Bad Barry

Hi I'm Bad Barry. I live in Shakey Town with all the rest of the dole bludgers.We spend all day sitting outside the local store playing our fiddles and telling jokes.At other times someone gets a bright idea and says Let's reopen one of the mines around here and make a fortune, but it all sounds like too much hard work, so we sit there for a while, contemplate our navel, and ruminate on the state of the world, which has pretty much passed us by.This place used to hum with activity, once. But the last big thing that happened in Shakey Town was when Blimey Bill, also known locally as Captain Moonlight, got shot up outside of town for wrecking the police special, because he thought he'd relieve the temporary unemployment by going into the scrap metal business by ripping up the rails, seeing they were hardly ever being used, and the police were only coming up here on a training run and for a bit of fun, because every so often someone down in police headquarters says, Let's go have a bit of fun and bust all those illicit stills up in Shakey Town. But they ran into a bit of trouble coming round the curve and their train got busted up and 30 coppers died in the ensuing crash, so they went a gunning for Blimey Bill. Me Granddad inherited Blimey's still when he died of gunshot wounds.Well that was a bit before my time, but the story still gets told around here as if it were only yesterday.Now they have laid down the bitumen last year into this place, all the city slickers think they can come up here and take photos of us playing our fiddles and sitting outside the local store, which annoys everyone, still these city slickers are no better than overpaid dole bludgers anyway.But they only come up on weekends, which is when we all decide to decamp and head for the hills anyway to get away from them. So today we are sitting here thinking up whether we can do better out of these bludgers than that. Maybe if we hold a Bluegrass Festival we might be able to make some money out of them.So we have these great plans to hold a bluegrass and roots and indie and cajun queen festival some time in the next 10 years at which everyone is invited and we will charge hundreds of dollars to get in and we will provide some local colour as wellso look out for Shakey Towns Bluegrass Extravaganza when we get around to organising itnow, you may note that I actually do a little tiny bit of work occasionally, but it can hardly be called work. The feds got stuck into us dole bludgers a few years ago and told us all to get jobs or they would cut off our dole. A few got work with the HonkyTonk Shire Council, the pisspots that meet in the local pub at HonkyTonkVille, and ended up tarring and feathering some of our roads, what for I don't know, it only invites the city slickers up like a mass of hornets. Me, that seemed like hard work to me, so I took an easier option and every weekend I have to head down the mountain with Two Mile Bob and we work as public relations consultants at a few destitute roughhouse pubs, but they have not broken our spirit!!!. And we still get some compo out of the feds, seeing we all got back backs, terrible livers and fiddlers fingers.