‘Proud, pleased, gobsmacked’: Tidy Towns honours the unsung heroes of small Australian communities

The awards may look a little different from the original anti-litter tourism effort of the 1960s, but they’re still a way for far-flung towns to showcase their civic pride Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast It’s a quintessential Australian image. Driving down a freeway or gravel track on a road trip and coming across a well-weathered sign at the entrance to a community reading “tidy town winner” in proud lettering. It may come as a soothing reassurance that the town you’re about to enter will be relatively litter free, or stir up a sense of deja vu of a similar sign on another road you’ve seen some years ago, perhaps on the other side of the country. The National Tidy Towns Sustainability awards event, to take place in Launceston this weekend, began as a West Australian tourism initiative in the 1960s and has grown into one of Australia’s longest running community programs, with more than 4,000 volunteers contributing to projects that entered this year’s awards. The state winners competing for the coveted national title range from Ikuntji in the NT, population 150, and Williams in WA, population 1,040, to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria