8 Of The Quietest Towns In Australia

In Coober Pedy, a good chunk of the town lives underground, and on a still night out in the surrounding desert there is quite literally nothing to hear. That is one kind of Australian quiet. There are others: the rainforest hush behind a waterfall near Dorrigo, the empty golden sand of a Mission Beach morning, the slow clink of a glass in the vineyards around Cowra. For all its roaring cities, Australia is full of towns where the volume drops right off, where a big night out might mean spotting a cassowary in the rainforest or soaking in a mineral spring. Here are eight of the quietest, each with its own flavour of calm.

Coober Pedy

Let's start with the quietest of the quiet. Coober Pedy sits in the South Australian outback, roughly nine hours' drive north of Adelaide, in a red-dirt landscape so stark it has doubled for Mars and the end of the world in more than one film. About 1,400 people live here, and a good many of them live below ground. Summer temperatures regularly climb past 45 C (113 F), so locals long ago dug their homes, along with their churches, shops, and hotels, straight into the hillsides, where the rock stays cool and cave-quiet year round. You can tour an underground church, sleep in an underground hotel room, and get the whole story at the Umoona Opal Mine and Museum, because this is the self-proclaimed opal capital of the world. Just outside town, the Kanku-Breakaways Conservation Park rolls out a landscape of flat-topped hills and colour-banded desert that genuinely looks like another planet. Out there, the silence is total.

Bellingen

Bellingen, or "Bello" to the people who live there, sits in the hills between Sydney and Brisbane and runs on a distinctly unhurried, slightly hippie wavelength. The main street is all timber verandahs, wholefood cafes, and secondhand bookshops, and nobody seems in any rush to be anywhere. When you want to cool off, locals head to a swimming hole with the excellent name of the Promised Land, a stretch of clear, startlingly blue creek water just out of town. Go on a weekday morning and you might have it to yourself. Closer to the coast, Bongil Bongil National Park protects one of the largest wild koala populations in New South Wales, along with a long, near-empty beach. Back in town, grab a coffee at Hearthfire Bakery and watch Bello do what it does best, which is very little, very pleasantly.

Montville

Perched in the Sunshine Coast hinterland of Queensland, Montville is a tiny mountain village that leans all the way into cottage-core cuteness and somehow makes it work. The main street is a run of fudge shops, tearooms, and galleries, including a German-style shop devoted entirely to cuckoo clocks, which is exactly as delightful and mildly overwhelming as it sounds. The Montville Art Gallery alone shows work from around 40 local artists. When you have had your fill of tearooms, the quiet turns wild a few minutes away in Kondalilla National Park, where a walking track drops down through the rainforest to Kondalilla Falls, an 80-metre cascade spilling into a swimming hole. The rush of the water is about the loudest thing you will hear all day.

Cowra

Out in the rolling farmland of central New South Wales, on the banks of the Lachlan River, Cowra is wine-country quiet: vineyards, big skies, and cellar doors like Windowrie Estate where you can sip a glass and watch the hills do nothing in particular. But Cowra's real story is a surprising one. During the Second World War, the town held a prisoner-of-war camp, and in 1944 it was the scene of one of the largest POW breakouts in modern history. Out of that grim chapter grew something remarkable: a lasting friendship with Japan, expressed today in the Cowra Japanese Garden, one of the largest of its kind outside Japan and built as a symbol of peace. For a different sort of calm, drive out to Wyangala Dam, a reservoir holding more than twice the water of Sydney Harbour, and paddle a kayak across water so still it mirrors the sky.

Dorrigo

Dorrigo perches on a plateau in northern New South Wales, a small country town wrapped in some of the oldest rainforest on the continent, part of the Gondwana Rainforests World Heritage area. This is waterfall country. In Dorrigo National Park, the Wonga Walk leads to Crystal Shower Falls, where a footbridge takes you behind the curtain of water so you can look out through the falls, which is exactly as good as it sounds. Right in town, Dangar Falls tumbles into a pool you can actually swim in. And at the Dorrigo Rainforest Centre, the Skywalk juts out over the treetops, best at dawn when the mist is still sitting in the valley and the only sound is birdsong. It is the kind of quiet that makes you lower your voice without meaning to.

Daylesford

Daylesford, up in the spa country of central Victoria, has been Australia's wellness capital for well over a century, ever since people worked out that the whole district sits on a network of natural mineral springs. This is the town you come to specifically to slow down. You can soak in the mineral pools, book a massage, kayak in gentle circles on Jubilee Lake, and eat very well, and that is more or less the entire agenda. When you feel the need to earn your relaxation, walking tracks such as the Great Dividing Trail and the Mount Sugarloaf loop head out into the surrounding bush. But nobody will judge you if you just stay in the water. That is, after all, the point.

Yamba

Yamba sits where the Clarence River meets the sea on the New South Wales north coast, and it has the feel of a beach town that time forgot, in the best possible way. It regularly turns up on lists of Australia's best towns, and yet it has somehow never tipped over into busy or flashy. There are close to a dozen beaches to choose from, an old lighthouse on the headland, and a coastal walk that runs south along the wild Yuraygir shoreline. When the surf is up, the point break at nearby Angourie draws a small, respectful crowd. When it is not, you can wander the little main street, browse the Nook Bookstore, and watch the trawlers unload at the river. The whole place moves at about the speed of an incoming tide.

Mission Beach

Right up in tropical north Queensland, Mission Beach is less a single town than a string of tiny villages threaded along 14 kilometres of palm-fringed sand, and it is quiet in the way only far-north places can be. This is the closest point on the Australian mainland to the Great Barrier Reef, which sits less than 40 kilometres offshore, so you can be snorkelling the world's largest coral reef and back in time for lunch. Behind the beach, dense rainforest runs right down to the coast, and it is home to one of Australia's most improbable residents: the southern cassowary, a flightless, dinosaur-like bird as tall as a person, which you have a real chance of meeting on a forest path. Wander north to Bingil Bay for a coffee with a view of Dunk Island, and you will understand why nobody here is in any hurry to leave.

Finding the Quiet Side of Australia

Australia does big and loud brilliantly, but these eight towns are proof that it does hushed and slow just as well. Whether your idea of quiet is a mineral soak in Daylesford, a rainforest waterfall near Dorrigo, or the flat outback silence outside Coober Pedy, there is a version of it out here with your name on it. The only real risk is that once the volume drops this far, you may find yourself strangely reluctant to turn it back up.