It was lunchtime on March 11, 2017, and Zenon Kosmider was preparing to leave work early. The 22-year-old was a copy kid at Sydney’s The Daily Telegraph, but his mind was on his other gig, a one-day-a-week internship at The Betoota Advocate. At The Daily Telegraph, his job involved answering calls and doing whatever he was told. But that afternoon, for Betoota, he was about to help interview the prime minister.
That Malcolm Turnbull would give an interview to The Betoota Advocate was noteworthy in itself. That he would agree to do it livestreamed on Facebook, on a Saturday, crammed on a small couch at The Old Fitzroy Hotel in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, with nine schooners of beer arrayed on the coffee table in front of him, was even more revealing.
Turnbull sat between two broad-brimmed hat-wearing blokes – known as Clancy Overell and Errol Parker – and fielded eclectic questions. “You pick up things the mainstream media overlook,” Turnbull assured them. “You don’t pretend to be anything other than a satirical newspaper.” Clancy shot back: “We prefer the term conservative.” The PM burst out laughing. Some 380,000 have watched.
In the 10 years since it was created, The Betoota Advocate has grown into a media enterprise that has outlasted far more serious local news start-ups including Buzzfeed News (born 2014, died 2020) and Vice (2003 to 2024). Its cut-through is marked by monikers such as “Scotty from marketing” for former prime minister Scott Morrison and “bachelor’s handbag” for a supermarket roast chicken.
Clancy Overell (front), Errol Parker (right) and Wendell Hussey. Nic Walker
It publishes eight articles a day, posted to its one million followers on Instagram, and 850,000 on Facebook, under headlines like “New Rule In ‘Monopoly: Australia’ Allows Players Born Between 1946-1964 To Start With Houses On The Board” and “Aldi Trolleys Now Take $5 Notes As Inflation Ramps Up”.
Its readers are, presumably, aware that it is not really “Australia’s oldest newspaper”. Nor is it based in the outback Queensland town of Betoota (which, instead of having a wealthy “Betoota Grove” suburb and a bohemian “French Quarter”, is in reality uninhabited). They might suspect that it employs a team of writers (there are half a dozen, including three women).
They would very likely have no idea that it’s actually based in an office in the inner Sydney suburb of Woolloomooloo, and that Betoota has a podcast business, a talent management firm for up-and-coming influencers, and a commercial arm that has worked with the likes of Fosters beer, the Queensland government and KFC. Almost no one would know about the bitter falling out with one of Betoota’s founders over the direction of the business.
And few would know the precarious nature of the whole operation, perched perilously on the molten lava field of new media that informs millions without yet having entirely figured out how to pay for itself. Just this past September, they appointed administrators for a Betootasubsidiary holding $500,000 in unpaid debts, including $150,000 in unpaid superannuation and a $250,000 bill from the tax office.
An ambient sense of what’s going on: Instagram posts from Betoota.
And yet Betoota endures, with its satirical takedowns of influencers and politicians, finding the absurdity of everyday life while giving an ambient sense of what’s going on. “Chalmers resigns after losing entire Future Fund on Hawk Tuah meme coin”, reads one headline. Another: “Struggling CommBank Introduces Cash Fees To Make Ends Meet After Meagre $9.8 Billion Profit”.
The Betoota Advocate is not making a fortune, but it is building careers. Months after that Turnbull interview, Kosmider, who’d just graduated from a journalism degree, threw in his job at the Tele, owned by News Corp, and opted instead to go full time at Betoota.
There he was baptised with the pseudonym Wendell Hussey (a combination of rugby player Wendell Sailor and cricketer Michael Hussey) and the grand title of “cadet”. It’s where he got to interview the prime minister, he figures. And it’s where his own mates saw his work. As Kosmider/Wendell says: “If Betoota is talking about something, then it is a thing.”
The Betoota Advocate team (left to right): Claudia Bursill, also known as Miss Double Bay; Xanon Murphy, head of production; Errol Parker (Charles Single), Betoota editor-at-large; Antony Stockdale, head of partnerships; Clancy Overell (Archer Hamilton), Betoota editor; and writers Effie Bateman (Josie Kent) and Wendell Hussey (Zenon Kosmider). Nic Walker
Walking through The Betoota Advocate office is like walking into a university student’s bedroom. There’s a framed South Sydney Rabbitohs jersey on the wall and piles of assorted books. A faded box of Betoota Bitter beer sits in a corner in the kitchen, under several layers of merch sediment. There is a keg of beer connected to a tap.
For all this clutter, it is a professional outfit. A large podcast studio has three serious-looking video cameras. A second, smaller studio with three microphones is next door to a boardroom. “This,” Errol announces on a brief tour, “is the deals room.”
Staff are busy typing away, searching stock image libraries and messaging each other story ideas. Each has an online persona crafted lovingly over years. They usually read news.com.au, ABC News and The Sydney Morning Herald before writing their stories and scheduling them to be published. They then move on to work on podcasts, commercial content or other projects. Claudia Bursill, one of Betoota’s writers, moonlights as Miss Double Bay, an Instagram account and character (“international woman of mystery”) with 64,000 followers, a merch line and podcasts.
The Betoota team at work in their headquarters at Sydney’s Woolloomooloo. Dominic Lorrimer
The quest for recurrent revenue leads to endless new projects. DM Podcasts, launched in 2017, now produces some 60 episodes a week for shows such as Josh Szeps’ Uncomfortable Conversations, Leigh Sales and Annabel Crabb’s Chat 10 Looks 3, and Sam Perry and Ian Higgins’ The Grade Cricketer.
“We leverage the Betoota brand,” says Antony Stockdale, the business’s head of partnerships, who argues the niche appeal of many podcasts is, in fact, their commercial strength. “You want to talk to mums? We’ve got, like, the biggest birthing podcast in Australia. You want to also talk to some young tradies? Cool. Got the Reese Brothers while they’re there.”
Earlier this year, they also launched Button Management Group, representing some of their podcast talent (former NRL player Josh Mansour and YouTuber Spanian, for example) and acting as a local outpost for a handful of global influencers. “We just want to do more cool shit,” Stockdale adds. “Obviously, we want to keep making money.”
In a media and advertising landscape dominated by Meta and Google, this is easier said than done. Critical to Betoota is finding ways to monetise the political and cultural zeitgeist, via constant pithy takes on current affairs.
“When things are really grim, we try to provide a circuit breaker,” Clancy says. “On the day Trump got shot, we were f---ing just writing, writing, writing.” “Lefties Clearly Not Spending Enough Time At The Range”, one headline read. It came alongside “Biden Puts Politics Aside And Wishes Reagan A Full Recovery”, and “Both Presidential Candidates Now Equally Likely To Cark It On Stage”.
“It was a bit of fun, you know, for an Australian perspective,” Clancy continues. “But when everyone’s also furious and there’s this ridiculousness of it all, I think we kind of play like a pressure valve too.”
And that pressure valve is released in an Australian vernacular. William Shakespeare is credited with inventing 1700 words or phrases for the English language. In 2021, Betoota released its own dictionary of “Betoota-isms”, claiming credit for reverse ATM (poker machine) and concreter’s caviar (a can of tuna). There’s also the pangolin’s kiss to describe COVID and sugarcane champagne to describe Bundaberg Rum. “Errol did one the other day that I think might take off,” Clancy says, smiling and leaning back on his chair in the boardroom-deals room. “Which was when guys pass out after the Melbourne Cup. He called it the Tarocash sleeping bag.”
Hot Mess Gladys, which described former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, briefly took the internet by storm. Former prime minister Tony Abbott became Uncle Tony when he was appointed special envoy of Indigenous Affairs in 2018 (Indigenous youth would yell it out when he visited their communities).
Perhaps its most enduring nickname was Scotty from marketing, which was coined in late 2020. One seasoned Liberal political operator concedes it stuck. “If I was designing a campaign now, I would look at funny, satirical things like this,” he says.
“It actually hurt him,” says RedBridge Group’s Kos Samaras, a lobbyist, researcher and former Labor strategist. Betoota, he says, has a bigger influence on politics and culture than most people would assume. “The majority of people under the age of, I would say, 40, no longer consume political information through traditional platforms,” he says. “They will follow particular individuals, whether it’s on a podcast; they will follow satirical sites like Betoota Advocate.”
Which means keeping on the story. When Turnbull was ousted as PM, 18 months after the Sydney interview, Clancy and Errol happened to actually be in Betoota, visiting for the races (the only event that happens there each year). They had to get to work at the homestead where they were staying, on a 7550-square-kilometre cattle station.
“Here they are, smashing out stories from my dining room table the Thursday and Friday before the races,” says Lorraine Kath, the cattle station’s owner. “Rich White Dude From Sydney Replaces Rich White Dude From Sydney As PM,” they typed. “Malcolm Turnbull Quits Parliament And Boards One Way Flight To Cayman Islands.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the politician with whom Betoota writers have the closest affinity is maverick Queensland MP Bob Katter. “They’re trying to ingratiate themselves with me, because I’m gunning for them,” Katter says when reached over the phone. “I’m gunning for them for destroying Mount Isa’s bid for the Winter Olympics. They shamelessly put Betoota forward when they knew we had it in the bag.”
Katter then takes me in graphic detail through a (fictional) story they apparently ran of a Catholic priest having honey “smeared on a certain part of his anatomy and then tied to an anthill”. He stops at one point to yell out “Elise!” to someone off the phone. “They did not carry the story where I moved that the ... ELISE,” he yells off the phone again. “What’s the name of the body you have to go to if you want to buy something in Australia?” He returns. “The Foreign Investment Review Board. Well, I moved that the FIRB be replaced by the Kynuna Country Women’s Association ladies. Because all it involves is saying yes to everything. But they wouldn’t run the story.”
“Those bastards” at Betoota, says Katter, paint him as extreme. “Like when I said everyone in Australia should have a gun,” he says. After a pause, he adds: “And, well, I suppose I did say that a few times.”
Betoota’s founders met studying journalism at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, 200 kilometres west of Sydney, although neither came from there. Clancy, whose real name is Archer Hamilton, is 195 centimetres tall, carries a thick, bushy beard and has a deep, booming voice to match. His early years were in Mitchell, central Queensland, but his family moved to south Brisbane. Errol, born Charles Single, is more softly spoken, has a slight stutter and grew up near Mudgee in central NSW.
They left university in 2012. “I started at Broken Hill FM but I didn’t last long because I didn’t know AFL,” Clancy says. “Which is funny. Because we still get accused of not knowing f---ing anything about it.” Clancy says he found work in odd copywriting jobs, but it was demoralising. “I thought I’d be working in radio and we’d become the Hamish and Andy boys,” he says. “Everyone was doing clickbait. Everyone was disillusioned with it.”
Overell (left) and Parker with writer Sam Buckingham-Jones. Dominic Lorrimer
Errol was a bar manager at Watsons Bay Hotel in Sydney’s east, where he honed his powers of observation and banter. “Two different types of people lived there. The alcoholic children of very well-heeled people. Or normal people who paid $60,000 for a house on a sand hill that’s now worth $10 million,” he says.
The goal was “a job at Fairfax”. But they saw a void in satire after The Chaser’s War on Everything had faded in the late 2000s. They started The Australian Advocate Facebook page on September 18, 2014, with entrepreneurial media personality Piers Grove, who had employed Clancy as a copywriter for a content agency he ran. Grove, who later went on to have a hand in The Daily Aus, Junkee and a handful of other new media start-ups, challenged them to write a story every day for at least two years, and they did.
They invented their characters. Clancy, a “fourth, arguably fifth” generation editor of the paper, and Errol, a former London Red Top tabloid reporter in hiding. Clancy had the idea of renaming The Australian Advocate after Betoota, which meant the publication’s initials were TBA (as in, the acronym for “to be announced”).
They spent the early years hustling, and had some wins. In their first weeks they wrote a story headlined “VB goes undercover to win Surry Hills Craft Beer Festival”. The story rocketed around the craft beer community. Mainstream news took a while to cotton on that their headlines were fake. Channel Nine’s Today show followed up on “City Ranger accidentally gives himself parking ticket; takes matter to court”.
Satirical news outlets exist everywhere. Japan has the Kyoko Shimbun. Pakistan has the Khabaristan Times. Turkey has Zaytung. Russia has Panorama. The US has dozens including The Onion. The UK has 10 to Canada’s seven to Australia’s three (including The Shovel and The Chaser).
“We were blown away by how fast it had grown in creating their two characters,” Colm Williamson, the editor of Ireland’s Waterford Whispers News, says. He and his co-writer Karl met Clancy and Errol for pints while travelling. “[It] inspired us to create a couple of our own [characters] with great success.”
“They’re really good written satirists,” says co-founder Piers Grove of Overell and Parker. “And they’re really good because they wrote a story every day for three years.” Dominic Lorrimer
But for all The Betoota Advocate’s profile, it is not a lucrative business. As Williamson says, satire is “a very difficult business to monetise”. On paper, there is Diamantina Consolidated Holdings, an entity formed in mid-2015 that owns the website, and Diamantina Media Group, which owns DM Podcasts. Button is a separate entity. There are about 12 staff.
“The website used to be a cash cow back in the day when banner ads were something,” Stockdale says. Stockdale and Xanon Murphy, its head of production, are the two relatively unknown partners who operate behind the scenes of the business – the two commercial brains to Clancy, Errol (and Wendell’s) cultural and political minds.
Key to their business model is integrating advertisers directly into their stories. “Dorky Dad Left Confused And Rattled As Daughter’s Trendy New Boyfriend Turns Up With A Case Of Fosters,” was part of a campaign to relaunch Foster’s. A campaign for the Queensland Department of Transport and Main Roads won a slew of awards.
“Everyone gets paid well. I think we’re doing better than traditional media are,” Stockdale says, pointing out they do not take wagering money. “We’re not making pokie money. But we’re all fine.” He clams up when asked about Grove, who has long been credited as a founder and the original publisher.
Grove has never given an interview about his past few – legally fraught – years with the team behind Betoota. It has not been pretty. “I want to have my place in the story of Betoota reflected. And I’m being airbrushed out,” Grove says. “I’m almost telling you because I know you’re writing for a magazine.”
The Betoota Advocate, he says, was initially set up out of his home in Alexandria in inner south Sydney. The 48-year-old describes himself as someone whose key skill is spotting future talent. It was he who encouraged the duo of Clancy and Errol to publish stories daily, damn the minor spelling mistakes.
“They’re really good written satirists. And they’re really good because they wrote a story every day for three years,” he says. “I’m all about the craft.” He knows them intimately. Errol’s stutter made him uncomfortable at public events, Grove recalls. “We put a cowboy hat on Charlie, and he stopped stuttering.”
(Errol says he changes his voice slightly – a performance of sorts – and it forces a different part of his brain to put the words together.)
Before 2014, satire websites like The Chaser or The Shovel were “inherently left wing” because they were founded by people who came out of “f---ing sandstone university review,” Grove says. “We were like, let’s get rid of that. Let’s include the news, and let’s also start writing about rugby league and Summernats and all sorts of good bogan shit, so that everyone feels welcome.”
By 2017 Grove, who identifies as someone who “always does lots of things”, had moved onto another business, a start-up accelerator. That’s when, he says, he started to get pushed out of the business. In May 2022, a few months after taking over as publisher of Australian Geographic, he had a stroke which, he says, left him effectively illiterate. At the time, he had just changed accountants and had given his new one a list of his various holdings. “My accountant rang me up and said: ‘You don’t own 20 per cent of Diamantina [Media]. You own 10 per cent,’” Grove says. His shares had been halved behind his back, he claims.
This is true. Or, at least, true to an extent. “We did it at a bad time. We didn’t realise how compromised he was, mental health-wise,” Stockdale says. They sent all the proper notifications about what was happening, he insists, but it didn’t sink in for Grove until he saw his accountant months later. “I wrote to them because they’d done it, like, six weeks after my stroke, and I was pretty pissed,” Grove says. “I’m not a big governance guy, but you don’t just go in like that.”
Stockdale says the team rolled back the shares. “In his mind, we f---ed him,” he says. “We could have done it because we issued it all legitimately, but we weren’t here to make him an enemy.”
Grove says he went out and found a “seven figure” buyer for his shares, but they backed out upon finding out what had happened to his stake. Stockdale and Murphy then put forward someone willing to buy Grove’s 20 per cent stake in Diamantina Media for about $300,000, but they also pulled out. “That offer he’s talking about, we don’t know who it was. It was never tabled,” Stockdale says. “We haven’t managed him out, because he’s still got equity. We’re happy with the status quo.”
“He was there at the start,” says Clancy. “He definitely founded it. He gave us the belief, and I’ve always said that. He was eccentric enough for us to believe that something like this could happen, which I think is part of his magic. We’ve spent years managing this relationship.”
I later discover Grove contacted the Betootapartners before our interview, suggesting he would tell me everything – unless he got a binding agreement to buy him out within three days. The deadline was hours before our scheduled call.
Grove admits he has moved on from direct involvement in The Betoota Advocate. He didn’t think they should have started a podcast business. Or a talent agency. “I would be building a proper agency that sits alongside in the same way that The Onion does Onion Labs [an advertising agency],” he says. “It was a bit of a missed opportunity. I think it should be a $5 million to $10 million turnover business with $1 million to $2 million in cash flow.”
A business called Three Rivers was supposed to be just that, the current team says, but it was put into administration in September. It owed $159,000 in outstanding superannuation (that of Errol and Clancy), plus another $250,000-odd for the Australian Taxation Office, and $130,000 to various Betoota entities. “This was the Onion Labs model,” Clancy says. “But it needed as much attention as Betoota. We have less super. But hey, that’s this cool entrepreneur space.”
There is a brilliance to the Betoota founders recognising their inherent limitations. They had no physical presence in Melbourne, so found ways to make stories about the city work. “Every time we write anything about Melbourne, we just make one slight error. Because it’s free engagement,” Errol says. “There is nothing like a Melbourne person scorned. It’s not Northcote, it’s North-ket.” Clancy adds: “We used to purposely f--- it up and say the hipsters were from Toorak.”
Writer Effie Bateman pitched a (true) story related to a dog called Laika that was sent into space on a one-way mission by the Soviet Union in 1957. “Local Woman Finds Herself Thinking About That Dog They Sent Into Space Again” went live. “That went f---en bananas,” Clancy says. “It had a reach of 29 million,” Errol adds. It hit a nerve, somehow.
You could spend months researching, refining and honing a story that ultimately bombs, Wendell says. “Then you write an article about, ‘That Smell’s Amazing, Says Housemate Smelling Some Onions And Garlic Being Fried’. And it gets 150,000 likes and two million impressions,” he says. This, he ruminates, is influence – not power. “In terms of actual power structures in society, I don’t think we come close to that at all,” Wendell says. “I think we can, you know, have some influence on the mood and the zeitgeist, kind of seed some ideas. I guess that’s for people outside the organisation to make a judgment call on whether we do it or not.”
Other people do make this judgment call, including Samaras, who, despite its longevity, describes The Betoota Advocate as a nascent new media power player. “It’s similar to the sort of impact that podcasts had during the US presidential campaign,” he says. He mentions Donald Trump’s interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, which had a larger audience than the US presidential debates.
Australia is five years behind the US in this sense, Samaras says. Give it a bit more time, and there will be powerful individuals who wield an audience the way Rogan and his contemporaries do. “The political class will scamper over each other to get to them,” he says. “They already are having an impact among a group of Australians, Millennial-Gen Z, who are the largest voter block in the country in every state and territory. They now outnumber the Boomers as an example, because, you know, when Abbott won, they were, you know, 56 per cent of the voters. They’re now down to 33. And Millennial-Gen Z are up close to 50 per cent.”
When the campaign for the upcoming federal election gets under way in earnest, Betoota will be ready. “Albo Keeps The Media Happy And Moves Into A Single Bed Flat Above The Huntsbury Hotel In Petersham”, they informed their million Instagram followers in October. “Dutton Catches Himself Daydreaming About Going On The Joe Rogan Podcast,” they wrote in November. They’re planning to resurrect their 2022 election analysis podcast, Decode, and go big to cover the 2025 polls. And they’re looking for politicians to join them in their podcast studio in Betoota HQ in Woolloomooloo. Or perhaps at the old Fitzroy Hotel.
“I reckon we’ll get everyone but Dutton or [Angus] Taylor,” Clancy says. “Either way, we are ready, willing and able.”
Fashion details
Styling: Monique Moynihan
Hair and make-up: Desiree Wise
Main photo: Bursill wears Shona Joy jacket and pants, Hugo Boss camisole, Nine West shoes, Cushla Whiting necklace; Murphy wears Hugo Boss suit and shirt, his own shoes; Parker wears P. Johnson suit, M.J. Bale shirt, his own Akubra; Stockdale wears M.J. Bale suit and shirt, G.H. Bass Weejuns shoes; Overell wears M.J. Bale suit and shirt, R.M. Williams boots, his own Akubra; Hussey wears M.J. Bale jacket and pants, Hugo Boss shirt, R.M. Williams boots, his own Akubra; Bateman wears Courtney Zheng vest and skirt, Prada shoes.
