The mullet’s resurgence divides Australia

Consider the mullet, a hairstyle that has a good claim to being Australia’s national do. It comes in various shapes and sizes. The mullet can be “extreme”—shaved bare on top. Or it can be spiked up like a mohawk. It is sometimes “grubby” and dreadlocked. And then there is the “ranga” mullet, meaning red-headed (it’s an abbreviation of “orangutan”), which is always a crowd-pleaser.

Since 2018, fans have convened every year for Mulletfest, a competition to find the most outrageous examples. “A lot of people wear this hairstyle and have a dirtbag lifestyle,” muses Timmy Pinger, a mustachioed coalminer whose long, straight mullet carried him to victory in Mulletfest’s heats in Dubbo, a small city in New South Wales, on August 20th. But Australia is full of “sophisticated, hard-working, honest-living” mullet-wearers too, he says.