of my nine-year-old son – looking at the Easter Show website and creating a Google doc called “What show bags do we want” (with 32 highly optimistic entries) for him and his five-year-old sister – fills my heart with maternal pride.
We have introduced a single bag policy since they started attending, for both economic and environmental reasons. It can be difficult to execute when you’re walking past a parent weighed down with half a dozen bags on each arm, and it spoils the rest of us. But in the weeks after the show when you won’t accidentally step on a little plastic detritus, justice tastes sweeter than the all-day sucker that you also refused to buy.
I’ve heard all the complaints about the Easter Show, that it’s crowded and expensive and involves queuing, and to that I say, yes, you’re absolutely right. But so are sporting events, and half of those people go home sad because their team lost, while almost all the kids leave the Easter Show on a happy and obnoxious sugar high.
The last trick is to skip public holidays and go in the middle of the week if you can. Whether you decide to go to the Easter Show on the long weekend or the last Saturday, that’s up to you, not the Easter Show.
Perhaps the GOAT of the Easter Fair is, naturally, a farm nursery. It is filled with critters that roam freely like small mills. But it’s really an opportunity for inner-city milquetoast and suburban kids to learn some grit, as these animals are tough as nails. Forget billy goats, these are naughty goats. Time to learn it’s a goat-eat-barley world, kids!
As soon as the sheep and goats see the new boy coming in, they surround them, deliberately moving closer and closer to get any food they may be holding. My kids usually immediately scream in fear and drop the cup full of hay and oats that I just bought them. But we persevere and in the end they will stand dutifully on the leaf rock and let me photograph them exploring the caprine kingdom. Really character building stuff.
At the end of the annual Easter Show trip you’ll be sticky and tired, but with a camera roll full of memories, getting in touch with not only your inner child but your real children. And know that if you have prepared them to overcome the fierce goat, they will be able to face anything.
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