Walk through Nambour on the Sunshine Coast right now, and the town hums with a quiet, defiant energy. Its walls are alive with colour, its streets echo with music, and its community thrives on collaboration. At the heart of it all is Ben Hines, a poet, hip hop musician, street artist and the mind behind several projects taking centre stage at this year’s Horizon Festival.
Hines is juggling multiple strands of the festival: Namba Concrete Canvas, Namba Narrates, and what he calls a third, slightly rogue project, a fine art vending machine featuring works from 26 local artists.
“It’s going to be Nambour’s first fine art vending machine,” he says, though he admits he hasn’t done the fact-checking. “I strongly suspect we’re the first.” For Hines, these projects converge on one thing: community. “We’re blessed with an abundance of creative folk across all disciplines. I guess I’m lucky enough to stand at the crossroads of those subcultures,” he says.
Read more about Horizon Festival 2026.
The Namba Concrete Canvas and Namba Narrates projects are different, yet intertwined. One is visual, the other literary. One is performance, the other a walking tour of the town’s street art. Both are driven by the same philosophy: art rooted in the community rather than imposed on it. Hines recalls his first piece in Nambour, a bright, tribal-inspired mask designed to hack local pride. “It was a bit cynical,” he laughs, “but also about positivity. That approach has absolutely shaped the direction of my art since.” Now, his work aims to inspire and empower, reflecting the town’s collective spirit.
Namba Narrates - Image © Fiona Harding
For Hines, Nambour is more than a canvas, it’s personal. “Love drew me here,” he admits. Sixteen years ago, he met the love of his life, who has been a staunch advocate for the town ever since. “Growing up in Caloundra, it was easy to malign Nambour,” he says. “But over the last 15, 16 years, I’ve been revelling in the fact that we are the neglected child west of the highway.”
What the town lacks in council funding and tourism attention, it makes up for in culture: a thriving music scene, artists spilling out of every crack in the pavement, and an undercurrent of creativity that feels rare on the Sunshine Coast.
Street art in Nambour doesn’t just decorate, it reflects. Hines points to murals addressing social justice, homelessness, and the natural world. “It’s almost as though we simmer in a soup of each other’s creativity,” he says. There’s a spirit here that blends the rebellious with the compassionate, where ceramicists and graffiti kids rub shoulders in ways that Hines admits might not happen elsewhere.
This energy will be on full display during Horizon Festival’s Nambour Day Out. From 8am to 3pm, the Namba Artist Market will showcase local art, vinyl, ceramics, and textiles, while Hines runs walking tours that blend live mural painting with poetry. By late afternoon, Namba Narrates takes over, featuring headline poets alongside community members, gardeners, plumbers, and others who might never self-identify as poets but whose voices carry equal weight. “It’s a reflection of the community,” Hines says. “Everyone has a story to tell.”
Namba Concrete Canvas - Image © Georgia Haupt
For local creatives, Horizon’s spotlight is more than publicity, it’s validation. “We’re not the faded glory or the neglected offspring we’re sometimes perceived to be,” Hines says. “There’s a heartbeat here powered by young creatives and wholesome families.” Events like the Namba Artist Market, led by Bad Habit Records’ Aaron Borg, are crucial for sustaining this culture beyond the festival. They offer a tangible connection between artists and audiences, a bridge between passion and survival in a town where arts funding is scarce.
Hines sees himself as an eclectic element in this ecosystem. “I’m a strange note struck in a greater symphony,” he admits. Regional towns like Nambour allow for a different creative approach than big cities. “The anonymity – or lack of it – here shapes practice. You can’t just drop art into a void. It has to be responsive, site-specific, part of the conversation.”
Art, for Nambour, has been a lifeline. After the collapse of the local sugar mill and the town’s industrial decline, creative initiatives helped carve a new identity that is organic, sincere, and contemporary. “The next generation of freaky beatniks, poets, street artists and band kids planted seeds amidst the rubble,” Hines says.
As Horizon wraps, Hines hopes the impact lingers. He wants people to walk away inspired, to pick up a pen, or to engage with the culture he’s helping cultivate. He also hopes the vending machine, a personal labour of love, finds a permanent home. “I feel like I have to show the world the vision,” he says. “Even if it’s just for ten days, it has to exist fully, beautifully and unapologetically.”
In Nambour this Labour Day, Hines and his community are doing exactly that, turning a once-overlooked town into a vibrant, living gallery. Joyful chaos, rebellion, compassion and creativity, it’s all there, simmering in the streets, waiting for you to witness it.
Explore the Horizon Festival programme, including the Nambour-centred events.
Horizon Festival 2026 is on from 1-10 May.
