The Bilooga Himbo

The town of Bilooga is famous for its good-looking but brainless young men.

When the fortunes of the global economy turned into lumpy yoghurt in the twilight decades of the second millenium AD and a fifth wave of post-industrial innovation swept the land, manufacturing withered up and all the woolen mills, brace assembly plants and tractor blade accessory factories along the sturdy Nelson Ranges fell into rusty ruin. A think tank led by Professor Bright, who was, according to his webpage, Emeritus professor and Goulburn Chair in the History of Ruralness, first suggested the town invest in hi-tech robotics for the production of plastic modules necessary in the assembly of Teenage Ninja Turtle figurines for a Japanese cartel looking to move plant for the tax perks. When this fell through unemployment soared and the future of the town looked bleak. Then, in their second report, the think tankers hit upon a somewhat more robust idea when a consultant pointed out that - other than the mine disaster of 1931 - the only thing for which Bilooga was rightly famous was its good-looking but notoriously brainless young men.

For whatever reason - a quirk of Darwinian mutation or the massive arsenic content in the watertable - there were several key families of the district known for producing big, loping, handsome dolts. There was the Walters family, for example. There was Bruce Walters. Barry Walters. Reece Walters. Toby Walters. Mick Walters. Arnold Walters. All as handsome as Hollywood but as dumb as Detroit. Then there were the Hudsons and the Bishops and the Maslins and the Farrier's and the Turners and the McCourtneys. Not a daughter - or a brain-cell - among them. The Drapers had eight strapping sons with a collective IQ of 15 - they did have one daughter, Louise, but even she was six foot three, simple and looked like Errol Flynn. For whatever reason, a cluster of local bloodlines were prodiguous in this department and local lads towered over all-comers in both earthy goodlooks and sheer natural stupidity.

Regrettably, though, these gorgeous hunks of thickness showed no inclination for normal pursuits such as football, athletics or farm work and so had never excelled in the things that locals valued. Instead, after floundering around in numerous sales assistant positions, they all eventually found their way into the fashion industry, a fact about which no one liked to talk. Thus was Professor Bright's brainwave. "Let's break down the barriers!" he said and proposed a chic-led recovery. He wrote to Carvy Delure, the fashion talent agent, who jumped on a jet and decided to turn Bilooga into a stud from which to seed pretty boys onto the catwalks of Europe. Soon people began to talk about it as an "export industry" and the men's hairdressers of the town tried to tell the tax department they were "value adding".

For many years young lads of Bilooga had made their way in the magazine and advertising industries as nostril-flaring pieces of dense masculine meat. Roy Draper had modelled briefs in full colour at an international level. Neville Maslin was the eighteen year old blonde bombshell on the Kellogg's cornflakes ad. Young Jake Turner had left a good job in hardware sales to model ties in Sydney. Most famously, back in the seventies, the very hot Alec Hudson had gone to New York and been an extra in most of the Village People videos including YMCA where he can be seen making the letter C. The local beefsteak was a proven product. Carvey Delure opened an office and the talent flooded in.

It was at this stage that the Maslins hung a shingle on the roadside saying 'Maslin Stud Services' and people began to wonder. Was crusty old Bob Maslin, a potato farmer who had taken on the shape and demeanour of his produce, offering to service women for a fee? A rumour went around that he was leaving his wife Carmel for a nubile breeder from the United Arab Emirates. Another rumour said he'd tried to insure his DNA for a living fortune. Meanwhile the McCourtneys had hired a high profile agent for their son Carl who, even though he was only thirteen, already looked a bit like Brad Pitt. They were expecting big things and big money. The town prospered with an influx of lawyers, sub-agents, male beuticians, photography salons and plastic surgeons. Some said things had gone too far when the two eldest Walters boys signed a walloping contract to expose their backsides in a beer commercial aimed at the thirty-something set. Carvy Delure remarked on the fibre of the land. "Such boyz!" he exclaimed. In a career stretching across three decades he'd never seen such buttocks. The tough red earth. The relentless sky. The grit. The canola. The broad antipodian gait.

The most successful discovery of them all was the rugged but boyish Lance Bishop, with Sinatra blue eyes, a chiselled physique, glistening abs and a stoney, solid jaw that made him look like a famous aviator. He was the dream package. Everyone who met him told him he looked like a sober version of the guy out of Law & Order. Carvey signed him up and flew him to Milan where he wowed them wearing the new season's designs. One day he was drenching sheep and the next he was strutting his frame for the big names. The outrageous Bilal de' Molyneus said he was a natural. This is what Lance related to the press when he arrived for a shoot in Basel. He was in fine form. "Lance," he explained. "It means a pointy stick." When a member of the French press asked about his  contract, Lance said he would be reviewing it "anally".

"Anally?" asked the reporter, looking twice.

"Yeah. Every twelve months," said Lance, talking as if it was the reporter who was clueless.

As breeding stock the Bishops had known four or five generations of grinning ignoramuses. Lance was pure-bred (if indeed not in-bred.) He told the woman at the airport that he didn't want a window seat because he was afraid of mussing up his hair. All the same, he appeared in Cosmo, Blom, Alpha and Brut, among other lifestyle magazines. Then in June he was photographed pouting in his Y-fronts with a teddy bear by salon master Marlon Drochslesher. He had arrived.

It was after a show in the spring of that whirlwind year that he encountered ageing socialite Sonya Brickencraft who needed a toy-boy to appease her nagging melancholy. She found him slightly Kurt Russell.

"Do you find him slightly Kurt Russell?" she asked Alistair, her secretary.

"Slightly," he said.

This was good enough for her. She decided to marry him because, if nothing else, the reception would be a hoot and she could at last fulfil her long time ambition of parading around with an Australian bushman on her arm in front of Penelope Greystone and her crowd of ugly bitches.

"Ooo," she said, feeling his biceps at the wedding, "I like the way they breed 'em back in Bilooga."

"My grandma used to put sheep poo in my boots," said Lance, apparently misunderstanding.

Everyone looked at each other sideways.

"Quite," said Sonya, patting him on the head.  "Quite."

Unfortunately, the biceps from Bilooga only managed to amuse her for a further fortnight and after that he became the butt of her endless jokes. She nicknamed him "Einstein" and treated him with a calibre of contempt that outstreched the capacity of his rustic wit by several thousand miles. At length, she grew bitter.

When the women among a group of guests made intimations of her splendid fortune, she had to tell them the truth.

"Do you know Lance's idea of long and hard?" she asked. "Grade Four! Although, God knows, Grade Three was the worst six years of his life."

At this point Lance walked in with a leather jacket and his hair slicked back.

"Rebel without a clue," observed Sonya. Then, "You'll have to excuse Lance," she said, as he sat down with them, "He has a brain the size of a pea in the mornings."

"In the mornings?" asked someone.

"Sure," she said. "It swells up overnight. You know why God created Lance?" she continued rhetorically. "Because sheep can't bring icecubes from the fridge, that's why. Fetch me some icecubes will you Lance?"

Smiling, Lance slapped his knee, stood up again and said "Sure darl" in his usual goofy way and sauntered off to the kitchen wiggling his backside as he went.

"The thing I like about driving with Lance in the passenger's seat is that I don't feel guilty about parking in the handicap zone," concluded Sonya. "I knew there would be compensations."

Six months later, however, she swapped him for a doberman. The occasion was Lance swallowing a vitamin tablet at breakfast. "A tab-let," he ventured, obviously musing, "is a small tablet. Just like a starlet is a small star!" He announced it like a great discovery. He had just noticed the diminutive suffix -let on the end of tablet.

"But a tablet can't be a small tablet, because a full-sized one is also called a tablet," Sonya pointed out.

Lance didn't get it. "What do you mean?" he said.

Sonya looked at him, thought, then stood up. "That does it!" she said. "I'm getting me a doberman."

The exchange was made that afternoon. Lance returned home. He felt spat out, but Carvey Delure said that with a new hair-do and a miracle in elocution he might get a minor spot on the Bold and the Beautiful. This put him between lives. He went for walks in the forest. He explored the old mine sites and purple hills of toxic castings picturesque against the spare blue sky. Hot clean air. He caught up with his old flame, Linda Frimpsky from Elegant Ridge.

"So what's Paris like?" she asked, dreaming.

"Its good," said Lance thinking back. "Yeah good."

"That's good," said Linda. "Good."

"Yeah good," Lance agreed.

There are advantages to being cosmopolitan and scintillating repartee is one of them. He still thought a seizure was a Roman emperor but he was a man of the world and had seen the beautiful people and Linda Frimpsky was impressed. So too were several of the Walterses and other young men who all aspired to walk the walk and talk the talk and be snaffled up by ageing socialites in need of toy-boys and who held up Lance as their hero. He should have told them not to worry. They were handsome enough and dumb enough to go all the way. They had that famous Bilooga breeding. That very moment new talent scouts from the fashion halls of Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur were heading to the district to mine it for models. Americans were booking into motels in search of stars for Porky sequels. Bilooga rode the bump. There was a future for her sons after all.

By rights, it should have been the consultant to the second Bright report who took the credit, but Lance became the emblem of the newfound sense of achievement. He began to appear at fundraisers with his teddy bear and Y-fronts to relive the famous moment, and the crowds came along. The Chamber of Commerce funded the Lance Bishop Road to Milan Scholarship for many up and comings. He gave talks. He related anecdotes. He was guest of honour at the Lion's Club. He spoke to the Young Jewish Mans Association about the pitfalls of being a good looking Genital.

Then came the blue dildo controversy. It ruined his career. There is no need, dear reader, to relate the details of the whole affair, but it involved a female customs official, a Samoan tourist, a group of Catholic school girls and a very small and determined dog. It happened as he was leaving for a tour of Bali. It ruined his chances with Linda Frimpsky too. From there he went into a downwards spiral until at last he succumbed to his single greatest feat of stupidity when, at a low point in his days, he was talked into Pentecostalism and volunteered to preach the gospel to Muslims in wartorn Iraq. He renounced his former vanities and was suckered into saving souls.

Some were surprised at this apparent display of spiritual depth but, as his father observed, he might as well have gassed himself in the tractor shed. Sure enough, within three weeks he was captured by bearded mujahadeen who put out a video with their new camera. There was Lance, his hair immaculate, bound to a chair in an empty room.

"They're making bombs," he managed to whisper. "And they keep saying they've got nitrates. I don't know if they're cheaper than their day rates. It seems like a funny thing to tell me. As far as I'm concerned I'm staying here free. I'm not paying any rate!"

Not surprisingly, they chopped off his head. His body was never recovered but his head was mailed to his family in a gruesome delivery, who then preserved it for the Bilooga public library.

And that, dear reader, is where the present writer stands, not far from the DVD selection and the historical novels, trying to make sense of Lance Bishop, the Bilooga Himbo, on display. It has a glass case and a fluorescent mount. You can see where the curious poke the glass.

What moral might we draw? Perhaps a pun about getting ahead might be in order? Or perhaps this grisly memorial says more about free market economics? Perhaps it is a testament to how the fifth wave of post-industrial innovation swept the land? As a symbol there is an intriguing ambivalence. Is he a martyr to the War on Terror or to the War on Wrinkles? There's no hurry to find an answer. This emblematic handsomeness, somehow indigenous in this region, is frozen in formaldehyde and will remain as a stillpoint forever as the town's fortunes rise and fall with the on-going coagulations of the global curds and whey and their abstracted impact upon the rusted out communities right along the sturdy Nelson Ranges.