The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race is inspired by a true story of perceived injustice around the weight of potatoes
The Robertson Show says its Championship Potato Race is open to men and women. Writer Melanie Tait campaigned to make the race more accessible and now her story has inspired a film starring Robyn Nevin.
The green rolling hills of the Southern Highlands are dotted with contented cows and the best homes are guarded by manicured hedges. There is no shortage of celebrities with property in this verdant region of NSW: from Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban, who own a black Angus cattle stud in Sutton Forest, to rocker Jimmy Barnes and wife Jane, and actors Robyn Nevin and Miriam Margolyes. Yet another national treasure also calls the area home: a giant brown mound known as the Big Potato.
The town of Robertson is historically potato farming country and the monument – once named Australia’s “sh..est big thing” by the satirical Sh.t Towns of Australia Facebook page – is situated on the main street to prove it. In the general store next door you’ll not only find bags of potatoes for sale among the fresh produce but Big Potato T-shirts should you wish to have a souvenir of this truly weird yet beloved statue.
Recently there’s been a buzz in Robertson as film crews have descended on the town to film the Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race, a movie based on a play by former ABC presenter Melanie Tait, who has also written the screenplay.
The production has been touted as the biggest thing to hit Robbo – as it’s affectionately called by locals – since Babe, that gorgeous George Miller movie about a sheep pig on Hoggett’s Farm that was filmed in the area. But while Appleton is a similarly feel-good film imbued with that country community spirit, the story’s concept sprung from a real sense of injustice.
“It was inspired by something that happened in my real life,” says Tait, speaking on the phone from her home in inner Sydney. “None of the characters are real but the setting is pretty much real. And the inciting incident is real.”
Tait’s Robertson roots run deep. Until recently she had often joked she was “the Big Potato heiress” because her parents had owned the monument and the general store for much of her life, before selling up last year. And while she hasn’t lived in Robertson since she was a teenager, she watches with curiosity the town’s great annual event held as part of the Robertson Show in autumn: the famous Robertson potato races. “There are never enough weeks for me to train for it. I’m so unfit,” Tait jokes of the race, in which contestants run 400m around the showgrounds carrying a sack of potatoes on their backs. “But every year I would go and check it out. And I noticed (in 2018) that the men’s prize money was $1000 (plus cash prizes up to 10th place) and the women’s was $200 (plus cash prizes up to third place). And I mentioned it to a friend. And once I’d mentioned it to a friend, I kind of had to do something about it.”
Living in Tasmania at the time, she wound up creating an official GoFundMe page to raise money to make the prizes equal. But the campaign went “a little bit viral”, raising $3500 in donations and setting off an unexpected chain of events.
“I went into it really naively,” Tait says. “I thought I would just raise the money and hand it over to the show and they would be like ‘thank you, we hadn’t noticed’. But it ended up being this really awful experience. Lots of people were really upset with me. Online I started to cop a fair bit of abuse, as did my parents at the shop. It was all pretty awful.” Tait admits she didn’t consult with the Robertson Show before running the campaign and that perhaps there was some resistance to an “out-of-towner who doesn’t even live here trying to fix things”.
But a spokesperson for the Robertson Show told Review there has never been a “men’s race”. “The major race, The Australian Championship Potato Race, is an open event,” they said. “Even though women have raced in the open race - including two at this year’s show - it is most likely that it has been misperceived as a men’s race because the overwhelming proportion of entrants are male.”
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A few years ago the show introduced a women’s race and junior races with lesser weights of potatoes to encourage greater community participation. The main prize for the women’s race in 2018 was $200 for carrying 12.5kg of potatoes 400m, while for the open race it was $1000 for carrying 50kg of potatoes the same distance.
As far as Tait is concerned, the “open” race is known as a race for men and “was run pretty much entirely by men with a weight of potatoes that’s roughly the size of a small woman (50kgs).”
She hung around at the finish line in 2018 and was pleased to hear from the female winners that they had been given the prize money raised by the campaign. But despite her success, Tait says the whole experience left her feeling like “she didn’t have a home anymore”.
“I moved away from Robertson when I was 17 or 18, as you do when you’re a teenager, and I’ve spent my whole life trying to get back there,” she says. “(Although) so many people were really happy that I had done (the campaign) at the show, it still was just a disconcerting thing.”
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Today on a blue-skied autumn day, with the smell of fresh cut grass on the chilly highlands’ wind, locals in checked shirts and akubras languidly hang on the bleachers at the Robertson Showgrounds as actors Robyn Nevin and Genevieve Lemon (Ticket to Paradise, The Power of the Dog) walk around the perimeter of the central oval with the film crew bustling around them. Today they are filming a scene from the movie’s climax: the fictional Appleton Potato Race, which of course is based on the real thing.
Nevin, who wears a floral dress and navy puffer jacket, her silver hair combed back at the sides, plays a cantankerous medical receptionist named Joan in the film. When 30-something year-old doctor Penny (played by Claire van der Boom) returns home to Robertson from Sydney after years of living away and decides to hold a fundraising campaign to level the reward for the race, Joan is among the disgruntled community members.
“Joan represents the kind of force against change and allows the light to shine on the darker aspects of a community’s way of life,” Nevin says of her character. “She’s very stuck in her ways and for that reason she’s deeply unhappy inside. But she sees the light at the end and she does come around.”
The cherished Australian actor – whose career spans television, stage and film – lives in the Highlands on 3ha with her US-born actor and screenwriter husband Nicholas Hammond, along with their rescue horses, a few sheep and two jack russell terriers. While she has been enjoying the short commute to set, she has also been juggling the filming of a horror film in Sydney, a contrast she later tells me is exciting “because the roles could not be more starkly different”.
Appleton, she says, appealed to her because it’s an Australian-made film and an Australian story “and I think that’s very attractive to people who have grown up, as I have, in the theatre, with new Australian writing as part of my life’s work. There are lots of stage plays that are written and then they have one successful season and then disappear forever. And maybe there are those plays in that category that could make the transition to screen. Good on the producers for seeing (the play’s) potential for a movie because it does translate very beautifully.”
Broome-raised actor Claire van der Boom spent more than 10 years based in LA but has many Australian productions to her name, including Claudia Karvan’s classic series Love My Way, about a group of friends navigating life’s dramas in Sydney. She says her role as the main character Penny is relatable, in the sense that she moved away as a young person but tries to keep a connection to her hometown. At one point, while she was living in Sydney, van der Boom went back to Broome – where she relishes the frogs, humidity and lightning storms of the wet season – but realised she would be “too much of a city girl now” to stay.
“From my experience, my childhood is always with me and I feel really deeply connected to it and I think Penny is the same,” she says. “She tries to relocate back and finds that she’s a little naive, perhaps, about how difficult that might be and how much she has changed.”
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Before Tait worked as a journalist, she cut her teeth in theatre in London. She was just 20 years old when she wrote The Vegemite Tales, a play about a group of young people in a share house in London, that wound up having a two-year run on the West End. Although the Potato Race incident left an unpleasant taste, she knew immediately that the issues of feminism and class in a small country town would be rich material for the stage. Friend and theatre director Priscilla Jackman pitched the idea to the Ensemble Theatre, on Sydney’s North Shore, which was quick to program the play for the 2019 season.
The movie – one of eight film and TV productions supported by the state government’s Regional Film Fund last financial year – is produced by Congaline Productions and EQ Media for Paramount+.
Looking back at the prizemoney debacle, Tait offers some deeper perspectives on why some members of the community may have found her activism offensive.
“If you think about somewhere like Robertson, where the industries were dairy, cheese and potatoes, none of those industries exist anymore. A lot of people who worked in those industries live in the town and have to try to find work. There’s this thing how the women, who keep everything together, don’t want men to feel bad about themselves. And somehow something like (the campaign) felt like an attack on men, for people who didn’t think about it properly.”
The Robertson Show, on the other hand, says “some community members saw there was no need to change what was in place” because it was widely known that the Australian Championship Potato Race was open to both men and women.
But the community has rallied around the film. A local person set up a Facebook page inviting people to be extras; co-executive producer Lisa Duff says 30 parents and their children arrived with notes excusing them from school to be in the production.
On filming day at the showgrounds there’s a real buzz. Some of the 100 community members who have signed up as extras are dressed in jeans and overalls and are taking directions for a scene in which they mill around a little market place – complete with a spud truck and live band – at the fictional potato festival.
Third assistant director Michael Boyle tells them to turn around and take their walk again. “It’s a relaxing day at the carnival,” he says, gesticulating in the air, “some of you need to slow down a bit.”
This is where the real potato race is held each year and if you look on the website for the Robertson Show, you’ll see the prize money for the 50kg championship race and the women’s race is now equal.
Says Tait of the result: “That’s the outcome that in my heart of hearts I wanted.”
Watch The Appleton Ladies’ Potato Race on 10 and 10 Play, Wednesday July 26 at 7.30pm or stream on Paramount+ from Thursday July 27.