ARIAH PARK – Pickup trucks, cowboy boots and a 24-hour booze-fuelled party in the outback: Welcome to modern-day dating in Australia’s bush, where swiping right is not an option.
For single men and women on remote farms or in tiny villages, “Bachelor and Spinster” balls offer a better chance of finding love than dating apps like Tinder.
The balls, a decades-old tradition in outback Australia, still attract thousands of young adults looking for love – or to get rolling drunk.
“It’s very old-school,” Emily Pitt, a 24-year-old from the former gold rush town of Gulgong, tells AFP.
“It’s how country singles meet each other because you’re rural, and there’s hundreds of kilometres between you.”
Surrounded by vast tracts of wheat and canola, Ariah Park, some 400 kilometres west of Sydney, is better known for grain-growing than big parties.
It has a population of just 500, and the main street – with its row of historic buildings with wide verandahs – looks preserved in time.
But on the last Saturday of October, the usually peaceful village is inundated with pickup trucks, which roar up to a dried-out paddock to deposit partygoers.
About 1 500 people showed up for this year’s outdoor drinking and dancing extravaganza, the second-biggest turnout in the event’s 32-year history.
While the ball has a black-tie dress code, the warm-up party is a casual affair, with people wearing scruffy T-shirts, shorts and flip-flops and drinking heavily.
“It’s just fun. You meet people, you drink, you party,” says five-time B&S partygoer Claudia Bailey, who travelled more than 200 kilometres to attend the celebration.
“We got here Friday night and haven’t slept yet, so it’s just completely different – nothing like clubbing or anything. It’s just a different vibe,” the 21-year-old says.
When night falls, partygoers change into their formal attire and pack into a marquee, where they stomp their boots and toss their cowboy hats into the air as they dance to country rock tunes belted out by live bands. –
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