Two Years, Tops: Local Secrets, Honest Stories & the Real Townsville
Every brochure tells you Townsville gets 300 days of sunshine. None of them tell you what to do with day 301, when the build-up hits, everyone in town is short with each other, and you don't yet know where to go to feel like a person again.
Four years ago my wife said the word Townsville and I said "for how long." Two years, tops, she said. Two years at Lavarack, then the next posting, then home to Melbourne. That was the deal.
The orders for the next posting came through last month. We asked to stay.
The reason is a bloke called Col, who lives next door, was born at the old General, and has never lived more than six kilometres from it. He found me in my first week, out the front in shoes and socks trying to work out the bins, and told me I'd be right once I stopped wearing shoes. Then, over four years of fence conversations, he taught me the town. Not the town on the council website. The real one.
Somewhere in year two I started writing it down so I'd have something to hand the next family that turned up looking the way I did. It got out of hand. This is the book.
What Col knows that the brochure doesn't
Townsville the way people who stayed actually live it. Why you do Castle Hill before six or not at all, and why the goat track is the only one that counts. The stinger calendar, when the nets go in, when the rockpool on the Strand becomes the beach and when the real water gives it back. How to do Maggie properly: which bay for a pub, which for a swim, when to walk the Forts to see a koala doing absolutely nothing, and which ferry takes your car, because one does and one doesn't.
Where you drive when it's 38 and you can't think. Paluma, Little Crystal Creek, Alligator Creek, the Riverway lagoons, and the order Col would put them in. Why the mangoes come from Bowen and you don't argue. What the build-up actually feels like, when it breaks, and how the town changes the week it does. The Cowboys, the Cairns thing, and why a born-and-bred local will tell you Brazil came to the Ville and not up the road.
The mornings that drop to 13 in September and the flanno you'll end up owning. The aquarium that's been reopening since 2021. The goodbyes, because this is a town that says more of them than most, and nobody tells you that either.
The honest chapters
If you're posted here, moving up from down south, or thinking about it, there's a section written for you and I didn't soften it. The suburbs, one by one, what they cost, what they're like on a Tuesday night, and which ones went under in February 2019, because you should check the flood maps before you fall in love with a kitchen. The crime conversation, treated like the real thing it is, not a punchline and not a brochure. Rentals, Defence housing, the northern beaches versus the city side, schools, commute times to Lavarack and the hospital, and what living here does to a southerner's idea of winter.
And the last chapter is the one spot Col took me to on a Sunday in year three. I'm not putting it on Facebook. It's in the book, with directions.
What you get
A full-length ebook you can read on your phone, tablet, laptop or Kindle app, delivered instantly to your inbox the moment you order. No waiting, no postage. And because the Ville changes every wet season, every buyer gets free updates for life. When the stinger dates shift, when the aquarium finally opens, when Col's chippy changes hands, you get the new version for nothing.
Two years, tops. That's what everyone says. This is the book for whoever is about to find out otherwise.