Sydney Fireworks & A Requiem For The Double Bunger (The Naked City)

‘Sydney Fireworks & A Requiem For The Double Bunger′  is the latest column (January 6, 2025) from Coffin Ed‘s The Naked City column – featured exclusively on City Hub.

New Year’s Eve proved once again that Sydneysiders are captivated by fireworks. Around a million people were said to have gathered harbourside and suburban locations to witness the legal displays.

 

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Nevertheless there appeared to be an increasing number of illegal pyrotechnics or ‘pyrohooning’, if you would like to add a new word to your vocabulary. The sale of fireworks in NSW has been banned for over four decades and anybody wanting to stage a display requires a special licence.

It wasn’t always that way. In the 50s, 60s and 70s you could walk into a Coles or Woolies and buy a big bag of assorted fireworks that included flower pots, sparklers and so called bungers and double bungers. The latter were akin to mini sticks of dynamite with enough explosive power to remove fingers and cause serious burns. Incidentally, smoking was still allowed in retail stores at the time – right alongside the mountains of crackers on sale.

Admittedly firecrackers were marketed for a specific event and in Australia that was originally Empire Day celebrating Queen Victoria’s birthday. It later became Commonwealth Day but for kids especially it was always known as ‘cracker night’ – even when it moved to June to celebrate the then current Queen’s birthday. There was often a huge bonfire in the local park as families gathered to let off their swags of supermarket fireworks.

Prior to their gradual banning in the late 60s and 70s, exploding crackers were the preferred choice of young mischief makers and aspiring bodgies.

Home made and potentially lethal pipe guns were popular as was the detonation of neighbourhood letterboxes. On cracker night or thereabouts many homemakers placed a bowl of water in their letterboxes to snuff out an invasive bunger, dropped in by a rascal on a pushbike.

About double the size of the average bunger was the rarer, but still readily obtainable ‘double bunger’, almost as long as the average adult hand and with enough explosive power to remove most of it. As a child I witnessed just how damaging they could be at a local cracker night celebration. When somebody lit one and tossed it in the direction of the bonfire, a popular old local dog took chase. It managed to grab it in its mouth just before it exploded and the rest is too grizzly to recall.

By the early 80s the sale of any kind of fireworks to the general public was banned in NSW although other states and the Northern Territory all adopted different regulations. Today you can still buy a variety of fireworks in the NT and Tassie but you won’t be making pipe guns or blowing the heads of hapless canines. The dreaded bunger has gone bung.

This New Year’s Eve, there were five people killed in Germany and three in Hawaii following the use of illegally purchased and homemade fireworks. Sydney saw numerous incidents of ‘pyrohooning’ but fortunately no fatalities or serious injuries. Illegal fireworks would appear to be as easy to obtain as cut price cigarettes and they are still legally available in the Northern Territory and Tasmania. There is also the possibility of enterprising backyard chemists cooking up their own illegal batch, putting the meth on hold for a week.

Given the massive police deployment on New Year’s Eve in basic crowd control and security, and then having to worry about illegal crackers, is a big ask for the men and women in blue. Hopefully some sanity will prevail at the next NYE and we don’t have a death or serious injury as witnessed overseas.

If you think seven or eight million dollars of fireworks was enough for the year then lookout, here we go again (albeit not quite as spectacular) on January 26. It’s Australia Day of course, marking the arrival of the imperialist First Fleet and definitely not everybody’s cup of English breakfast tea.

Given the dubious nature of the celebration maybe it’s time to bring back cracker night where those who view it as Invasion Day can vent their fury with legally sanctioned bonfires and the burning of colonialist effigies plus flower pots, catherine wheels and endless rounds of noisy tom thumbs.