A reborn city you’ll never forget

Nikki Gemmell soaks up the joyful, creative buzz of Toowoomba

Fintan Magee has created Street Art all over the world. This piece is in Toowoomba. Source: facebook

I am from regional Australia. Thought I knew regional Australia. A place I couldn’t wait to get out of as a kid and a place I rarely go back to as an adult. The quiet footpaths, the absence of traffic, twitching curtains, circling the wagons on the world, resisting difference, watching out fearfully for change. Disruption was bad; audacity to be sneered at.

Then I visited Toowoomba. Let’s just say I had certain misconceptions. A mate born and bred there filled me in. Her Toowoomba was all bibles and bluestone churches and graciousness; a Cobb+Co Museum, an annual flower festival, a rich tradition of conservatism and a musical name of mysterious origin. And she couldn’t wait to get out of it.

“Wearing a pale blue shirt as opposed to a white one was radical for a man,” she tells me. “I had to run away.”

Ah yes, I knew too well this kind of place. My certainties were only confirmed on the direct flight from Sydney when two lovely young moleskin-clad farmer types boarded – one in a tweed waistcoat, one in a tweed jacket – and both were wearing white shirts. Bingo. There would be no surprises.

Yet smug convictions were rattled the moment I stepped from the plane into a dazzling cavern of modernity called Wellcamp Airport. Not your typical country town flight facility. It’s an audacious initiative from a local family who had a dream, a big dream: to make Toowoomba the largest inland port in Australia.

Wellcamp’s long runway means it’s primed to be a future transport hub. Cathay Pacific’s first cargo export booking was for a live crocodile. Wellcamp Airport is on to a good thing: Toowoomba is Australia’s second largest inland city after Canberra, and over the past five years it’s become one of the fastest growing in the country.

There’s a lot to love here, the city’s dramatic geography for a start. It’s perched on the crest of the Great Dividing Range, 700m above sea level, nestled on the old lava pool of an extinct volcano. And because the city is so high you don’t get the sticky humidity of Brisbane – many locals have moved here to escape the heat. It feels like the Bowral of Queensland.

As I drove into the CBD I felt myself exhaling as I passed public gardens of verdant neatness, wooden houses from more aesthetically pleasing times and gracious churches of iconic bluestone sitting on streets that were country-town expansive.

“I call them ‘luxury lanes’,” chuckled a local, later, “because the roads are so wide.”

Then I hit the city centre and stopped, in surprise. Because threaded among the grand old civic buildings and shops and carparks is art. Street art. More than 100 painted murals, and they give the city a gloriously funky energy; this is a place that cares about the face it presents to the world. It wants visitors to take note; to marvel. Bring on the wonder.

Teresa Lane, from Toowoomba Walking Tours, took me on a guided art tour. The murals were initially put in place to stop graffiti; the initiative of a forward-thinking council and arts festival. The enormous outdoor canvases turned the city cool; re-energised it. Toowoomba is now a centre of creativity, and like Hobart with Mona, it reminds you that art is an audacious way to revitalise the communal psyche of a place. It generates local chuff; flavours a place with a sense of modernity and dynamism.

“There are still some blank walls that I’d like to see painted,” Teresa said, but a lot of the city’s vast, vertical canvases have already been snapped up. And so alongside the old blokes walking by in their Akubras and moleskins are floating polar bears and galloping elephants and building-long proclamations such as, “Don’t forget to stop and share the roses” and “War & Peace”. The murals are inspired by all manner of influences from all manner of artistic eras: Japanese manga and comic books; the Renaissance; Matisse and Keith Haring. Toowoomba was surprising me. And I was falling headlong into its vibe.

This is the largest regional gallery of outdoor art in Australia. Around almost every corner it feels like the city is a film set for some cool music video. Parked cars nudge up alongside the colourful walls; parking signs are placed over the paintwork; paintings continue down onto asphalt and over pipes and it all works together in a thrilling, jostling urban landscape. And it’s smack bang in the middle of the black soil riches of the Darling Downs.

Artists are attracted by the urban vibe and the cheaper real estate than nearby Brisbane - and so too the hipsters. I’m calling it now: Toowoomba has the biggest population of cool cafes, per population, of any country centre I’ve been in. It feels like a mini Melbourne with its tiny laneways adorned with overhanging strings of lights, street art, café nooks and outdoor tables hosting Apple laptops. Mine included, as I cafe hop and write, fired up by the energy of this place.

This is not the regional Australia I know. Toowoomba is walloping me with wonder. I dive into the breakfasts at cafes like The Baker’s Duck, all blond wood and artisanal sourdough bread; at the dog-friendly Bar Wunder with its vintage couches and bingo and retro film nights; at Bunker Records with its vinyl to buy on the side and at the Ground Up Espresso Bar that has “welcome to the laneway” on the front of its menu. Sandwich boards out the front of various cafes proclaim, “The buskers, we thank” and “Weekdays are great – celebrating all day and night”. There’s a joyful, creative buzz to this city.

Alongside the buzzy laneway eateries and street murals are second-hand clothing boutiques and op shops and the glory of Lancaster’s Toowoomba Antique Centre near the beautiful old railway station. For a fiver I purchase a pair of vintage kid gloves still in their flat oblong box (“David Jones ... For Service”).

It’s vintage heaven, and as I loosen into Toowoomba’s treasure-box vibe I feel the stresses of life falling from me.

It’s also the land of the writer Steele Rudd (real name, Arthur Hoey Davis). You can visit a reproduction of Rudd’s slab hut on his family’s original selection, south of Toowoomba, and get a feel for what it must have been like for the pioneering settlers. The original, extremely modest table top still stands on a miserly dirt floor. The slabs have gaps an inch or so wide which in Rudd’s day were stuffed with corn cobs and newspaper to keep the wind out. It’s a sobering reminder of what Toowoomba was.

Yet look at you now. A regional success story of reinvention and regeneration. From penury to super-cool luxury – and fast becoming a foodie paradise. The new Toowoomba is luring its alumni home, the kids who left for the Big Smoke and got their smarts in the top restaurants of Australia’s capitals but have now come back, to give back, attracted by the buzz of their old city.

Phil Coorey and his family own the George Banks Rooftop Bistro on top of a distinctive old Bank of New South Wales building, as well as Toowoomba’s iconic pub, The Spotted Cow. Phil was raised in the Lebanese area of the city (in the old days there was a German town, an Irish town and a little Lebanon; Toowoomba is a dynamic immigrant city).

He moved to Sydney to work but then returned to start up his own venture inside a glass box of culinary fabulousness perched on top of a beloved sandstone bank. Think smooth, purry luxe: an umbrella made of fairy lights above an illuminated bar, wood panelling, velvet chairs.

“I’m trying to create another tourist destination for Toowoomba,” Phil explains. “We have so much faith in this place. We’re only an hour and a half from Brisbane.”

Then there’s Rosalie House Cellar Door and Restaurant, smack bang in Darling Downs dairy country. The owners celebrated their first vintage in 2008 and specialise in chardonnay, pinot gris and viognier. It’s a beautiful 20-minute drive from Toowoomba. You pass the estate’s gorgeous old wooden homestead on the way to the restaurant, which is housed in an old railway shack that was originally by the Toowoomba railway yards. The owners transported it to their property in two pieces on the back of trucks. It’s now a fabulously relaxing day tripper destination. Think a catchup with old mates, a modern Australian meal with a hint of Mediterranean, a wide verandah, a sunset garden and a cattle dog cross called Jet who’s always reclining somewhere close.

Toowoomba’s starting to seep in to this clenched city chick with her laptop on a tight leash. I have visions of living in this place; start scouring real estate agent windows. Then I discover Spicers Peak Lodge, 90 minutes from the city and on the crest of a mountain that’s twice as high as Toowoomba. You thread your way along stunningly beautiful dirt roads to get there, passing gum trees like candles and curious grey kangaroos as you climb higher and higher into the clouds. When you arrive you stop the car in wonder, and exhale. You feel like you’re on the very roof of the world.

As you enter the property you cross over Bellbird Weir where a sign directs you to “stop and enjoy the moment”. I do indeed, listening to the cram of birdsong in the bush as all the city stresses drop away from me. I’ve found my place. Want to spend a week here writing, listening, stilling - and turning into someone else. Someone better, calmer.

The lodge is on the glorious peak of 3000ha of forest, with a World Heritage-listed national park as its backdrop. It’s the brainchild of the founders of Flight Centre, both locally born and bred. They’ve created a magical getaway for couples on a special occasion, or women like me drowning in busy-ness and needing to recharge, alone.

The main building is designed like a ski lodge; around it are eccentric artistic touches. A giant billiard ball several metres across sits high in a tree; a red phone box stands in a paddock of indifferent cows. The food philosophy is “the best of Australia on a plate”, which means oysters from Tasmania, duck from New South Wales and the creamiest, most exquisite lamb I’ve ever tasted, from Western Australia. Oh, and a killer dessert made from Daintree chocolate.

All this wonder from a chef who looks like a bikie but has the tenderest of touches – he’s worked in some of the best restaurants in Australia.

Alongside the extraordinary food are activities like mountain biking and stargazing if you’re so inclined, or just lazing by the open fire if you’re not. The day spa gave me a massage that made me feel so released I almost wept.

On my final night in Toowoomba I headed to the Go!! Show Gold show at the beautifully restored, art deco Empire Theatre. Colleen Hewett’s powerhouse voice gets us all up and dancing beneath the iconic wedding-cake glory of the interior. Next to me is an octogenarian having as much fun as me. She tells me her ancestors gave Toowoomba its beautiful name – it was what her family’s original house was called.

“‘Woomba’ is an Aboriginal word for swamp,” she explained. “Then they put Two at the start of the word, because there were two swamps here. And the town took the name!”

Phil Coorey says, “What I love about Toowoomba is how much it surprises people when they get here.”

Yep. Toowoomba feels like it’s doing everything right. Vision, enterprise, reinvention, that’s what this city is all about.

It’s about the audacity of surprise, again and again. It’s not dying off, it’s going off. Most gloriously.

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