Nambour’s creative underground has been getting a serious moment in the sun, with artist, poet, musician and street-art force Ben Hines helping drive a run of Horizon Festival projects through town.

The Sunshine Coast hinterland hub has long had the bones of something stranger and more interesting than a tidy coastal arts postcard.

Now, through Horizon Festival, that energy is being pulled into the open through street art, poetry, local stories, photography, markets and a mysterious fine-art vending machine stocked with work from Sunshine Coast artists.

At the centre of the action is Ben Hines, a Nambour-based creative whose work moves across hip hop, poetry, murals, community arts and DIY cultural projects.

Read the full Horizon Festival program.

Nambour’s walls, words and weird corners

Hines is involved in several Horizon Festival projects this year, including Namba Concrete Canvas, Namba Narrates and VENDOZA, a fine-art vending machine featuring works from 26 local artists.

Namba Concrete Canvas is a free urban art tour led by Hines, also known as Humble Dumpling, starting from The Old Ambulance Station on Monday, May 4.

The tour moves through Nambour’s laneways and hidden corners, digging into the stories, subcultures and local history behind the town’s street-art scene.

Along the way, the program includes live muralists, a pop-up performance by Sunshine Troupe, and a visit to VENDOZA, the art vending machine tucked inside the Old Ambo Arts building.

The registered tour is already sold out, but it still points to something bigger happening in Nambour: a creative undercurrent that is no longer staying hidden in the backstreets.

Stories from the street

The day also links into Namba Narrates, a spoken-word showcase at The Old Ambo from 3pm to 7pm.

It gives Nambour’s creative scene a form that feels less polished and more lived-in, which is exactly why it works.

This is not the Sunshine Coast as a resort brochure. It is the region as a backstreet, rehearsal room, mural wall, late-night idea, half-finished poem and somebody’s mate saying, “you should come and see this.”

That is where Nambour’s cultural power sits. Not in trying to become a prettier version of somewhere else, but in owning its own strange frequency.

Bad Habit Records brings the market energy

The program also includes Namba Artist Market, hosted by Bad Habit Records and presented by Horizon Festival in partnership with The Old Ambo.

The free public holiday market transforms the Old Ambo and spills into the street from 9am to 3pm, with handmade art, vinyl, ceramics, textiles and odd little treasures from local makers.

It is one of those Nambour ideas that makes instant sense: part record-store energy, part street market, part local art crawl, with enough weirdness around the edges to stop it feeling too neat.

The day also links into Namba Narrates on the Ramp Stage and the free Namba Concrete Canvas tour, making it a public holiday hit of art, words, streets and local oddities.

All Good Turkish Street Food will also be popping up at The Old Ambulance Station across several festival dates, serving Turkish street food including lamb kofta, falafel wraps and handmade gözleme.

A fuller picture of the Sunshine Coast

Picture Culture: Here & Now also runs at The Old Ambulance Station, bringing a photography exhibition into the Nambour festival mix.

The exhibition features 20 photographs submitted by Sunshine Coast locals, capturing stories of culture, identity and belonging across the region.

Curated by photographer Jo-Anne Driessens, the exhibition looks beyond the easy postcard version of the Sunshine Coast, making room for First Nations and diasporic communities, everyday rituals, family stories, food, festivals and local life in full colour.

Picture Culture: Here & Now runs from May 1 to May 30, with a launch event from 1pm to 3pm on Saturday, May 2, featuring stories and performances from exhibiting artists, plus talks by Jo-Anne Driessens and Louis Lim.

Driessens will also lead The Business of Photography Workshop at The Old Ambo on Sunday, May 3, looking at copyright, digital files, professional practice and the unseen work behind the lens.

Tiny art, big Nambour energy

One of the more playful parts of the program is VENDOZA, the fine-art vending machine featuring works from 26 local artists.

It is exactly the sort of idea Nambour should be doing more of: accessible, slightly rogue, genuinely local and not trapped inside the usual gallery format.

Instead of treating art as something you have to know how to approach, the vending machine brings it back to street level.

Small works. Local hands. A bit of surprise. Very Nambour.

The Sunshine Coast’s Dogtown

For YELO, this is where Nambour keeps getting interesting.

It has the feeling of a place that has not been fully sanitised yet, which is exactly why artists, musicians, writers and weird little community projects keep finding room there.

Nambour might be the closest thing the Sunshine Coast has to Dogtown: messy, brilliant, half-misunderstood, bright with hardcore punks, street poets, record-store lifers and the kind of creative energy that never comes from the glossy parts of town.

And with artists like Hines helping shape the work on the ground, that underground is starting to look less like a secret and more like the main event.

See the Horizon Festival program

Horizon Festival runs across the Sunshine Coast with a program of visual art, performance, music, conversation and community-led projects.

Read more Sunshine Coast music festivals.