At 1,330 metres above sea level, Guyra ranks among the highest towns in Australia, and the climate makes sure you know it. The town averages forty-two nights below freezing each year, and snow falls often enough that locals barely remark on it. Summer behaves strangely for this country: Guyra rarely climbs above 30 degrees, a rarity almost anywhere else on the continent. During a savage cold snap in July 1984, the town logged a daytime high of −0.3 °C on the third of the month, the most northerly sub-zero maximum temperature ever recorded in Australia. Up here on the volcanic spine of the Northern Tablelands, the air is thin and clean, and winter arrives with conviction. This is high country wearing an Australian disguise.

Long before surveyors drew the railway line, this was Aboriginal land, and more than one nation knew it. The Gamilaraay (also written Kamilaroi or Gomeroi) people lived across the region, and the name Guyra is said to come from their language, carrying meanings of 'white cockatoo' or 'fishing place.' To the Gumbaynggirr people, whose country lay to the east, the place was associated with the black cockatoo. The land itself runs two ways here, a fact the railway makes literal. Rivers east of the line tumble toward the Pacific; those to the west drift inland, joining the long journey to the Murray. Settlers arrived from 1835, when Alexander Campbell took up Guyra Station on the ground the town now occupies, and the village was formally proclaimed in 1885.

Guyra wears its livelihood proudly: its main festival, held each January, celebrates lamb and potatoes, the twin staples of a district built on fine wool, prime lambs, beef cattle, and root crops. The cold that torments gardeners turns out to be a gift for spuds. In recent years the town has reinvented itself on an industrial scale, with a vast climate-controlled glasshouse complex rising on the tableland to grow truss tomatoes by the millions of kilograms, making this frosty highland one of Australia's largest tomato producers. It is a curious image: tropical fruit ripening under glass while frost whitens the paddocks outside. The old regional abattoir that once employed up to 350 people closed in 1995, and the building found an improbable second life housing an angora rabbit operation.

On the edge of town lies a wetland with one of the best names in Australia: the Mother of Ducks Lagoon, a marshy sheet of water some fourteen kilometres around, cradled in the silted crater of an extinct volcano. Birdwatchers travel a long way for it. The lagoon is a rare breeding ground for several freshwater wetland species and a resting place for migratory birds that drop in from far afield, and its surrounds are protected as a nature reserve listed on the Register of the National Estate. A walkway leads to a viewing platform, with the town golf course and picnic grounds sharing the shore. To stand here at dawn, mist lifting off the water and waterfowl stirring, is to understand why the place earned such a tender, maternal name.