A faded black heavyweight tee, cut boxy and worn-in from the first day. Illustrated in Tasmania. Direct transfer printed in Seaford, South Australia. Named for the cattle that still graze the paddocks you'll be looping until you break.
$65 AUD, plus $12 AusPost, or free pickup at the event
Washed to a soft faded black before it ever reaches you, so the first wear feels like the hundredth. Boxy body, drop shoulders, wide ribbed crew neck, heavyweight cotton that holds its shape through a Riverland summer.
Secure checkout via Stripe. At checkout, under Shipping method, pick either AusPost at $12 flat (2 to 7 business days, anywhere in Australia) or Pick Up for free collection at Loveday on race day.
Because Loveday was a farm long before it was a racecourse, and it still is one.
The Riverland Backyard Ultra is held on private land at Loveday 4x4 Adventure Park: 8,000 acres of clay flats, creek beds, soft sand hills and mallee scrub, holding 14 kilometres of Murray River frontage. It's known for its tracks, but it has never stopped being a working produce and cattle property.
So when the loop takes you out past the fence line at 3am and a set of eyes catches your headlamp, it won't be another runner. Locals will tell you the cows are the real veterans of that ground. They've been doing laps out there for generations without a single aid station.
Every backyard ultra needs a mascot with the temperament for it. Something unbothered, well-fed, and still walking at hour thirty.
The land has form for endurance of a different kind, too. Loveday was proclaimed in 1940 and became the site of one of Australia's largest wartime internment camps, holding 5,380 German, Japanese and Italian internees alongside more than 1,500 Australian military personnel at its peak, according to Visit Berri Barmera. Roughly 180 hectares were planted, irrigated and cultivated there, and pigs and poultry were bred to feed the nation and allied forces before the camp closed in 1946.
Food, livestock and hard graft on the same dirt, eighty-odd years apart. The cow on your back is a nod to all of it.
We didn't want a clean logo on a shirt. We wanted something that looked like hour thirty feels.
Nick Hills is a full-time digital artist and illustrator based in Tasmania, specialising in digital illustrative branding. He describes his own work as "pleasingly gruesome": bold, psychedelic, mind-bending takes on wildlife, made for thrill seekers and high-energy brands rather than anyone after a tidy corporate mark, per his studio bio.
Born in 1987 and raised in Hobart on camping, bikes and cartoons, he's built a body of work for action sports outfits, fishing obsessives and craft breweries. It's exactly the wrong register for a polite fun run, which is why it's the right one for a last-one-standing race.
Look closely at the artboard he sent back: cowbell around the neck, purple shorts, headphones on, tongue out, sweat flying, calves like a hill runner. A cow that has clearly committed to another loop against better judgement.
Artwork © Nick Hills · hillsdraws.com · commissioned for Riverland Backyard Ultra
Printing in Adelaide since '93. This one goes on under heat.
The tees are printed south of Adelaide by a shop with a long, slightly ridiculous history. Founder John, known to everyone as "Stankers", started screen printing in 1973 for Golden Breed Active Sportswear on Gawler Place, spent three years there, then took six years off to follow the snow seasons through Falls Creek, Austria and Germany, before coming back to the squeegee in 1981.
He opened Classic Color Quality Screen Printers in 1993, working out the back of the Sea Suits wetsuit factory and printing mostly neoprene and stubby coolers, with his wife Jackie printing alongside him from that first year. They leased a shed at Lonsdale in 2002 and bought their first automatic machine, as told in the shop's own history.
Tori had been contracting to the shop since 2017 when John and Jackie offered her and Sam the chance to buy it and carry the name on. They took it over in 2022 and merged it with Tori's One Day Supply Co label that December to trade as Classic Colour Print Co. By 2024 they'd outgrown Lonsdale and moved to Seaford, doubling the print floor. They're now listed at 4/27 Seaford Rd, Seaford Meadows by Pure Blanks.
The cow is not screen printed, and that was a deliberate call. Nick's artwork runs to blended colour, fine linework and a lot of it, which on a press means a separate screen for every colour before you print a single shirt. So this one is a direct transfer: the art is digitally printed, then pressed into the garment under high heat, the method the shop itself recommends for intricate designs that cannot practically be screened, as set out on their site. Nothing in the illustration gets simplified to suit the process.
Printed in South Australia. Thirty years of Adelaide print floor between the artboard and the finished shirt.
6.7056 kilometres. Every hour. Until one runner is left and everyone else is a DNF.
A backyard ultra has no finish line and no course record you can plan for. You run a 6.7056 km loop, you're back inside the hour, and then the bell goes and you do it again. Miss the start, miss the cutoff, and you're out. The last person standing wins. Everyone else, every single one of them, is recorded as a did-not-finish.
The inaugural Riverland Backyard Ultra starts at midday on 13 March 2027 at Loveday, on private property in South Australia's Riverland, with a 400-runner capacity and a $15,000 prize pool. It runs under naming rights from Tarkine Athletics. Two words carry the whole thing: one more loop.
Faded black heavyweight tee. Cow on the back, badge on the chest. Printed in Seaford, worn in the Riverland.
Small, Medium, Large (unisex) · Stripe secure checkout · choose AusPost at $12, or Pick Up for free, under Shipping method
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