Why not Warwick?

I have just gotten back from spending a couple of days in Warwick. Why Warwick? Why not.

Call it practice for my trip around Australia, call it a chance to test out the capabilities of my car before taking it to the bottom of the country, call it an excuse to go somewhere. Call it anything you’d like but I did it and I’m not too upset that I did. I was able to visit the “Rose and Rodeo City” and take in all it had to offer.

Warwick was all of the things that you would expect of a country town and I was eager to finally get out of my car after the drive there and start to explore on foot. I had been warned that it would be cold but, despite a brisk breeze that was whipping the strangely incongruent palm trees about, I still had feeling in my fingers and only a slightly ruddy glow to my face as I set off.

The streets were wide enough to swing several cats that had been tied together and refreshingly devoid of traffic. Even at 9.15am cars were sparse in the main street and there were plenty of angle parking spaces available. From necessity though I had to park outside the downtown area and its 2 hour limit so I found somewhere down a side street that didn’t appear to have any signs and walked back to the main street.

The side street was my first real confirmation that I was in a country town. I stopped to look in one shop window that either had a display of home wares artfully decorated with a layer of dust or was selling a large tabby cat that on first inspection may or may not have been alive. As it turned out it was alive because when I returned to my car later in the day it had moved ever so slightly in order to stay in it’s patch of sun. A little further along was a barber shop that obviously had little time for this equality/unisex/metro business as it’s faded pricelist only listed men’s and boy’s haircuts and had those for the princely sum of $12. Across the road was the place to go for the fairer sex with the “Ooh La La Beaute” tucked in next to a workshop offering automatic transmission services.

Not that all of Warwick is layers of dust. There is a nice little shopping centre hiding in the main street that offers a couple of the major players in the retail world in the way Woolworths and Big W. The centre has a number of specialty stores and a strange slant that makes reaching the shops towards the back that much more satisfying.

I was in need of two things though and the first would lead to the second. I needed information on the town and I needed a coffee. Spying a sign promising an information centre I made my way down an alley behind the glitz and glamour of the main street and found not only the Information Centre but the Library and Art Gallery as well.

The information centre was a font of, well, information. There were enough free brochures and maps to satisfy even my paper hoarding needs and also a friendly women behind the counter who seemed genuinely pleased to see me. She managed to maintain her composure and only look mildly surprised when I said that I wasn’t just passing through but intended to stay for a couple of days and she was even able to direct me to a coffee shop when I mentioned that I was looking for a place to sit and read the paper and then peruse my brochures. With a warning that it was some way up the road and, that I should be looking for a coloured dome, I set off up Albion Street.

It was a reasonable way, well outside of the square on my map that marked the CBD and a good 10 minute walk from the information centre. Under a coloured dome I found a spacious cafe that was warm, smelled good and and had an expansive view of the road but it didn’t have the pot of bottomless pot of coffee that I expect from American roadside diners so I had to settle for a flat white. It may be a grail like quest for me to find somewhere in Australia where I can get the call of “warm that up for you” as something hot and black splashes into my mug but I intend to find it. I suspect that Warwick feels itself far too cosmopolitan to have anything less than a cappuccino with eight possible variations. It wasn’t a bad coffee however and the gargantuan slices of cinnamon toast (with jam and cream cheese) made up for all else. 

I used one of the info sheets I had picked up to choose a motel for the night and then had four hours of sightseeing before I could check in.

I read recently that there are more war memorials in Australia than anywhere else in the world. I don’t know for sure if this is true but I suspect that it may well be. Every town, big and small seems to have one and I am sure that they will become a blur as I travel but Warwick’s was the first for this trip and I spent some time inspecting it and reading the various dedications. I even felt that little sinking feeling that comes when you find your own surname among those listed.  

As these things go the Warwick memorial is nicely presented and neatly maintained. It is sited in one corner of a fairly spacious park that comes complete with covered eating areas, gravel paths and even a band stand. At this time of the year there were still roses managing to grimly hang on in the garden beds amid a coating of fallen leaves. In the conventional manner of these things the memorial was a four sided obelisk with the fallen from various conflicts named on two of the sides.  I’m not sure what the remaining two sides are being kept in reserve for, maybe the Warwick City Fathers know something that the rest of us are blissfully ignorant of. I did note that, despite the memorial being erected shortly after the end of WWI, the names of those from WWII were not added until 1996. It struck me as a long time to wait assuming that the war had officially ended in Warwick prior to that date.

On the subject of history, Warwicks claim to fame in the annals of Australian history is “the Warwick Incident”. Apparently in 1917 the then Prime Minister William Morris Hughes was making a speech at the Warwick train station when someone in the crowd threw an egg, knocking off his hat. Billy ordered the police to arrest the man but due to a border disagreement the Queensland police refused to do anything. Rather than attempting to do something about the mess that was interstate relations Billy organised yet another police force for the country with the introduction of the Australian Commonwealth Police. It may have had as much to do with his relationship with the “rogue State” of Queensland as it did with the egg but given that just 5 years earlier US President Teddy Roosevelt was shot, and ended up carrying the bullet in his body for the rest of his life, Billy may have gotten off lightly.

The beauty of Warwick lies mostly in its buildings. They old ones are an attractive sandstone, a tan colour that reveals a wonderful array of patterns on closer inspection. Get up close and look at the swirl of colours that permeate the stone and its easy to believe that you are truly staring at an ancient beach or watching the march of sand dunes over a desert. The information centre had an excellent book that guided me around the town and provided details on many of the older buildings.

It is this sort of inside info that takes a simple walk down the main street of a country town into a different realm. The attitude of “seen one pub, seen ‘em all” is easy to adopt when all you do is drive through these towns on your way to somewhere else but they are all unique in some way and have some amazing history. I think I would rather adopt the attitude of “everyone (and everything) has a story to tell”. Just look for the date of the buildings construction proudly displayed on it’s facade and you will have some idea of the things it must have seen over its life.

Not that everything is old. Far from it. There is the potential for ready access to all of the woes of modern fast food with one corner hosting an eternal battle as the facades of KFC and Red Rooster face off across the intersection. Neon burger signs beckon from only a little further down the road. But at least these are not in the main street. This is still the home of the coffee shop and proper chips and steak sandwiches and their understated facades. In fact that understatedness even extends to an adult shop that I was almost passed before I noticed it nestled between a pie shop and a computer shop. 

I’m not exactly sure why it’s there but Warwick can also boast of one of the most impressive pedestrian crossings I have ever had the pleasure to use. A massive construction that could easily accommodate a small truck and even has a glass walled elevator at each end for those unable to make it down the stairs. I strolled casually through the tunnel to the other side of the road and then, out of idle curiosity, wandered across the road itself and back again managing the trip in the gap between cars. I’m sure there is an architect somewhere with it prominently in his portfolio and I would have liked to have been there for it’s grand opening but, apart from being a tourist attraction in it’s own right, I’m not sure if Warwick is really getting it’s moneys worth.

But Warwick is first and foremost a country town. There is need for more than one saddlery shop and the large fibreglass horse guarding the door of one is undoubtedly a local landmark. To come across a sign outside a business boasting that “we use so-and-so horse dentist” is also a bit of a moment for a quasi city slicker like myself. As if the prominence given to Slim Dusty in one shops music display wasn’t enough, to pass people unselfconsciously wearing akubras and cowboy hats really drives it home.

Even returning to my car I was reminded of exactly where I was by a large pig sitting contentedly in a trailer parked directly behind me. Whether he should have looked so content or whether he should have had a much more concerned expression probably depended on his ultimate destination but for the moment he certainly seemed happy to be in Warwick.