Rooms for Rent in Townsville

The trade you make coming this far north

Brisbane is about thirteen hundred and fifty kilometres down the Bruce Highway: two days of driving, or two hours in the air. That distance is the trade. You give up the depth of a capital, so if your field is narrow there may be two employers here instead of twenty, and most flights out go through Brisbane or Cairns first. What you get back is a city of about two hundred thousand you can drive across in twenty minutes, with a beachfront at the end of the main street and an island offshore.

The other half of the trade is the weather. November to April is hot and humid, and it does not let up much at night. Ask whether the air conditioning is in the bedroom or only in the lounge, and who covers the power, because from December onwards that is not a small question.

The base, the hospital and the port set the year

Three things bring most people here. Lavarack Barracks sits on the southern edge of town and moves whole households in and out on the Army posting cycle. The hospital and James Cook University sit together out at Douglas, ten kilometres from the centre. The port and the work around it keep the rest of the city going.

That gives the rental year a shape you can plan around. Houses fill through December and January as postings land, the university year follows in late February, and in July the week of the Townsville 500 takes anything short term. April to October is the quieter stretch, and the better weather with it. Rooms near the hospital are the exception: they turn over on rosters, so something often comes free mid-year.

A city you can cross in twenty minutes

Castle Hill, the pink granite lump in the middle, is what everything else gets described from, and the Ross River loops down and around the south. North of the river is the older city. North Ward, Belgian Gardens, Hyde Park, Hermit Park and Mundingburra are high-set Queenslanders on stumps, two to four kilometres from Flinders Street and close enough to the Strand that people walk it. Cross the river and the streets get wider and newer: Annandale and Douglas about ten kilometres out, then Kirwan and Thuringowa Central further west, organised around the Willows centre rather than the CBD. Up the highway, Deeragun and Bushland Beach are newer estates sixteen to twenty kilometres from town.

• The bus. Translink, fifty cents a trip, flat, however far you go. There is no go card up here, so you tap a debit card or pay cash as you board. Routes fan out from the city and from Willows, and thin out once you are off the main corridors.
• The bike. The ground is flat and the Ross River path runs most of the way from Aitkenvale down to the mouth, which makes the inner south easy riding.
• The ferry. People do commute from Magnetic Island on the SeaLink service out of Breakwater, about twenty minutes across. The crossing is a separate commercial fare, dearer than the bus.