A British GP has been crowned the holder of mullet of the year in Australia for the curls he grew during Covid lockdowns.
Dr Alastair Bush’s 30cm long light brown hair won for best international mullet at the annual Mulletfest competition in the small Australian town of Kurri Kurri, which attracts thousands of visitors.
Bush first grew his mullet during the pandemic, but decided to keep his hairdo as he works in the British army, and found that “the soldiers are mainly in their 20s and find the mullet funny”.
The doctor from Dorset entered Mulletfest’s international category to raise money for Testicular Cancer UK. He flew out to Australia for a heat, and was subsequently invited back to the finals on 2 December.
The event started in 2018 as a way to attract tourists to Kurri Kurri, a town of just 6,000 people, and to prevent local pub the Chelmsford Hotel from closing down. It has soared in popularity since, with thousands of people entering.
Before his win, Bush told the local newspaper the Newcastle Herald on Saturday that if victorious he would burn the mullet and send the ashes to Australia in an urn, in reference to the traditions of the Ashes cricket competition.
He said: “There’s something quite funny, I think, about an Englishman coming to Australia and winning a mullet competition.
“The Aussies may have retained the Ashes in cricket but 2023 is going to be the year the UK beats them in the arena of competitive mullet growing.”
Mullets are distinctive haircuts associated with rock stars and sports players in the 1970s and 1980s, featuring short hair at the front, top and sides and grown longer at the back.
Although the Oxford English Dictionary says the term was “apparently coined, and certainly popularised” in the Beastie Boys’ 1994 song Mullet Head, the hairstyle can be traced back much earlier.
A metal figurine dating back to the first-century AD suggests that natives in ancient Britain during the Roman occupation could have worn their hair in a mullet style, while Homer, the Greek poet, also wrote about hairstyles resembling a mullet in The Iliad.
