Nanango Celebrates Australia Day

January 29, 2017

The South Burnett Regional Council, the Nanango Tourism and Development Association and the Nanango Show Society jointly hosted Nanango’s exuberant Australia Day celebrations on Friday.

Activities got underway early with a gold coin donation breakfast that offered scrambled eggs, home made baked beans, sausages, toast, tea and coffee sprinkled with a few lashings of bush poetry.

The breakfast attracted about 120 guests and at 9:00am – with digestion well underway – Nanango historian Liz Caffery introduced the town’s 2018 Australia Day award winners and James Webb sang the National Anthem.

Then NaTDA president Barry Green advised the audience to head out of the building so they could get a good view of the Australia Day dog high jumps being held on the main oval.

By this time the audience had swollen to 150 and they quickly took up positions on the shaded terraces to watch the competition and applaud the winners.

As usual, the high jump had two sections: one for very small dogs, who had to jump onto a forklift pallet; and another for bigger dogs, who had to leap into the tray of a ute suspended between a forklift and a truck.

The little dogs went first, and this year the section was won by Dana Frohloff and her dog Charlie, who fought off determined efforts by many equally small dogs to claim line honours.

For the larger dogs, the ute started the contest about 1500mm off the ground and this was steadily ramped up to 2200mm – about 7 foot – as the field thinned out to just three competitors: Lauchlan Stone and Pippa; Wayne Gilliland with last year’s winner Jess; and Nick Aird and his dog Bindi.

In the end, Nick triumphed over Wayne with Lauchlan coming third, and Nick’s dog Bindi almost – but not quite – broke the competition’s record into the bargain.

After this, 39 children took part in a tug-o-war over two rounds, which was followed by morning tea, cold watermelon and the drawing of the day’s raffle.