The Japanese Gardens and Multicultural Toowoomba: The City That Looks Outward

The Japanese Garden of Toowoomba, the authentic Japanese garden in the Ju Raku En tradition that the City of Toowoomba established as a centrepiece of the Queens Park botanical precinct in partnership with the City of Toowoomba's Japanese sister city Yoshinogari, is one of the finest Japanese gardens in Australia and the most internationally recognised feature of Toowoomba's cultural landscape, providing the city with the cultural statement that the 1989 establishment of the garden as the sister city gift and the subsequent development of the garden into the mature landscape that it has become over 35 years creates. The garden's traditional Japanese design elements, the stone lanterns, the koi ponds, the tea house, and the raked gravel garden, provide the cultural authenticity that the garden's Japanese horticultural consultants have maintained throughout its development.

The sister city relationships that Toowoomba has cultivated with Yoshinogari in Japan and with other international cities, creating the formal cultural and educational exchange programs that the sister city model provides, reflect the regional city's understanding that the international engagement that a city maintains directly contributes to the community's openness and the cultural intelligence that the globalised economy requires of the workforce that regional cities are developing for. The exchange programs, including the student exchanges that Toowoomba Grammar School and other schools have maintained with their Yoshinogari counterparts, create the personal international connections that sustain the sister city relationship beyond the formal civic level.

Toowoomba's multicultural community, including the significant Sikh community from the Punjab that has established in the city through the agricultural and the truck driving migration that the Darling Downs's farming economy and the transport sector attracted, the Southeast Asian community from the Vietnamese and the Filipino migration, and the African communities from the humanitarian migration that Toowoomba's refugee settlement program has welcomed, provides the cultural diversity that challenges the 'garden city' monolith identity that the Carnival of Flowers and the agricultural heritage create as the dominant Toowoomba narrative.

The multicultural festival and the cultural exchange events that the Toowoomba community organisations and the City Council support provide the public expression of the diversity that the residential and the agricultural migration has created in a regional city whose identity has been shaped more by the heritage of the European pastoral community than by the multicultural reality that the contemporary city embodies. The cultural events' role in creating the community cohesion that the diverse communities require to build the shared identity of a multicultural regional city demonstrates the social function of the arts and cultural events program that the council invests in for the community development outcomes that go beyond the entertainment and the tourism that the events generate.

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