A house straight from a fairy tale...Brickstone House, one of Ipswich's majestic heritage beauties, harks back to an era of romance and grandeur.This heritage-listed landmark that conjures a magical fairy tale ambience with its lavish heritage features and fittings, attic rooms and secret garden.
A cute cottage in the heart of Ipswich is reinvented thanks to one creative couple’s “terrifiying and exciting” new project. It's not the first time Brisbane’s Sara Taghaode and Andrew Crane have stepped into unchartered territory for the sake of a new challenge.
How many of Ipswich's 277 birds have you seen?If you have a love for birds, Ipswich is definitely a place to visit, boasting 277 recorded species, from Willy Wagtails often seen in backyard gardens to majestic raptors soaring high above.
The Ipswich region is home to some colourful and also quite cheeky birdlife - including many species you won’t find along the coastal regions of south-east Queensland. Above: Mount Mort's Laurie Smith (@Laurie7521 on Instagram) captured a galah feeding its not-so-small young one.
It shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise to learn more and more films, including big budget masterpieces, are being shot at Ipswich. The city’s mix of old and new, urban and rural, is proving to be a major drawcard for all sorts of film productions.An ever-growing list of Hollywood heavyweights have called Ipswich their temporary home, including Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman!The Railway ManJonathan Teplitzky’s war film, The Railway Man, brought A-listers Nicole Kidman, Colin Firth, Jeremy Irvine and Stellan Skarsgard to Ipswich in 2013. The film shot a number of scenes in Ipswich, including torture sequences at Queensland Museum Rail Workshops (established in the historic railway yards site at North Ipswich). Colin Firth plays a former British army officer and POW. His character discovers the Japanese interpreter who tortured him during the war is still alive and he and his wife, played by Nicole Kidman, set out to find and confront him.The film won a number of awards including Best Adapted Screenplay at the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Awards.
I first heard the legend of Blackstone Castle when I was fifteen and my Nanna had joined the local historical society. So, with our imaginations full of visions of turrets and drawbridges my grand parents and I headed to Blackstone where we took a walk up the hill in search of the lost castle.We wandered up a dusty track and reached the summit of the hill to find...well, not very much actually, just a single half-collapsed brick wall and some rusty old car bodies. Not exactly the Welsh castle I had been imagining, but intriguing none the less. Skip forward (cough) twenty odd years. I've been to Wales and back, I've seen a few castles but I am still just as fascinated about our "castle". How did Ipswich have and lose a castle, who built it, what's really left of it?HistoryFortunately for me, in 2015 the Ipswich Art Gallery held an exhibiton "Brynhyfryd – lost castle of Blackstone Hill" which bought together a collection objects from Brynhyfryd, including decorative objects, furniture, family heirlooms and other parts of the building retrieved from demolition. The exhibition also featured photographs of the building in its glory days and was accompanied by a history of its rise and fall.
