Gruesome title for my adoptive state

For years, other South Australians and I have had to put up with South Australia being labelled as the state where weird serial murders happen. Kids going missing from the beach on sunny days, never to be seen again… bodies in barrels (not in Adelaide, I’d like to point out, but an hour north in a small country town)... the guy who took an axe to his ex-girlfriends’ new boyfriend, which rocked my working community – I actually knew the killer’s father. I’m sure there are more gruesome murders attributed to SA, but I just haven’t elected to retain this information in my brain over more important matters I need to remember.

But anyway, ever protective towards the place where I grew up, a while back I was trying to come up with a ready-made and witty comeback to throw at any New South Welshman who threw an insult at my home state by labelling it as the Serial Killer State. This used to happen quite a lot, as there is a particular breed of New South Welsh-people who think that Sydney is the only city in Australia, and everything else is too boring to mention or should be made fun of. They usually haven’t lived anywhere but Sydney, or can’t work out how to occupy themselves outside a dense urban environment. At that particular time, Sydney seemed to be having a drive-by-killing every other week. “Here’s my chance”, I thought! But Sydney just doesn’t cut it in the drive-by-killing stakes, when you compare it to LA, or perhaps less stable countries in the world.

But finally, NSW has done it. I think NSW can be safely labelled as the “Family Murder-Suicide State”. Every week at the moment there is a case of someone either killing their entire family, or killing most of their family followed by themselves.

But that's not very funny, is it?