The kids had been geed up before their first trip to Bicheno. In 1974, my parents bought the Silver Sands Hotel Motel in the tiny Tassie fishing village. I grew up fanging around on my Honda 50, gorging on wild blackberries, daring my brother to go closer to the blow hole during a big sea, mastering how to hold live crayfish.
Fabulous childhood. Memories were regularly drip fed to my children. We talked a lot about going to this dazzling wonderland and the hits and memory places I’d show them.
Finally, the day came when we rolled into Bicheno. When I took my kids to my childhood digs, they quickly declared it “craptastic”. Here’s my old bedroom window, here’s the rock shaped like a whale, here’s my school, here’s the lookout.
Here’s where I stacked the minibike and it rolled on me. Here’s the fishing harbour, here’s the beach. I was glowing with memories and pride.
“Isn’t it incredible?” From them, crickets. One eventually spoke up. “Mum, there’s nothing here.
What did you do all day? It’s so craptastic.” Since forever, craptastic has been a recurring concept in our family. Its meaning is a bit fluid.
It can be something one person sees as crap, another as fantastic. Or as the Collins Dictionary defines it, “something fantastically awful.” Entertainment Weekly had a florid stab at exploring “craptasty” in 2020, saying it “assumes an ironic, hipsterish acceptance of blithe bad taste and bad production values, as if standards are for .