Myf Warhurst on the city-country divide and what she really thinks of the US Bluey rip-off

Myf Warhurst has revealed why a new animated program by a conservative US media company is “no good” compared to the Aussie smash hit Bluey that she stars in.

Despite decades of living in the big smoke, Myf Warhurst says that in her heart, she’s always felt like a country girl.

The versatile Spicks and Specks team captain, Bang On podcaster and occasional author and actor got her start in media in the most inner-city fashion possible, living in a share house while writing gig reviews for Melbourne street mag Inpress, before transitioning to radio, first with community station Triple R and then the national youth network Triple J.

But her formative years were spent in the Victorian bush and in her memoir of last year, Time of My Life, she paints an idyllic, if slightly haphazard, picture of growing up dodging snakes, sleeping in a converted tram and taping Countdown off the TV in the country towns of Donald and Red Cliffs.

Myf Warhurst, host of the SBS documentary Meet the Neighbours.

She still looks on those days and country Australia fondly – she recently returned to semirural life by buying a mid-century architectural gem “about an hour out of Melbourne and near the Yarra” she is currently renovating – and says she left her home town not because she hated it but because it was the only way forward for her chosen field in a pre-internet world.

“I literally had to go to study,” she says of her decision to relocate to Melbourne in the early ‘90s.

“I didn’t really have a choice if I wanted to go on at that stage. I was always just excited to learn about the world. All we’d had was the telly, radio and magazines and that was it. We didn’t have the world at our fingertips like kids do now.

“In that sense, I couldn’t wait (to leave) but I never wanted to escape for reasons of feeling trapped. I had a pretty good upbringing – it was a bit loose in that we were left to our own devices growing up. It was pretty free range.”

It was Warhurst’s connection to and concern for country Australia that made her a perfect fit to host the Meet the Neighbours. The premise of the new three-part SBS documentary is to relocate eight city-based households from culturally diverse backgrounds to the small town of Maryborough, in regional Victoria, for three months.

The social experiment is designed to highlight challenges faced by regional Australia, such as lack of affordable housing, skilled workers shortages, and under-investment in services and infrastructure. Driven by the local council and AMES Australia, which specialises in migrant settlement in regional Australia, it also puts a spotlight on the widening city-country divide and the potentially existential crisis of an ageing population and an exodus of younger residents.

The Singh family from the SBS documentary Meet the Neighbours.

“I grew up in a small country town and there were plenty of other young kids when I was there and plenty people who stayed when I was there,” Warhurst says. “And I think for some towns, that’s not the case any more. There’s a real struggle and they they’ve lost a lot of industries that might have supported employment and things like that. It was quite an eye-opener for me to see that change and to then realise how many towns are actually struggling.”

Warhurst is full of praise for the families and singles – from a young journalist of Indian background, to an aspiring cricketer of South Sudanese heritage and a chef who wants to bring his El Salvadorian flavours to the local pub menu – for taking the leap in Maryborough. While there is plenty of good, old country hospitality on offer, there’s also suspicion, hostility and resistance to change from the former gold rush town, which is one of the least ethnically diverse and most disadvantaged towns in Australia.

“I had to move to the big smoke when I went to university and I remember what a full-on, wonderful and bizarre experience it was,” she says. “For these families, they’ve upped sticks and done the same thing but in the opposite, to go to a small town where they don’t know anyone. That takes a lot of guts and a lot of hope and a lot of optimism.”

Although long-running music quiz show Spicks and Specks took a break this year, Warhurst has been as busy as ever. In addition to Bang On, her popular pop culture podcast with great mate Zan Rowe, she toured the country as The Narrator in The Rocky Horror Show and co-anchored the SBS coverage of the Eurovision Song Contest with fellow high-camp enthusiast Joel Creasey.

Myf Warhurst as The Narrator in this year’s production of The Rocky Horror Show. Picture: Sam Tabone/WireImage

But arguably her highest profile gig is one in which she’s not seen at all – as the voice of Aunt Trixie in the global smash kids animation Bluey. Although it’s now consumed by millions on worldwide streaming platform Disney+ – and a US college marching band doing a version of the theme song went viral last week – Warhurst says it took an incident much closer to home to make her realise just what a pop culture phenomenon it had become.

“There was this little kid at a wedding and his mum told him I was Aunt Trixie from Bluey and he just came and stood at my feet and stared at me for ages and ages and ages,” she says with a laugh. “It was the cutest thing – I’ve never experienced anything like it and he said ‘can you just talk?’. He was so, so happy.”

But don’t get her started on Chip Chilla, the new animated show about a family of Chinchillas made by a conservative US media company, which has been accused of being a “blatant Bluey rip-off”.

“I saw that,” a distinctly unimpressed Warhurst says. “How dare they appropriate our Bluey into anything else that has no basis or origin in reality? It’s no good – I was like ‘what are they doing?’”

Meet the Neighbours, SBS, November 1, 7.30pm.