Buried deep in Tasmania’s terrifying western wastelands, the nightmarish hellhole of Queenstown could not be more incongruous with its regal moniker. The living museum of misery comprises a cluster of dilapidated hovels and abandoned shacks with mangy dogs chained up outside, perching on the precipice of an abandoned copper mine, surrounded by slag heaps and adorned with a polluted poo-filled river. Despite being prone to incessant rain, Queenstown’s tap water is brown and undrinkable. Decades of deforestation, sulphurous smelter fumes and topsoil erosion have rendered the area’s hills a barren moonscape. Famously featuring a gravel footy oval because grass refuses to grow there, Queenstown is a great place to visit if you get off on mass-scale ecological vandalism. Locals are so proud of their desolate wasteland that they have opposed revegetation attempts. Queenstown is not so much a town as an inhabited environmental disaster.

Despite being a half-abandoned soggy little slum, Queenstown’s understandably cheap housing attracts undesirables from all over Australia, including extreme hermits who can’t handle the hustle and bustle of Hobart and extreme hillbillies who require extra privacy for nefarious habits like marrying their siblings or eating tourists. The town’s defunct mining business has been replaced by a fledgling tourism industry, predicated entirely on befuddled travellers ending up there by accident after trying to reach the New Zealand tourist trap of the same name. The dismal little village was strategically built in a hole amongst the mountains to hinder escape – visitors are forced to negotiate a rollercoaster road with over 90 hair-raising bends just to get out of the place.

A third-world shithole as quaint as a yeast infection, Queeftown is a foolproof recipe for instant depression.