SA Heaps good. Like good but better

This is the grand tourism campaign currently attempting to lure visitors to the southern state. I do not want to blow my own trumpet but when I lived there it used to be SA Great and Sensational Adelaide, now after only two short years in my absence it has slipped to only being better than good.

I would like to see the scale.

• Great
• Damn good
• Heaps good
• Good
• A bit of alright
• Better than ACT
• Giving it a crack
• Sorry

It is just so defeatist. The government is essentially telling the world that it is not that South Australia is not a bad place but rather it is just not a great example of an excellent one. Such an inferiority complex, I am surprised SA is not sitting in the corner complaining that no one ever want to play with it.

The website www.heapsgoodsa.com.au suggests that the following South Australian places, events people and stuff are all heaps good; Fruchocs, Adelaide Pie Cart (home of the pie floater), Central Markets, Emu Bay Kangaroo Island (previously voted Australia’s best beach), Adelaide Fringe, Monarto Zoo and the Heysen Trail. All of things offer some credibility to the site, but keep looking.

It also lists The Advertiser (South Australia’s only daily newspaper that as its name suggests does not make the reporting of actual news its min priority), random fish and chip shops, bakeries, pubs and pizza stores, an online scrabble community (if it is online is it really unique to SA? Though I am starting to understand why SA is no longer great if that is the best they have to offer) and a cardboard cut out of Men In Black. This right a left over advertising poster from the 1997 Will Smith film is one of the things that make South Australia heaps good.

But what about the people; no sign of Lleyton Hewitt, Dame Roma Mitchell (Australia’s first female QC), Sir Howard Florey (discoverer of the medicinal benefits of penicillin), David Hicks, Sunrise’s David Koch or Sir Douglas Mawson (of Antarctica fame). There was just not room for such luminaries on a list that posts people like Pete from Craigmore, Kylie from Wayville or the pre-eminent Gavo from Stirling.

What have they done to deserve such accolades? Nothing more than typing their names onto the website. But as their mates tell them, “Yous are heaps good.”

They are like good but better.