Farmer Wants a Wife snubs Wollongong women to give other states a chance

Wollongong women have been shut out of this season of Farmer Wants a Wife and it must be to give ladies from other states a chance.

As predicted by the Mercury just days or weeks ago, the Illawarra's raging success on reality dating shows has caused a rethink on how casting is done.

Channel 7 confirmed this week there are no contestants from the Illawarra this year. Hard to believe, but perhaps necessary in the interests of fairness.

As Woonona's Olivia Benic showed last year, if a Wollongong woman gets close to a farmer, she's taking that cockatoo home.

It's possible there were no applicants from Wollongong, that the men around here are all they could want, and there's no need to look further afield for a match. I said possible.

"From farm to forever" sings the tagline for this show, a nicely put summary of most animals' experience on, and after, living on a farm.

What will be the lot of this year's contestants as the farmers decide which ones to keep for breeding, and which ones will be picked up by a truck in the morning?

And who even cares, given the absence of local talent after Channel 7 pulled a NSW government at budget time and forgot all about Wollongong?

Queensland and South Australia in particular are on the receiving end of some particularly generous primary production assistance.

One look at the lineup and it's clear a man from the Pineapple State isn't capable of satisfying the ladies there without giving him control over a captive audience.

Almost half the women (17 of 40) who started the show were from Queensland, but you can understand them having to go on TV to find a man because half the blokes up there are related to Bob Katter and the other half would probably be smarter if they were.

Tara is one of the suitors from bananaland. Sixteen girls are listed as being from "Queensland" but Tara is said to be from "Brisbane", which presumably is the capital of the nation called Queensland, a large country that shares a border with Australia.

Sounds good on paper. Pineapple and banana farmer Bert (guess where he's from), who is a fourth generation pineapple man and a third generation Bert, may take comfort in the knowledge his wifey-to-be-ey will have the pineapple in her blood just like him. She'll also have a ready supply of lines about "spiky on the outside but sweet within". These thrills await.

As do the thrills of the home visit week when the South Australians come up with bogus reasons to avoid taking their beau to Radelaide.

The question is, will this year's show manage to add to its remarkable success of kindling true romance without any Bellambi babes, Lake Illawarra lovelies or Dapto dreamboats?

Let's hope so. But they'll be doing it without your favourite agriculture-related dating show comedy recap, coming to you from everyone's favourite former-but-still-kinda Steel City of Wollongong, home of the Illawarra Mercury and countless reality TV show winners. We follow locals only. It's the Sandon Point way.

It's been a hoot, I answer to a question no-one asked, with the feelgood highlight being when Olivia told us she'd been reading the recaps and loving them - even as they constantly mocked her beau Matt for actually being an agriculture-related public servant.

Look forward to more heavily edited "drama" this year as contestants who didn't make the cut for the Bachelor try their hand with a real man, and look forward to at least one of the farmers' brains exploding trying to deal with it all. Look out for Queensland watermelon farmer Dean for this role. He was already caught reaching for his earpiece for instructions after Teegan walked off from a stressy sitch.

As we have pointed out, an Illawarra FWAW suitor has a serious advantage over her rivals - the place is beautiful and liveable, its people are down-to-earth and friendly.

This becomes all too obvious during the "home visits" at the pointy end of the show. While an Illawarra girl has time for a trip up to Sublime Point and a swim at the beach before her beau meets the parents, her Sydney competitors spend their time stuck in traffic in Randwick or wherever. Nothing a farmer hates more.

Farmers are trained to think long-term, so they would be weighing up coupling a visit to the in-laws with a trip to The Farm at Killalea or any of about 20 great beaches nearby.

For their part, the eligible farmers may have been a bit annoyed that the screening process for contestants hadn't worked. They had to take matters into their own hands to make sure only skinny girls got through to the next stage and seriously, isn't that why we have video applications?

Once the girls had been measured up like the start of a Gold Coast roller coaster, the show could move on, and move on it did, with the crowd being whittled away.

Like male chicks at a battery farm they were dispatched quickly, as anyone who stuck their neck out was told "you can go your own way" - home in the back of an Isuzu.

There's still a glimmer of hope for Wollongong with the intruders who may be parachuted in mid-series. And of course there could be another recipient of the University of Wollongong Sydney Business School award for pretending she's from somewhere else - someone from "Sydney" who our dear readers reveal is actually from Albion Park.

But we won't be holding our breath. It's time to move on to something fresh: the first season of Renovation Tradie Wants a Wife Swap at First Sight Island - now that has to have someone from the Gong.

As the tail lights of this flatback ute fade into the distance, bear in mind: if the producers decide they need a real keeper, they know where to find them: just go to Griffith, take the Yenda road and head all the way east til you hit the Tasman.