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There is a certain irony in finding a town named Warwick on the Southern Downs of Queensland, some two hundred kilometres south-west of Brisbane, when the original Warwick sits behind its medieval castle in the English Midlands. The Australian version was named by early settlers who arrived in the 1840s, and it grew into one of Queensland's oldest provincial towns, shaped by the granite country around it and by the pastoral industry that still defines much of the region. The Rose and Rodeo City, as locals call it, wears both those titles with genuine pride: the Warwick Rodeo is among the oldest in Australia, and the town's rose gardens have long drawn visitors during the cooler months of spring.

The Southern Downs landscape is not the subtropical Queensland of the coast. At roughly five hundred metres above sea level, Warwick experiences four distinct seasons, with cold winters that occasionally bring frost and a spring that arrives with particular colour across the town's parks and private gardens. Summer afternoons can be warm and dry, and the light across the open downs has a clarity that painters and photographers tend to notice. The Condamine River runs through the district, and the granite belt that extends south towards Stanthorpe gives the surrounding countryside a texture quite different from the flat plains further west.