Traveling hairdressers Jason Brooks and Shane Hawton would like to see dedicated funding to get their service out to isolated towns in the Western Plains. 

"The issue we face when we are doing this is that we can cover Brewarrina and Lightning Ridge, but we have problems getting out to all the smaller communities between them. We are trying to get funding to get out to these communities, and if we go out there once or twice, we are not making enough to keep going back out there." Brooks told the Western Plains App.

"Towns with 60 or 70 people don't have a hairdresser, and often they don't have transport to come into a bigger town." 



"Every day we had a guy at the door just watching us, and he lived with his grandmother, and he didn't have much. He had a job interview," Brooks explained.  

"We couldn't afford to give another free haircut, and unfortunately, he missed out on that job. It really made us wish we had more funding to provide people with free haircuts. We did, however, connect him with the Brewarrina Council and got him another job". 

Brooks and Hawton started traveling to the region during COVID and got their majority of clients from Grawin, Lightning Ridge, and Brewarrina. 

They travel into the these towns roughly every six weeks from their base in Sydney. 

"One of the things we have a love for is camping, and before we started our business 18 years ago, we loved traveling and camping. So it's continuing this on. The fact that we are no longer working in a salon means it doesn't feel like a job. We go to these places, people will have a beer in their hand; it is so much more relaxed compared to life in Sydney" Brooks told the Western Plains App 

"Brewarrina has a salon in their tourist information center, but we canned that because we prefer the atmosphere of not cutting in a salon. We started using the CWA hall, and we realized that the atmosphere is just better in a club or a hall."   

"We have one town that is majority miners, another town that is majority Aboriginal, another town that is farmers; it really breaks it up for us."  

"We always get a result; I love to see someone change through a haircut," he explained. 

Brooks said there were several towns in the Western Plains with a population between 50 and 100 that he would like to be given free haircuts. 

He said he would love to be able to serve communities where people couldn't afford to travel to get their haircuts and said that local land services or councils should be providing towns like Enngonia, Weilmoringle, and Collerina with a voucher-type system to get what he considers an essential service. 

"In the aboriginal communities, we give them a lot of confidence, and we find that very rewarding.  

"We constantly get inquiries from these smaller towns, but they are not big enough to travel to." 

"If we were to get funding, I guess it would have to be for repeat visits because it takes a couple of visits just to build the trust up."