The Singing Dingo - Alice Springs

At Jims place in the northern Territory, the foods good but the singer's a bit of a howler.

MY DOG’S A-BARKING

At Jim's Place in the Northern Territory, the food's good but the singers' a bit of a howler.
By Travis Cranley

From outside, Jim’s Place 90 kms south of Alice Springs along the Stuart Highway doesn’t look much different from any other outback roadhouse. There’s a pet emu pecking around its pen, some feral camels loping by on the opposite side of the road, a bloke in a bush hat and blue singlet making running repairs to the place, and your usual crowd of tired drivers, bussed-in backpackers, hungry campers and happy retirees coming in and out of the doors with various assortments of needs and wants.

But get near those doors and a strange sound reaches you. There’s a painful plunking of piano keys, and rising beyond it is a voice wailing in melodious answer to the keyboard’s crushed rhythms. You’re drawn towards it, and out the back of the dining room you find a small crowd packed around the piano, the flashes of digital cameras spotlighting a strange performer standing on the keyboard, pawing away at the ebonies, ivories and nervous fingers of the pianist sitting beneath him. The piano strikes up again and the performer once more adds his own barking baritone to the acoustic ensemble. It’s raw, edgy, new. It’s Dinky the Singing Dingo, and his song goes something like this:
“Awwwwwwwwwwwoooooooooooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllll. Aaaaaaaaaaaawwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwoooooooooooooooooolllllllllllllllllllllllll.”

Snoop Dogg and Howling Wolf eat your hearts out - Dinky and his dingo dirges have made him and Jim’s Place world-famous, as a wall of newspaper clippings in several languages attest. In fact, Dinky last year made the leap from local legend to pop culture icon when he won a nation-wide contest to find Australia’s top trivia fact, beating out a biker who can do 232 stationary jumps on his unicycle in a minute. Dinky’s reward: his very own question in the 20th anniversary edition of Trivial Pursuit. That’s the big-time.

Jim is Jim Cotterill, and Dinky is his four-year-old pet, rescued as a pup from a dingo-baiting program. As he became part of the family, Dinky began singing along every time one of Jim’s daughters played the piano. Now, he earns his keep performing his cabaret show to the coffee-and-eggs crowd. Between acts, he sleeps out the back on his chain; during acts, he steps up onto the piano as a brave tourist taps out a tune, let’s out some howls as the high-pitched notes stir his inner-Sinatra, then steps down again and continues sleeping. Fame hasn’t changed him.

Jim introduces Dinky before every act and gives visitors a nice, knowledgeable speech about dingoes, stressing they’re wild dogs and not backyard pets. Jim’s even had to drive Dinky up to Alice and elsewhere for special performances. He’s held the phone to Dinky’s mouth so radio listeners around the world can hear him sing. These days, just who’s leading who on the chain can be tough to tell.

Dinky is now part of the southern NT tourist trail, as memorable to some as Uluru or King’s Canyon. “Dinky, the eighth wonder of the world,” writes Larim from Iceland in the diner’s guest book, kept near a pile of Dinky postcards. “Interestingly different,” critiques someone else. Another guest gives Dinky the ultimate outback thumbs-up: “A good place to break down!”
Barking never sounded so sweet.

Dinky the Singing Dingo Details:

Where:
Jim's Place, South Sturt Hwy, Alice Springs, NT

Contact:
Phone: (08) 8956 0808
Email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it