By Dominic Cadden 

“We’ve murdered a lot of the bogans and young mothers and stored them neatly away in barrels.”
“We’ve built some warships to stop the koalas invading.”
“We made up heaps of bullshit ‘festivals’ to bring people to our pissant town and we passed a strongly worded law telling our thousands of heavily armed bikies not to play with each other.”
“So where the #@!*ing hell are you?”

As a tourism campaign, this wouldn’t be very good, even by Australian standards. Yet this is the type of message you often hear about Adelaide, ‘City of churches’, a moniker that’s gravely linked to its reputation as the ‘Murder Capital of Australia’. In February, Adelaide football coach Aurelio Vidmar called his home city a ‘pissant town’ and got off lightly for it because most people outside Adelaide agreed. The truth is, Adelaide’s reputation is based on a reality that’s a little outdated and bent out of shape.

Let’s make one thing clear: Australian Institute of Criminology figures show Adelaide has a lower rate of homicide than the national average, except for years when there’s a larger than usual mass murder. The notoriety comes from the bizarre and creepy way that the locals kill each other ­– Senior Vice Squad detectives out for a spot of ‘poofta bashing’, corpses in freezers, tortured and mutilated bodies kept in barrels in bank vaults. Although usually a solo pursuit, serial killers in Adelaide strangely tend to work in groups. The upside for Adelaide is that the AFL awarded the city a second team in the national comp to give homicidal men another group activity. 

It is true, however, that Adelaide has a lower number of children than other Australian cities, probably due to the number of mothers murdered. Prior to September this year, eight mothers had been killed by their partners in the previous eight months, although an Unley woman’s husband also died after his wife set fire to her husband’s genitals.

It all sounds like something out of a horror movie (SAW, perhaps?), but Adelaide is a fertile place for talent that’s not always directed to spectacular ways of killing. Rupert Murdoch and News Corporation came out of Adelaide, as did Boost Juice and many of Australia’s top music acts, artists and performers. Some would say that such enterprise and ambition was borne out of a desperate desire to escape the city. Others would say the same thing.

South Australia is called ‘The Festival State’ and Adelaide alone has 400 yearly festivals to drag people in. For a city of just over a million, some of these festivals are truly startling. The Adelaide Fringe Festival is the second-biggest festival of its kind in the world and the city hosts the largest Christmas Parade anywhere. They can’t all be good, though. The Festival of Ideas, which, among other things, discusses ideas for other festivals, looks about as fun as a four-day festival of world music. WOMADelaide, on the other hand, brings together people from all over the world who can’t sing or play an instrument properly for a four-day festival of world music.

Adelaide was traditionally home to arch-conservatives who made the local German Lutherans look like Charlie Sheen celebrating a positive STD screening. Then came the rise of Don Dunstan, the radical reformist Premier. For nine years in the 1970s Dunstan transformed South Australia’s arts, culture and society. Things loosened up so much that MPs even began wearing shorts in Parliament and in 1973 Dunstan himself once arrived at the House dressed in what media described as ‘flesh-pink hot pants’. Today Adelaide is a strange mix of libertines who see the city  as a potential artistic and social utopia at the end of the world and an old guard to the right of Genghis Khan who no doubt listen to the country’s worst shock-jock, Bob Francis. Francis calls little old ladies ‘Dickbrain’ and has demanded a judge's face be smashed in, all live on air. (God showed His sense of humour last year when Francis contracted golden staph in his leg after he fell while urinating naked in his garden). Bikies like it because it’s an easy place to control the drug trade. Perhaps its apocalyptic radicalism comes from living with the threat of invasion from amassed forces of koalas on nearby Kangaroo island, although crack squads of government operatives have made pre-emptive strikes to either sterilise or capture and ‘relocate’ thousands of the scheming animals.

So Adelaide’s a bit odd but it’s odd in good ways, too. The nightlife is all laid out in one straight stretch with one of everything, from exotic showgirl clubs to geeky kids scratching records over arty slide shows. The vineyards of Adelaide Hills, Barossa Valley and McLaren Vale, all just a short drive from the city, are flooded with the best wines in the country – any sub-standard winemakers are deported to Queensland. The quality and variety of local beers and foods are as good as anywhere in Europe, yet in 2008 KPMG rated Adelaide the third-least expensive developed city in the world. The city centre is based around beautiful parkland, there are sedate beaches just to the south and there are four distinct seasons. Yet with so many locals leaving or quitting regular work to focus on imaginative homicide projects, the State government has been pimping the city out, telling potential migrants, investors and business owners, “You want to get busy? She's a sure thing. She’s not very big up front, but she tries hard and she's up for anything.” 

The government actually writes to anyone applying for a skilled migration visa to Australia and begs them to come to SA. Agencies such as SA Great have been set up to lure young people to Adelaide and tax incentives such as a 10% rebate on all eligible South Australian labour expenditure. The city once relied on manufacturing and defence contracts but now it’s pushing tech industries, the arts and education. In fact, Adelaide is sometimes referred to as ‘The Learning City’. Mind you, with curious infrastructure such as the reversible one-way freeway that's open 22 hours a day and lifelike sculptures of pigs with their snouts in public garbage bins sending a worrisome message to tourists, this could actually mean that the city is actually still learning.

Perth, Sydney and Melbourne might be the places to sell your soul for a fat pay cheque, but following a carefully structured comeback after the economic collapse of the early 1990s, Adelaide is now a land of opportunity and quality of life. So let the rest of Australia make antiquated jokes about the place. Watch the Adelaide bikies move to Victoria. See Perth’s economic climate shrink like a scrotum on ice every time the Chinese demand for commodities falters. Maybe it's time to make the move to Adelaide.