From Cliff Young to an Underground Piano Concert: Australia’s Taste for the Unusual

Australians occasionally do things that seem wonderfully improbable. They can look eccentric, even slightly unreasonable, without being simply foolish. There is a kind of humour in doing something unexpected, taking it seriously, and not making too much of a fuss about it.

In 1983, the first Sydney-to-Melbourne ultramarathon covered 875 kilometres. Among the runners was Cliff Young, a 61-year-old farmer from Victoria. With his modest clothing and distinctive shuffle, he looked nothing like the winner people expected. Yet he finished first in five days, 15 hours and four minutes, almost ten hours ahead of the runner-up.

Young was no stranger to running. He had competed in marathons and spent years running around his farm and on country roads. What set him apart was not outright speed but his ability to keep moving with remarkably little rest. The surprise was that someone who seemed so far outside the usual image of an elite athlete could win an extreme endurance event on his own terms.

More than four decades later, on 9 October 2026, something equally unusual happened in Bendigo, Victoria. To mark 175 years since the discovery of gold in the region, organisers brought a roughly 300-kilogram grand piano 61 metres down into a former gold mine. They held a concert for an audience of just 60 people. The piano had to be partly dismantled, carefully transported and tuned underground. The audience wore hard hats on the way in, then listened to two professional pianists perform music from the nineteenth century.

It was hardly the most convenient or economical place for a piano concert. But the organisers saw a way to bring local history and music together, and they went to the trouble of making it happen.

These stories are not identical. Cliff Young was competing in earnest, not trying to make anyone laugh. The underground concert was a deliberately conceived cultural event. What connects them is the way each unsettles our assumptions about how something is supposed to be done.

They also raise a question about the constraints of social convention. In many Chinese social settings, people may hesitate before trying something unusual, worrying about how others will judge them, whether it looks respectable, or whether they will appear odd. Such expectations can help sustain social order, but they can also narrow the room for imagination and experiment. Australia has conventions and social pressures of its own. Still, in some everyday settings, there seems to be more willingness to tolerate, and even enjoy, departures from the usual script.

What I find appealing is the sense of proportion: a little unconventional, but not recklessly so; apparently playful, yet pursued with genuine seriousness. That may be one of the more distinctive forms of humour in Australian life.

Sources
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-03-24/cliff-young-potato-farmer-who-ran-from-sydney-to-melbourne/105023078
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-10-10/piano-gold-mine-underground-concert-bendigo/107247298