Peter Goers: Once again we’ve lost SA’s greatest and most popular event

The state’s most beloved event has been rendered pointless, uneconomic and impossible again, and I grieve for it, writes Peter Goers.

Damn COVID. Damn. Damn. Damn.

Can someone please tell me why SA Health allows 15,000 people to sit at an AFL game and will only allow 10,000 people a day to attend the Royal Show (which is about the number of people working and volunteering there daily) thus making it pointless, uneconomic and impossible.

I grieve for The Show. I’m even going to miss the intense frustration of not being able to get past people ambling around with pushers.

Once again we’ve lost SA’s greatest and most popular event, the Royal Adelaide Show. It’s the event which has the best spirit. I’m so sorry for The Show society and all its workers and I’m so sorry for the whole state. I’m even sorry for me ‘cos I love it.

Where else can I eat fat enclosed in fat and dipped in tomato sauce and fat sprinkled with cinnamon. Yummy.

Once again we’ll miss our annual culinary treat of a Dagwood Dog and “get ‘em while they’re hot” cinnamon doughnuts and all the other many joys of the show.

Due to dreaded Covid it’s cancelled for another year – for only the fifth time in its nearly 200-year history.

Only wars, pandemics and the Victorian Gold Rush stopped it. It’s not like the Olympics – it can’t happen without people there. How do we love The Show – let us count the ways as once again it becomes something we remember as in a dream. So imagine it with me.

Fourth generation Victoria-based Show ride vendors Russell and Amanda Watkins had hoped to be up and running in Adelaide again this year. Picture: Keryn Stevens

Like most South Australians I’ve loved The Show all my life. It’s a glorious rite of passage for all ages. I love the parades in the main arena and the fireworks which are the climax of the night. I love checking out the chooks, especially those chooks with long tails – fowl drag queens.

The country meets the city and I love seeing the cockies in their RM Williams finest clobber. I love eating in the Members’ Dining Room under the southern grandstand with the best buffet in town – and it’s fully open to the public. I love yarning with old friends you only see once a year. There.

I love watching people – teenage boys on a lair, kids on tentative first dates warming up to holding hands, families with an impossible number of show bags hooked on to prams and pushers and people carrying absurdly long sticks of mettwurst. I love looking at kiddies wide-eyed with awe and excitement. It’s a place of joy, energy, enchantment. The proletariat on parade.

I love a cold collation at the celebrated CWA Cafe and a pastie at the Red Dove Cafe and a rest for weary feet. I love sideshow alley and the screams of those defying gravity. Ever since I went down with Nicole Cornes on the Mega Drop I’ve retired from whizzy rides and it was a good, final burst of excitement.

When you go to The Show you remember being a kid. I remember eating lunch on the lawns by the Rothman’s Pavilion where I saw (for free) a documentary on the erection of an electricity tower in NZ.

The Woodroofe’s display in the old Hamilton Hall was always a spooky, black-lit highlight as you slurped on your lemonade or Big Sars spider. I love checking out the cooking (so competitively fought out) and most especially I love the flowers and the handicrafts – “the works” as we used to call them.

CEO John Rothwell says he is devastated the Show has been cancelled again at such late notice. Picture: Keryn Stevens

It’s all a shared happy place and the best of, for, by and with us.

What do The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Chubby Checker, Liberace, Yehudi Menuhin, Louis Armstrong, Manfred Mann, Gene Pitney, The Boston Pops Orchestra, The Kinks, Wayne Newton, The Monkees, The Who, Gary Glitter, Jethro Tull, Johnnie Ray, Alvin Stardust, Barry White, Don McLean, Bobby Rydell, Roy Orbison, Peter and Paul but not Mary and Shirley Bassey have in common? They all peed in a large terracotta urinal backstage at Centennial Hall at the Showgrounds. If you’re lucky you can see this historic urinal at the excellent Royal Show Archives.

I love buying kewpie dolls for my best girls and keeping up that wonderful tradition. The only thing wrong with the Royal Show is its name. It’s the People’s Show. So there’s a lot to look forward to next year, please!

Sorry to everyone who makes it happen and we keep the faith and it will be back and we’ll love it all the more.

Most importantly we may not have The Show at Wayville but it will remain a vaccination centre so GET VACCINATED and I’m shouting at you to GET VACCINATED as it’s the only hope we have of having our wonderful Show next year and the good old normal. Remember that?

Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide

Originally published as Peter Goers: Once again we’ve lost SA’s greatest and most popular event