Kyogle sits in the traditional country of the Bundjalung Nation, in the lands of the Githabul clan, and the bush turkey woven through its identity is no marketing invention - it is a translation of the place itself. The big concrete bird that greets travellers was built on site in 2018 by local artists John and Chrystine Graham, joining the ranks of Australia's beloved "big things." Some call it the Big Brush Turkey, others the Big Scrub Turkey, a nod to the vast subtropical rainforest that once blanketed this corner of the state. The Big Scrub has largely been cleared, but the turkeys remain - scratching through gardens, raking leaf litter into nesting mounds, utterly unbothered by the town that took their name.

Kyogle bills itself as the Gateway to the Rainforests, and the claim holds. Border Ranges and Toonumbar National Parks rise to the west and north, ancient Gondwana forest clinging to the rim of an enormous extinct volcano. The land below tells the story of how the region was opened: timber cutters came first for red cedar and hoop pine, and once the great trees were felled, the cleared hills were given over to cattle and dairy. Today those green paddocks make a soft foreground to a dramatic backdrop, the Tweed and McPherson Ranges stacking up on the horizon. Kyogle is the last proper town before the road climbs into rainforest, the place where you fill the tank and buy the supplies.

North of town, near Cougal, the railway does something extraordinary. To haul trains up the steep wall of the McPherson Range from the low New South Wales side to the high Queensland side, engineers built the Border Loop - a spiral where the track curves a full 360 degrees and eventually crosses over itself, gaining height the way a corkscrew threads through a cork. It is one of those quietly audacious feats of early-twentieth-century engineering that you only fully grasp from above. Kyogle station itself sits on the main North Coast line between Sydney and Brisbane, though these days the through trains pause only if someone has actually booked to get on or off.

The Richmond River gives Kyogle its fertile soil and, on bad years, its hardest days. In January 2008 the river burst its banks after heavy rain upstream and rose to 18.1 metres, the second-worst flood on record after the deluge of 1954. Emergency crews pulled thirty people from a caravan park as landslides cut roads around the town. Living below the ranges means living with the water that pours off them, and Kyogle has learned the rhythm. The same community that bails out after floods also took the national "Young Legends" Tidy Towns award in 2012, judges praising a small place that simply refuses to let itself go shabby.