The City Built On Brown

The city I live in, like most cities, has a nickname Townsville becomes Brownsville – or for some out of towners Boringsville, and Bogansville. This first nickname, most Townsvilli’ites would agree, aptly sums up the town’s surrounding area. The landscape is dry and lifeless; the trees always look as though they are having a bad day and would rather make friends with the dirt than put up with the bother of photosynthesizing.

However, one of the main reasons Brownsville deserves its name is not distinguishable to the untrained eye. The ever so valued perfection of suburbia comes at a price. In order to achieve a healthy looking lawn, of the kind that stretches for miles across Brownsville’s suburbia, the city’s residents pull out all the stops. Late at night, when they are sure no one is looking, Brownsville residents will clamber out onto their lawns, and turn their sprinklers on. By morning no one is any the wiser that the large majority of lawns in Brownsville could have ever looked like a dry wasteland.

Now if you’ll allow me, let me throw some numbers at you; you may catch them however you see fit. This traditional nighttime ritual is repeated 365 nights a year. I am going to go out on a limb guess that the sprinkler is on a minimum of four hours a night. That brings me to the final number: 1, 460 hours a year is spent covering up every crack and crevice of Brownsville’s otherwise imperfect lawns.

Now I would be wrong in merely implicating Brownsville’s self-conscious suburbanites in this nightly ritual. Townsville City Council also adopts the practice, and has made a point of shoving a sprinkler into every square inch of dry, public land. These are discreetly placed, though, of course, and are not noticeable unless one happens to be striding home along a footpath at the three or four in the morning, in which case getting home dry is in the very low of possibility standards.

Brownsville is currently under level 1 water restrictions. To be fair, Brownsvilli’ites aren’t braking any laws, they are just skirting within the boundaries of them. Heaven forbid we reach level 4 water restrictions though, or Brownsville residents may be forced to give up the key to the secret of their suburban perfection.

As a newly settled Brownsville resident I am saddened to think that I am now associated with a town so vain that they would so readily waste an increasingly precious resource in order to feed their own silicon delusions. Citizens, we are Brownsville! Embrace it!


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