Month: January 2026

www.tristanforsyth.com/wattleford_downs

Introducing Wattleford Downs
From the about page

This page is a small out-of-character note for anyone who has gone looking through the fine print.
Wattleford Downs is a fictional Tasmanian coastal town, but the forces that shape it are very real (hopefully, the geographic location will make comedic sense through the military history of the town).
The site is presented as an old municipal website from the late 1990s / early 2000s because that was the period when small towns started using the web to market themselves, reassure themselves, and imagine a future.

Hometown roots

Wattleford Downs grows out of my memories of Wellington in central New South Wales, the town where I grew up. From here on I’ll just call it “my hometown”, but it matters that it was a place that tried very hard to find a new identity once its original role had faded.

My hometown began as a natural stopping and change-over point for Cobb & Co coaches. When larger regional centres like Orange and Dubbo grew, and cars no longer needed to stop, that role quietly disappeared. What remained was a beautiful town in an awkward position: too small to compete, too proud and too important (to the people who lived there) to simply vanish.

My hometown tried a lot of things.
One of my clearest memories is an event called “Balloons and Bentleys” — hot air balloons and luxury cars sharing the same space.
It was a small disaster as it was too windy for the balloons to do their thing on the day.
It was designed to draw tourists, to put the town on a map in people’s heads, and then it was gone.
There is almost no trace of it on the internet.

I also proposed to my wife at this event.

Many events felt like that: earnest, imaginative, often one-off, without the sense that they would become annual traditions. Whether it was money, organisation, or just the difficulty of getting people to come back, continuity was hard to hold on to.

Amalgamations and identity

In 2016 Wellington Council was merged into Dubbo Regional Council as part of the NSW government’s local government amalgamations. The argument was that a larger, combined council would be more financially sustainable and able to deliver better infrastructure and services. Some residents — especially farmers and people in the surrounding rural areas — supported the change because they hoped for more reliable basics like roads and rubbish collection. Others fought hard to stay independent, worried that the town’s identity would be diluted into a bigger regional brand.

From a distance, the merger confirmed something that had been true for a long time: my hometown was big enough to matter, but too small to be the kind of self-contained place it imagined itself to be. Wattleford Downs takes that feeling and moves it to a different coastline.

What Wattleford Downs is trying to do

This project treats a small town as something you can understand through its paperwork, posters, websites, brochures, and rumours. Instead of writing a neat narrative, Wattleford Downs is built out of:

• tourism posters that oversell the fort, the wildlife and the foreshore,
• council pages and strategy documents that promise activation and renewal,
• estate flyers that turn heritage into lifestyle marketing,
• newspaper clippings and wraparound inserts from a local Gazette,
• interpretive signage and school worksheets, and
• oral histories that never quite agree on what really happened.

If Scarfolk (which semi-inspired this project) imagines a city haunted by the state, Wattleford Downs imagines a town haunted by tourism. The fort, the penguins, the estates and the Visitor Information Centre are all ways of asking the same question: what happens to a place when it has to keep reinventing itself to be worth visiting, and what does that do to the people who just live there?

What it isn’t

Wattleford Downs is not intended as parody or mockery of Wellington, Dubbo, or any real town.

The tone is dry in places, and some of the council language is pushed to the edge of absurdity, but the project comes from affection and recognition, not from the outside looking down. Small towns make serious, hopeful decisions under real constraints, and those efforts are worth taking seriously even when they fail or look strange in hindsight.

Things still to build

At the time you are reading this, a lot of Wattleford Downs is still “coming soon”. That is partly honest (the work is in progress) and partly thematic (small-town plans often live on in draft form for a very long time).

Some of the planned pieces include:

• Media & archives: issues of the Wattleford Downs Gazette, including wraparound editions with the regional paper.
• Heritage & tourism: brochures and open-day posters for Fort Wattleford, plus interpretive signs and walking maps.
• Wildlife: penguin, pelican and ibis sections that show how “nature” can be asset, nuisance and protected species all at once.
• Estates and development: Pelican Point and Estuary Heights marketing material, from glossy brochures to half-finished web pages.
• Council documents: strategy outlines, consultation notices and project pages for foreshore activation and visitor economy plans.
• Events: a loose analogue to “Balloons and Bentleys” and other one-off festivals that never had the chance to become annual.
• Oral history: pages that collect different versions of stories such as the so-called “Coastal Guardian” in his rowboat (or yacht, depending on who you ask).

Over time, the aim is that you could follow a thread from almost any single object — a poster, a council notice, a map, a Gazette story — and slowly piece together what Wattleford Downs thinks it is, what it is afraid of becoming, and what it quietly knows it has already become.

Credits

Wattleford Downs is a collaborative project between PlasticOddities and Forge, built using deliberately out-of-date web technology: HTML 4.01, tables, inline styles, and small images pretending to be big promises.

Any resemblance to real councils, strategies, or regional tourism campaigns is coincidental but probably inevitable.