The Royal Mail, Goodna

An elderly man sits on his Brisbane Terrace verandah, looking out at the street. We chat. “I’m losing all my neighbours,” he says.

Across the road is a vacant lot, with crepe myrtle trees. A house stood there once, on that good corner block.

“It was the floods – January 2022. Missus across the road, she’s gone. And the people down the street.”

The government Resilient Homes Program provides funding for people whose houses have been affected by floods; and while submissions can be made to retrofit or raise houses, these vacant lots are the result of the Voluntary Buy Back scheme, through which people have been able to move elsewhere and leave their houses to demolition or removal.

“Did your place get flooded?” I ask.

“It came to three feet below the floorboards,” he answers. “I’m lucky my house is high set. Lots of places around here didn’t survive.

“If the pub goes, there’ll be nothing. And it’s up for sale.”

Along with so many regional pubs in Queensland, I think to myself. They often sit on the market for years.

The pub he’s talking about is the 150-year-old Royal Mail Hotel, a few hundred metres down the road. A traditional two-story timber pub, with verandahs, and a beer garden out the back, this is a much-loved venue.

When I told a Brisbane friend, a lover of music and a regular at the Woodford Folk Festival, that we’d been to a pub in Goodna, her eyes lit up. “Was it the Royal Mail?” she asked. “I love that place!”.

Goodna is an eastern suburb of Ipswich, and until 1955 what is now Brisbane Terrace was the main road between Brisbane and Ipswich. Cobb and Co. Coaches used this road, and the Royal Mail was one of their stopping points.

Now cut off from passing traffic by the motorway, it still brings people in after work, and publican Andrew Cafe and his family also found another way to attract customers.

They have brought this old pub to international attention by making it, over the last thirty-five years, a famous Blues venue.

This year’s Bathurst 1000 ad was filmed at the Royal Mail, Goodna: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cLSJ1TpzKDQ 

According to its website, the Royal Mail Hotel is “the only venue in Australia to be awarded the International Keeping the Blues Alive Award from the Blues Association in Memphis Tennessee.” Every Thursday and Saturday, Blues bands and performers appear here, plus Jam sessions one Sunday a month. When we visit at lunchtime on a Friday, there are a good number of customers: a few tradies, a couple of singles, and several groups of friends having quiet beers. Some motorcycles are parked out the front. The bar and music lounge are atmospheric. A few people sit out in the shady beer garden, yarning.

It’s not always this relaxed, though. It’s difficult to imagine how people can recover from the floods that have been through this suburb, and this old building.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKMLcJFi8sc The Royal Mail flooded in 1974, 2011, and again 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fIPvYQGgfo The water rose to just below the ceiling in the bar. In 2011, publican Andrew says, he used a large oar, up until then a decorative feature in the bar, to push floating shipping containers away from the building, where his family and some flooded-out neighbours had taken refuge.

When the waters went down, many locals and people from further away came to help with the clean-up. The oar is back in the bar today.

Brisbane Terrace is a quiet street, although the non-stop roar of the Ipswich Motorway can be heard just a couple of blocks away. Most of the suburb of Goodna lies on the other side of the motorway and the railway line. The street runs through a narrow strip of land, dipping to flood-prone creeks and gullies and following a curve of the Brisbane River and Woogaroo Creek, 100 metres away, which forms the boundary between Brisbane and Ipswich. Along both sides of the road are old silky oaks and jacaranda trees, in gorgeous flower at this time of the year.

The jacarandas were planted in the 1930s, during the Great Depression.

The University of Queensland has jacaranda purple as its official colour and holds the Bloom Jacaranda Festival every spring. Grafton holds a famous Jacaranda Festival. Herberton in FNQ and Goombungee, north of Toowoomba, hold Jacaranda Festivals.

And Goodna. There have been yearly Jacaranda Festivals held here since the 1960s. Except for flood years. And COVID.

Later this month, from 27 to 29 October, the Club Parkview Jacaranda Festival will be held in sprawling Evan Marginson Park, a few hundred metres up the road from the Royal Mail.

This old suburb has seen hard times but is surviving. There will be more floods in the future, and more houses will disappear. I hope the old Royal Mail keeps going for many years to come. It has become the much-loved centre of the community.