The festival that anchors the town's identity is Casino Beef Week, a sprawling celebration that turns a working cattle centre into a party for the better part of a fortnight. It has been a fixture for decades, missing only the occasional year, including 2007 and the pandemic year of 2020, and in 2024 it ran from 18 to 26 May. There are rodeos and street parades, a beef-themed everything, and the particular pride of a community that knows exactly where its prosperity comes from. Casino positions itself flatly as Australia's Beef Capital, and while Rockhampton in Queensland makes the same boast, few towns have leaned into a claim quite so wholeheartedly. The Richmond River runs straight through the middle of it all, splitting South Casino from the rest of the town, the same river that drew settlers and cattle to these flats in the first place.

Long before the cattle yards and the highway junction, this was Bundjalung country, and it still is. The wider Northern Rivers region was home to an estimated twenty different language groups under the broad Bundjalung umbrella, and the traditional custodians of the Casino area, Djanangmum, are the Galibal. That heritage is no museum piece. At the 2021 census, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people made up 11.5 per cent of the town's population, well above the national figure, and the community remains a living one. Casino has produced figures like Clive Andrew Williams, an Aboriginal activist born here in 1915, whose generation fought for rights and recognition that earlier Australia had refused. To drive into Casino is to arrive in a place where two deep histories run side by side: the cattle country the settlers built, and the far older country it was built upon.

Casino is a railway town in its bones. Its station is the terminus of the daily XPT from Sydney and a junction for services running north to Brisbane, and the rails are stitched into the local story, including the ones that were never finished. In the 1920s a branch line toward Bonalbo was begun and abandoned; other lines were proposed to Tabulam and even all the way to Tenterfield, and never built. Today a miniature railway runs beside the Casino Golf Club on Sundays, hauling visitors along two and a half kilometres of track to a small museum. The song "I've Been Everywhere," that breathless Australian roll-call of place names, name-checks Casino in its second verse, a small immortality for a small town.

Casino has a knack for standing in for the archetypal Australian country town, partly because it so thoroughly is one. The 2014 drama series The Gods of Wheat Street was set here and partly filmed on its streets, and in 2018 a Coca-Cola television advertisement used the Richmond Dairies factory and a corner general store as its backdrop. The roll-call of locals who left and made their mark is long and varied: High Court judge Ian Callinan, crime novelist Michael Robotham, country songwriter Stan Coster, paratriathlete Katie Kelly, and Jeff Fatt, the purple Wiggle, who grew up here before becoming one of the most-watched faces in Australian children's entertainment.