It’s a quintessential Australian image. Driving down a freeway or gravel track on a road trip and coming across a well-weathered sign at the entrance to a community reading “tidy town winner” in proud lettering.
It may come as a soothing reassurance that the town you’re about to enter will be relatively litter free, or stir up a sense of deja vu of a similar sign on another road you’ve seen some years ago, perhaps on the other side of the country.
The National Tidy Towns Sustainability awards event, to take place in Launceston this weekend, began as a West Australian tourism initiative in the 1960s and has grown into one of Australia’s longest running community programs, with more than 4,000 volunteers contributing to projects that entered this year’s awards.
The state winners competing for the coveted national title range from Ikuntji in the NT, population 150, and Williams in WA, population 1,040, to the Mornington Peninsula in Victoria, home to more than 170,000 people.
In Williams, two elderly women, Judy and Robin, have spent thousands of hours in the past year preserving disintegrating old roads board records to be archived digitally.
Sign up for the Breaking News Australia emailRobin says she has a habit of getting “bogged down in other people’s history”, having previously volunteered for four years “smartening up” the cemetery.
The paperwork dates back to the late 1800s and had been growing dust in old barrels and tea chests at the local newsagents. From a pottery shed, they’ve been cleaning up the old records, damaged by water, vermin, fire and the mark of time.
They’ve found sustenance payments for ex-soldiers, residents who lost their farms for under a pound when their rates were overdue and rewards for parrot beaks and scalps of foxes that were overrunning the area.
“We’re cleaning it up as we go, nobody is putting up hands to help us,” she says with a laugh. “But there’s so much to learn from it … I think the town will be a bit proud, a bit pleased and a bit gobsmacked if we win. They probably didn’t realise the effort that’s gone into it.”
Hazel Harris is the community resource manager in Williams and helped lead the town’s winning entry. After being announced victor, the whole community “came out in droves” to celebrate at a sundowner.
The awards honour “all the unsung heroes within small communities”, Harris says, with Williams’ winning state entry sign now sitting proudly by a beloved gumtree that’s the first thing most travellers see driving into the main street.
Launceston has the hosting rights for 2026 after winning last year’s national title, with the sustainability team leader at the council, Michael Attard, in full preparation mode for the big event.
He says winning gave the community a “great sense of pride”, with the city praised for its marine cleanups and education programs, as well as its volunteer-led Repair Cafe, which has diverted 2000 kilos of landfill.
“There’s a sense of purpose being part of a community group that’s working towards [benefiting] our environment,” Attard says.
Traditionally focused on litter prevention and beautification, the awards have long since expanded, with the NT’s winner, Ikuntji, for instance, commended in the heritage and culture category for becoming the first central Australian community to implement a local decision-making framework, empowering residents to oversee their own essential services in line with cultural knowledge.
‘Unsightly objects’ and ‘standard of fences’: Tidy Towns’ evolution
Tidy Towns was born in Ireland, which began running the awards in the mid 1950s alongside its flagship National Roadside Gardens Competition.
As the story goes, an agent from the Irish Tourist Board, based in Sydney, reached out to WA’s Tourist Development Authority professing they’d had similar problems attracting amenities and tourist attractions “on the scale required by the traveller of today”.
In 1968, the inaugural Tidy Towns awards were held, with 59 entries divvied out points on a range of measures, including absence of litter and “unsightly objects”, “colour harmony” of buildings and “standard of fences and paved areas”.
Back then, local councils, not community groups, were competing against each other, and it wasn’t all fun and games. One shire took the competition so seriously it circulated a public notice reminding people to deposit their rubbish. A later notice warned “some townspeople have made an effort to comply with council’s suggestions while others have made no attempt whatsoever”.
Bunbury came out victor in 1969.
Three years later, Keep Australia Beautiful, founded by the late Dame Phyllis Frost, formed a national association with the awards and since 1990, Tidy Town winners of each state and territory have been pitted against each other for the coveted national title.
Keep Australia Beautiful NSW CEO, Val Southam, says running the awards is getting difficult as they no longer receive government funding and sponsors’ budgets are getting tighter.
“Everyone thinks it’s wonderful … but no one wants to put any money into it. It just survives by the hard work of the volunteers,” she says.
Back in the early days, a chief judge would individually tour the town of every state winner, now just reserved for the national ceremony. Southam recalls two years ago when Gascoyne Junction, a Western Australian community of just 70 people, took out the prize.
“We had to catch two flights to get there and then they had to send a bus out 150 kilometres to pick us up … in the middle of nowhere,” she says.
“The pub put it on and they put tents up for accommodation. They brought in an army band from Fremantle and brought stargazers out in the evening to look at the stars in the dark sky. It was just amazing.”
It’s the ability for a far-flung community to showcase their pride that Southam says makes the hard work worth it.
“The fact [volunteers are] able to get recognition means a lot, and that’s something they don’t get outside their own little community,” she says.
“That’s what we want to do – be able to reward them. Otherwise people lose heart, I think.”
