Goondiwindi: it’s in the water
The Queensland border town is capturing the imagination of people looking for a slower, more intentional kind of life.
There are seven dentists in Goondiwindi. The mayor tells you this. “Eleven doctors and seven dentists,” he says. The hairdresser tells you this. “Somethin’ like seven dentists here,” she says. “Seven dentists!” holler the locals at the bar of the Queensland Hotel. Even the station hands with the tobacco-stained and missing teeth tell you without telling you that Goondiwindi is Goldilocks enough to attract seven oral health professionals to a regional population of 6000 people and accepting enough not to care a hoot if you choose not to use them.
The locals keep offering this curious employment statistic because you keep asking them why the hell everybody here smiles so much. The real secret behind that, says hairdresser Hazel Lloyd, is the strange magic in the water; the shimmering stuff in the Macintyre River that curls around the town centre, bringing the town to life, quenching its thirst. Thirst for fun. Thirst for community. Thirst for meaning. “Have you drunk the Macintyre water?” Hazel asks. I’ve filled a plastic bottle with the liquid magic – bathroom tap vintage, Room 5 of the Comfort Inn. “You’re gonna become a resident,” she says. “You drink from the Macintyre, you’ll always come back.”
“We’re right on the border of Queensland and NSW,” says the man in Hazel’s swivel chair, Richard Hawker, general manager of the Fox & Thomas legal practice in town. “We’re the inland gateway to Queensland.”
Wrapped in a salon smock, Hawker lays out the Goldilocks qualities of Gundy like an effortless legal argument that begs no rebuttal. “Across the border is the Moree Plains Shire, the wealthiest agricultural shire in Australia. We service half that community. We have good diversity in our agriculture. We have irrigation farming, we have dry land farming, we have livestock, and we’re far enough away from the next town centre, Toowoomba, yet we have the ability to travel to Brisbane [four hours’ drive], which helps provide a lifestyle.
“We haven’t had any mining, which probably hasn’t brought us the wealth of some other communities, but we also haven’t had that itinerant workforce either, which has probably kept our community quite connected. And we’ve had less people moving away for retirement so it’s grown a lot. If you get the right balance, it works.”
It’s like this, says cotton farmer Sam Coulton. You ever seen a cow get near to the front gate of the paddock in which it was born? “It’s a strange thing,” he says. “When they come back to that paddock years later, when they get near to that paddock, they will run towards that paddock. It’s amazing. It’s the same thing that happens with our people here. They feel good when they hit town. You see that on them, that’s what happens. It’s in all of us.”
Sam, 65, stands in a cotton field cupping a durry because he doesn’t want the smoke to spoil our view across his field of dreams. He pulls a low brush of pre-season white cotton, puts it to flight on the Goondiwindi wind and offers another profundity in a voice built for advertising Mack trucks. “Nature never lies,” he rumbles.
As in, nature is bigger than all of us. It’s like this, Sam says. You ever seen one of those city office workers in their button-up business shirts pushing for an hour through traffic so they can get to their desk to wait 30 minutes for their computer to work and in their pocket is a communication box that wants their permanent attention like a psycho lover and after eight to 10 hours of buzz and swish and click and swoosh the office worker pulls back into their remote-controlled garage having, for the sixth day in a row, not looked up once at the sky?
“That thing up there,” Sam says. Big pulsating orangey-yellow fried egg thing in the sky. “It produces life. You don’t get caught up in the negativities and the small stuff because you’re thinking about the big stuff. You don’t get caught up in the little disappointments when you start the day by having to shoot your dog. You know what I’m saying? We don’t dwell on things here. We fix them and move on. You’re thinking about life. That thing up there. Then you get the experts who come out and try to put everything in a spreadsheet and you’re dealing with nature. You’re dealing with a feeling.”
No expert does a spreadsheet like the esteemed Bernard Salt. He crunched the numbers on the home of Gunsynd – the Goondiwindi Grey, thoroughbred of thoroughbreds, horse of dreams – and found an unemployment rate of 3.7 per cent; a median house price of $335,500; a country town where more than a quarter of the population are aged under 18. “There are 1600 kids at school here,” says mayor Graeme Scheu. “Unemployment’s low because there’s good quality work. You want a job, you’ll find one here.”
This is still a town where farm owners can walk into the Queensland Hotel on Marshall Street and, from the door of the public bar, bark, “I could use a few days’ work, Shorty”, and Shorty – ginger feller at the bar with the beard – will swig his stubby of VB and place it down beside his mate Anne’s smokes and duck off for a week’s hard work 100km up the road.
“Came here cotton chippin’ 18 years ago,” Shorty says. “Yer takin’ the weeds out from the cotton with a hoe. Doesn’t happen much anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Roundup,” Shorty says. Ever since the herbicide took his job, he’s been farm contracting. “Once you get known as a bit of a worker, they come looking for you.”
“Goldilocks town, hey?” considers Anne Rowsell, a 63-year-old former jillaroo and contract musterer. “Everything’s just right.” She likes the sound of that. Anne came to Goondiwindi when she was 18. “Married a bloke then split up and I never left,” she says.
“Why’d you stay?”
“Drank the water,” she says.
The bartender offers a piece of history. “We were voted Queensland’s friendliest town ’bout 20-odd years ago,” she says.
“That’s just before I came,” laughs Shorty.
“That’s when it all went south!” laughs Anne.
Along the bar Lorelle Dillon, who lives past the cemetery on the Serpentine Lagoon, is showing regulars the latest happy snaps of her pride and joy. “Wiggyyyyyy,” she coos over an image of the barrel-fat feral pig that comes to her fence at 4pm every day to eat frozen blocks of ice. “He loves ice,” she says. “Big fat thing. He has biscuits, cakes, cheese, peanuts for dinner. Muesli bars for dessert. Then he goes to bed at seven o’clock.”
Wiggy is unbearable if he doesn’t get at least eight hours’ sleep a night. Lorelle runs a loving forefinger over her Wiggy portrait. “He’s so gentle,” she says. “But if you upset him, of course, he’ll slice you open with a tusk.”
Sure, it’s not all funny pigs, B&S and cotton balls. Gundy has its issues like any other town. The farmers have barneys over water resources. Chinese money’s coming to town in the form of a new abattoir. It’ll spark a small boom, create up to 380 jobs, but some locals are spooked because they don’t want their porridge spoiled. They like it how it is.
“Law and order is the big worry,” Sam says. “The ice.” He doesn’t mean the stuff Wiggy loves so much. “These towns around us, it’s just gone right through,” he says. “We’ve got it here, too. But it hasn’t quite taken hold yet because we grab the kids when we can and we look after ’em. We know everybody. We know when a kid’s in trouble and we don’t walk away from it. We confront it. We take responsibility. Everybody does.”
This is the community Pearl Gawler was craving. Pearl works part-time in The Larder, Gundy’s go-to coffee joint. She’s 30 years old and not so long ago was running a hole-in-the-wall espresso bar in Preston, Melbourne. One night, she and her partner Jason, a carpet and vinyl layer, saw an online video tour of Goondiwindi. They saw the town’s wide, jacaranda-lined streets. They saw the grand majesty of the Victoria Hotel, where lifetime local Gordon Fleming gives his enthralling daily “beer and bullshit” history tours. They saw the Border Bridge crossing the Macintyre at sunset; the old art deco cinema; the cotton fields in harvest season when the farmers look like they’re standing waist-deep in fallen snow. Pearl and Jason packed up their belongings and a shih tzu poodle named Meika and drove north, slowly.
“Slow living,” Pearl says. “Intentional living. I can do that here. From the moment you wake up and before you exit the bedroom door, just knowing you want to do whatever you’re going to do that day. Breaking my day down into portions, about six different portions, and intentionally going from one step to another.” People in the old days used to call that breathing. Stopping on top of a gently sloping hill somewhere and sucking in a lungful of perspective.
“You feel that?” asks Sam Coulton, stopping by a tower of hay on his cotton farm. He looks around on a silent afternoon landscape filled only with crops and sky. He looks north, south, east and west, eyes searching for something that can only be felt. In the sun on your nose. In the dirt beneath your fingernails. In the toothy smiles on all those town faces. “How do I get those experts feeling what I’m feeling right now?”
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Goondiwindi stats
Population 2016: 5524 (growth 2011-16, 0.2%)
Median age: 36
Top three countries of birth: Australia 82.9%, New Zealand 1.1%, Philippines 0.9%
Most common religions: Anglican 28.5%, Catholic 28.3%
Occupations: Technicians & trades workers 16.4%, professionals 15.0%, clerical & administrative workers 12.9%, managers 11.8%, labourers 11.8%
Median income (all workers): $37,189 (Australian av $34,426)
Median weekly personal income for people aged over 15: $718 (Australian av $662)
Unemployment: 3.7% (Australian av 6.9%)
Median house price (2018): $335,500 (Australian av $548,000); Five-year growth: 24.7%
Did voluntary work in past 12 months: 25.9% (Australia av 19%)
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