The name of the booth near the Snowy River Rampage was called Drover's Delights, and if you had a few doughnuts there between 1994 and 1996 then chances are some of them were made by me! I loved working there and still have some fellow Drovers staff who are friends today. But after seeing how doughnuts were made and what they were fried in (at least at Drover's) I've never eaten a doughnut of any kind again since I left AWL. Good times.

We fried the doughnuts in animal shortening, but it wasn't so much what they were fried in as how the doughnut fryer was maintained. My understanding when I started working there was that the used shortening was to be drained out of the machine and replaced with fresh stuff on a regular basis. But in three years at Drover's, I never saw it done. If the oil was running low, we just dumped a couple of handfuls of new shortening into the old stuff. There was a layer of crud at the bottom of that machine that probably came to life at nighttime and went walking around the park.

Mixing the doughnut batter was also problematic. There were so many flying bugs around and the batter was so sticky that it was impossible to remove any insects that may have tried to land in the batter and got stuck. So they were just incorporated into the mix. Tasty!

So that's why I don't eat doughnuts. Not now, not ever.

But again, good times.

These signs were lovingly ripped off the back of the doors at Drovers on my last day.

Now they live in my backyard shed.

I will definitely be saying those two phrases to my daughter when she turns eighteen and starts going out. She'll hear them each time she sets foot out of the front door!!