Some Thoughts on the Guy With 30,000 Beer Cans in His Shed

You might have seen the video. A guy from Moonta, South Australia, who owns 30,000 empty cans of VB in his back shed, is wading through the cans like he’s really pleased with himself. He’s got a cigarette in his mouth. He doesn’t talk. He knows he doesn’t need to talk because he’s got 30,000 empty cans of VB. There’s nothing left to prove.

The bio tells us that these 30,000 frothies were downed over 15 years. That’s a total of 5,479 days—leap years considered—which means the guy drank 5.47 cans each and every day. That’s basically a six pack. A six pack of VB every day for 15 years.

The video has gone viral because it’s a lot of VB, but also because it’s a lot of Australia. Moonta is about two hours northwest of Adelaide. It’s got a population of 681 and four pubs, and while I’ve never been to Moonta, I did grow up in rural South Australia, so I feel licensed to speculate about both the town and the man.

See, rural South Australia is place where men communicate their value through durries and sheds and pronounce the days of the week with a weird eeee sound on the end. Like they say Mondey when what they really mean is Monday. It’s oddly quaint.

Also it’s a place where a lot of blokes get a bit stuck in adolescence. Like, do you remember when you were 18 and you collected empty booze bottles and stacked them along the top shelf in your bedroom? You had heaps of Jack Daniels including that big expensive one with the handle as well as a Black Sambuca that lent the collection depth and variety, and they all looked fantastic up there on your shelf until one day you wondered is this lame? And you realised it was so you threw them out.

Well, some guys never throw out their empties. They just keep collecting until one day they’ve got 30,000 empty VB cans in a shed, at which point their friends should be like mate, it’s time. But apparently this hasn’t happened. Instead, in this video, you can just hear the guy’s friends being really enthusiastic. “This is the shed in full action guys!” announces the woman holding the camera. “If you couldn’t believe it before, believe it now!”

This too is another way that the video is just full-on Australiana—full-on South Australiana. The whole thing is just an implied drinking competition, like when when you met up with your schoolmates after a big one and listed everything you drank in obsessive detail. “I had four guava Vodka Cruisers and 14 Wipeouts and two schooners of Baileys and…”

That’s what this video is. A celebration of drinking prowess with notes of rural legend and lonely old man. It’s funny but sad and very disconcertingly Australian—and I just worked out that at current prices it would have cost about $52,000.