Grafton spreads across both banks of the Clarence on a broad floodplain about 620 km north of Sydney and 320 km south of Brisbane. The settlement that grew here in the 1850s was officially named in 1851 by Governor FitzRoy after his own grandfather, the Duke of Grafton, who had briefly served as British Prime Minister. Long before that name was bestowed, the Clarence marked the meeting line between two Aboriginal nations - the Bundjalung to the north and the Gumbaynggirr to the south - and descendants of both still live in the district today, where Grafton is known in Bundjalung as Gumbin Gir. The town was proclaimed a city in 1885, by then a thriving river port shipping timber and produce downstream to the sea.

In 1935, Grafton held the first Jacaranda Festival, and it has run almost every year since - Australia's oldest floral celebration. For ten days the city throws itself into street parades, a float procession, fireworks over the river and the crowning of a Jacaranda Queen, all timed to the trees' brief, spectacular flowering. See Park becomes the natural amphitheatre of it all, its lawns shaded by some of the oldest jacarandas in the country, many now well over a century old. At night during the festival, floodlights turn the canopies into glowing purple chandeliers. It is a small provincial event by population, but few places in the country can claim a celebration so completely woven into the streets themselves.

Beyond the blossom, Grafton rewards anyone who likes heritage streetscapes. The wide avenues are lined with verandahed shopfronts, churches and grand Federation houses, and the city's Heritage Trail strings them together for a leisurely walk. Christ Church Cathedral, dedicated in 1884 and designed by the noted architect John Horbury Hunt, anchors the Anglican Diocese of Grafton and counts among the city's finest buildings. The unhurried pace, the river light and the deep shade of the street trees give Grafton a settled, dignified character that its boosters have long called one of Australia's most beautiful provincial cities - a claim that feels least like marketing in late October.

Because the city sits on two sides of the Clarence, everything hinges on a single remarkable crossing. The bridge completed in 1932 carries a railway on its lower deck and a roadway above, with a central bascule span that once lifted like a drawbridge to let river traffic through - long the only bridge in Australia to stack a rail line beneath a road this way. The XPT train still rumbles across it daily on the long run between Sydney and Brisbane, the train station tucked into South Grafton across the water from the central business district. Getting here takes patience - the nearest airports with regular flights are Coffs Harbour to the south or Ballina to the north - but the slow approach suits a place that measures its calendar by when the trees turn purple.

It would be a mistake to think Grafton is worth visiting only in late October. The Clarence is one of the great rivers of the New South Wales north coast, and the city is the gateway to a whole valley of it - downstream to the river towns of Ulmarra and Maclean and the beaches at Yamba, upstream toward the rainforest country and Washpool National Park. Grafton makes an unhurried base for all of it, a working provincial city of around 19,000 people with its galleries, racecourse and riverside parks. The jacarandas may be the headline, but the deeper appeal is the river itself, broad and slow and central to everything, the reason a town grew here in the first place and the reason it still feels so settled in its own skin.