What do you do when your town is on the Bogan River and "bogan", courtesy of the comic character Kylie Mole, has become a term synonymous with youthful vulgarity and a charmless lack of sophistication? You turn your weakness into your strength, of course.

This is precisely what Nyngan, a modest town on the Bogan River, 204 kilometres south of Bourke and 572 kilometres from Sydney via Dubbo, has done.

Next Saturday, the inaugural Bogan Day Out Festival, with such exotic rural entertainment as a snake tent, clowns and barefoot skiing and wakeboard demonstrations (on the Bogan River, of course), will be part of a self-deprecating day of fun based on the theme "proud to be a Bogan". The organisers promise that if you look really closely you might find the odd "bogan" in the crowd but, of course, they will be out-of-towners, not locals. And as Kylie Mole once observed, they are people "you just don't bother with".

Nyngan is much more than just a rural service centre on a river with a funny name. It is the launching point to see one of Australia's most spectacular and beautiful natural wonders. It also offers unique opportunities for a yarn with locals, who will tell you about the "roaring days" when the flat western plains were criss-crossed by Cobb & Co and vast herds of sheep.