'Life kept getting better and better': Albury, the regional city so charming, people forget to leave

Skydiving lured Londoner Catherine O’Neill to Albury in 1986. It was meant to be a short stay but more than 30 years down the track, Albury is well and truly home for the landscape designer and estate cartographer.

“I was fully intending to go back to England, but once I was here I really liked it,” O’Neill says. “Albury had a very active skydiving club so we joined the display team and it was a great, fun time to be here. I stayed and had kids and built houses and life kept getting better and better.”

Now the custodian of one of the city’s oldest properties, St Hilaire, O’Neill has reinvigorated the garden to make the most of Albury’s four distinct seasons.

Land of plenty

“You can grow just about anything here from the most delicate English spring flowers through to cactus gardens and everything in between,” she says. “It gets very hot but also quite cold.

It blew me away that I could grow lemons and daffodils in the same garden.”

O’Neill says the region also offers a rich diversity of food and wine, with vineyards, fabulous restaurants such as Miss Amelie and The Goods Shed, farmers’ markets and organic vegetable farms among a host of gourmet offerings.

“It’s a really vibrant thriving community, with plenty of art, culture, the fantastic MAMA gallery and two universities,” she says. “We have all the benefits of being in a big city but we’re still in the country.”

Through her work, O’Neill was able to make a unique contribution to the city when she was engaged to map the Charles Sturt University grounds. She created an accurate aerial record of all the plants and trees and turned it into a large-scale framed watercolour which now hangs in the university.

O’Neill’s work has taken her back to England, to Ireland and around Australia, but she always returns home to Albury where she has found “opportunity and freedom”.

A bewitching city

Stanley & Martin agent Brent Booker says it’s a similar story for many Albury residents who made a temporary move to the regional city and then “forgot to leave”.

Booker himself moved from Melbourne “for a change of lifestyle” in his 20s and 10 years later he is married with children and has no intentions of going elsewhere.

“I love the simplicity of living here,” he says. “It’s a very open community and there’s a lot more space than in the city. It’s centrally located making it easy to get to Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne and Albury itself is always growing, which is exciting.”

Top home in the area

Built from stone, Kia Ora is a handsome property zoned for commercial use but has been a home.

Close to the town centre on 860 square metres, it has parking and an adjoining warehouse.

Stanley & Martin, who are selling the property, say the home has a $1.9 million price guide.