The Plucked Duck B&S Ball has been attracting party lovers from across Queensland and NSW for generations.
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And 2018 was no different.
More than 1300 people poured into town over the weekend, making it one of Goondiwindi biggest social events.
“We know the drought has made it tough for people, so we were more than happy with the numbers,” committee president Sam Tweedy said.
It all began in the early 1990s when the Goondiwindi Rugby Union Club decided to resurrect the Goondiwindi B&S.
There’s not much doubt they wouldn’t have expected it to still be going.And it may not have, if it wasn’t for the intervention of one Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof, better known as Sir Bob.
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He was back then known as the lead singer of The Boomtown Rats which had number one hits with his compositions Rat Trap and I Don't Like Mondays. He co-wrote Do They Know It's Christmas?, one of the best-selling singles of all time.
That’s where it may have all ended for Geldof, but in 1984 he was the driving force behind Band Aid, which raised money for famine relief in Ethiopia.
He went on to organise the charity super-concert Live Aid the following year.
It has been his political activism which has kept him in the news ever since.
In 1993, of all the places in the world he could have gone to, he arrived in Goondiwindi to perform at the B&S. He brought a film crew and documented the experience.
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Here’s how the Sydney Morning Herald looked back at the event:
Bob Geldof put the NSW-Queensland border town of Goondiwindi on the world map when he performed at the B&S there in 1993 and made a documentary about it.
Geldof Goes Goondiwindi (12 Stubbies from Toowoomba) had some debauched scenes and was promoted as a Sylvania Waters II-type blow to Australia's international image, but Geldof saw it very differently.
B&S balls, he said, were about “exuberant youth and people having a very hard time trying to make a living forgetting, as one farmer says, all their troubles for 48 hours and going back to work with a heap of hope”.
(The B&S is all about) exuberant youth and people having a very hard time trying to make a living forgetting, as one farmer says, all their troubles for 48 hours and going back to work with a heap of hope
- Bob Geldof
“They’re dignified and good people and they come across like that.
“The question has to be begged, what do Australians imagine they are?
“They keep being hung up about Sylvania Waters and documentaries about truckies and B&S things and they keep on saying, ‘Oh my God, that's what people think we’re like’.
“Well, you are. What do you think you're like? What's to cringe about? It's an admirable culture. What do you want to be – the boring Parisienne sophisticates? Spare me.”
And so say all of us.
The Plucked Duck has been about that “exuberance of youth” ever since.
Goondiwindi has been benefiting ever since as well.
The B&S has given back more than $300,000 in donation over the past decade alone and more than $1 million in total.
That does not take into account the money injected into the region by the thousands of people who have attended over the years.
“It’s something we are very proud of,” Mr Tweedy said recently.
