Getting Bashed for Children’s Charities

A very big man squeezed into a red lycra superhero jumpsuit is aghast. “I’ve been lied to and cheated out of a million bucks by the Chairman.” Can’t something be done to rectify this injustice? Mr Incredible stops and stares at me as though I’m completely mad. “Hell, no,” he huffs indignantly. “After all, we’re on the bloody Bash, aren’t we?”

Cheating, games, ridiculous costumes and general skulduggery are all part of how about 300 South Australians blow off steam after raising more than $1 million each year for Variety Club, a charity supporting children’s medical needs.

Indeed, the annual SA Bash – a comical eight-day car rally that weaves along hundreds of kilometres of various remote tracks, lost roads and dusty highways across South Australia – has become a ritual of epic proportions, from the amounts of money raised for children’s charities, to the exorbitant lengths that rally participants go to win (or steal) Bash Bucks in the hope of taking out event awards.

The Variety Club Bash is not like other fundraising marathons; funds are deposited to the charity before the cavalcade of cars starts rolling. Each team must present Variety with a donation of at least $7500 to enter a car, though most don’t stop at the minimum. The record is $176,962, set by Sue Pearce, Roz Chow and Ann Ewer; 24 of 69 entrants last year each donated more than $22,000. Since the first SA Bash in 1989, Variety has amassed more than $20 million from fundraising. It’s a commitment that demands year-round work from participants, which explains why the Bash is such a wild celebration – it’s their reward, the payback for persistent work to raise funds.

Bash wildness manifests itself in many ways, from costumed Elvises trying to earn Bash Bucks by setting up an impromptu vision of Vegas with a roulette wheel beside a desert billabong, to dancing around a bonfire while guest entertainer James Blundell, one of Australia’s most famous country rock artists, sings up a storm. Most of this involves very enthusiastic consumption of alcohol. Banter can get rather ribald, and showing off and stupid stunts are the norm, but the laughter is rich and shared between everyone; the Bash is no place for shrinking violets.

Like any fancy dress party, people step outside of themselves and play out roles in more gregarious, animated fashion. The exasperating fact is that everyone has the stamina to take this party on the road – for an entire week.

Breakfast is a rather amusing affair. Everyone’s bleary as a consequence of the previous night’s frivolity and another night in the swag, but they’ve all got up at dawn, packed their cars and are queued for food in their dishevelled costumes – lady penguins and red-and-white striped Wallys, bedraggled hippies, gals in Barbie outfits, Buzz Lightyear and big lumpy blokes in skirts pretending to be Virgin Airlines (irony intended) flight attendants, with wigs on crooked and lipstick askew. Many are wearing palpable hangovers like death masks. Most are cackling with raspy laughs at recollections of the previous night’s antics. No matter how shabby you’re feeling, it’s comforting to see that so many more are faring much worse.

As for me, I’ve donned a lycra supersuit to join the Incredibles in Car 33, a growling 1970 Ford Fairlane. Wearing underpants on the outside of a superhero suit makes you feel rather incredible, though the Hippies insist on calling us The Invisibles because they really don’t want to look at us in skintight attire. Not even at strapping singer James Blundell, who’s also in costume and enjoying a stint behind the wheel of the Fairlane – proving that he’s still just a big country boy with a hoon steak and the ability to powerslide around sharp bends in dirt tracks.

This is a big reason why many come on the bash – to test their rough road driving skills, and test their beloved old cars. All Bash cars have to be built before June 1970, most of them having been tinkered within backyard sheds to iron out the bugs and breaks from last year’s Bash before cutting them loose on the dodgy dirt roads again. Doug Lehmann, managing director of Peter Lehmann Wines in the Barossa Valley and dressed as one of the Three Little Pigs, dusts off his 1929 Silver Jubilee Buick Tourer. Team Toro has a 1937 Buick Sedan. The Hippies, who hail from Perth, trucked over their 1969 Cadillac Fleetwood convertible to participate.

When they’re not driving, Bashers are usually slaking a powerful thirst. Because of this, the designated driver system is carefully adhered to; everyone in the driver’s seat is breathalyser-tested by Bash officials before leaving the morning campsite and lunchtime site. Those that blow over the blood alcohol limit get put into a passenger’s seat. Organisers know that many eyes are upon this high-profile event, and can’t afford criticism to taint Variety’s achievement. Their code of responsibility and care on the roads is absolute.

The ringmaster of this travelling circus is Bash Chairman Phillip Eglinton, who spent way too much of the event solving crises on a network of radios, and subsequently survived on not much sleep. Having driven his own Bash car for many years, Phillip took over as organiser in 2007. It’s a hefty undertaking; it demands about 20 hours of his time every week of the year. He declares dryly that it’s a neat fit with his profession as a debt collector: “It all just requires a lot of organisation.” While there’s no shortage of people who offer to help, he’s very careful when selecting the Bash committee, to ensure the continuity of a carefully developed and highly successful event structure.

How it all works so efficiently is baffling, because the scale of the Bash now presents a logistical nightmare. Added to the 69 Bash entrants, there’s a caravan of 13 support vehicles and another 13 4WD official vehicles – not to mention transport haulage company boss Peter Cochrane, who’s driving his own semi-trailer between destinations with a load of 200 swags, then donning rigger gloves each afternoon to toss swags out to arriving recipients.

Organising accommodation sites involves a certain mix of miracles and hard work. Phillip called on old friends Richard and Lisa Opie to make their property, Nulla Station, available as a Bash camp for two nights. Philip’s persistence also saw the Murray Darling Basin Authority finally allow the Bash route to travel atop the line of levees outside Wentworth that are out of bounds for public travel – a treat for Bashers that affords spectacular views of Australia’s big inland river system and Lake Victoria.

During each day of the Bash, the improbable and impossible happens on a routine basis. The “fun stops”, constructed to provide a break in the day’s driving, appear like mirages; a marquee in the middle of flat red dirt and saltbush country, serving fresh shucked oysters and chilled white wine. Ian Bidstrup and Brian Paroissien play a significant hand in such matters with Official Vehicle 15 – Ian’s tiny Cessna aeroplane that has been a part of the Bash for 17 years, flying in entertainers, cargoes of fresh seafood and all manner of surprises to remote locations.

More minor miracles happen through Peter Lloyd – a fencing contractor – who, with his two brothers and two more mates, arrives two hours before Bash vehicles roll into evening campsites. They dig latrines, erect flat-packed toilet blocks and their ingeniously designed block of hot-water showers. The next morning they fill the rather pungent holes and move on to the next campsite – an awful lot of labour in what officially constitutes an annual holiday for them.

Larger miracles occur where nine teams of volunteer mechanics – led by Des “Rusty Nuts” Butler, whose achievements in keeping broken cars on the road are spoken of with hushed reverence – are fetching tools from their Mobile Workshops to fix and fabricate unobtainable spare parts for these old cars. “We hate to see anything not make it to the finish line,” says mechanic Nigel Giles. “We do whatever it takes – even if it takes all night – to keep the show on the road.”

This is a common theme among the Bashers. They attend this annual rally for their own enjoyment, but work hard to ensure its continued success and ultimately never lose sight of why they got involved. Many have friends whose sick and stricken children have been direct recipients of Variety’s generosity. It provides the impetus for their support of Variety to go further, for longer.

The Bash, as its frivolous nature suggests, is a mere sideshow to the real work being done, which isn’t lost on even the most fervent revellers, such as Doug Lehmann. “I’m leading a pretty fortunate life, so it’s only right that I should be putting something back in to help others,” he says. “And having fun with this big family of mates just underlines how fortunate I really am.”

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