It's so crazy. I remember I drove in to a few NSW country towns for work some years back and it absolutely baffled me that a small town could sustain a KFC or a McDonalds! Socio-economic factors would make it hard for those battlers to eat anything else BUT Kfry or Micky D's.
Yeah small town Australia is somewhere I avoid but my recent trip to Mackay was exactly as you describe. I asked my sis if there was any nice restaurants to eat at..... we ended up at the yacht club eating fried food...:( It seems healthy food is just a weird fad that is only found in the big city.