Set between mountains and oceans at the top of New South Wales, the Tweed Valley was recently named one of the top 25 global destinations in Lonely Planet’s Best in Travel 2027 list – ahead of places like the Maldives and Italy. Making the most of that reputation is Savour The Tweed is a five-day foodie event curated by Tweed-based chef and author Christine Manfield and local food advocate Amy Colli.
Taking place from 21 to 25 October, local producers and makers bring gourmet offerings to audiences, but alongside events that highlight produce and cooking, there’s an art spin that highlights the area’s passion and creativity. In Entwined, an exhibition by local photographer Rob Palmer, the focus is on the people behind the Tweed’s culinary scene.
Palmer muses that the region is incredibly geographically diverse. ‘You’ve got this beautiful coastline, and beaches backed almost immediately by fertile farmland, cane fields, mountains and this incredibly lush hinterland,’ he says.
‘But there’s also something less tangible about the place. People talk a lot about the energy of the land up there, and whether you subscribe to that or not, there’s no question it has been a magnet for people searching for something different for a very long time.’
Shown at M|Arts Precinct, Muwillumbah, Entwined opens with a special evening on 21 October. Officially launching the festival, it will be a chance to hear from the eccentric, diverse, and unique people featured in Palmer’s photos, with food writer and cookbook author Magdalena Roze hosting the conversations.
Savour the Tweed – quick links
An eye for the Tweed
‘There’s a slightly wild and eccentric side to the Tweed that sits alongside this increasingly sophisticated food and creative culture,’ Palmer says. ‘And despite feeling quite removed from everything, you’ve got the Gold Coast and Brisbane not far away, so there’s this strange collision between isolation and accessibility, old and new, alternative and ambitious.’
The photographer had been living in the Northern Rivers for a few years and always wanted to do a project like this. ‘It was really just a matter of waiting for the stars to align … When Savour the Tweed came along, it felt like the perfect platform to bring together food, people, landscape and photography in a slightly different way,’ he says.
Palmer pitched the idea to Savour the Tweed as a concept beyond photographing the food, instead focusing on the people and places behind it. ‘There was so much personality in the people I was meeting, and they were really into what I was trying to do,’ he continues.
The series challenges what we expect from farmers, rum distillers, cheese makers, fishermen and chefs, mostly, in that the viewer can be completely blown away by the diversity of produce and makers in The Tweed. It’s unpredictable, a little bit ridiculous, and very memorable.
‘I deliberately kept the ideas for each shoot pretty loose. I’d have a starting point based on the person, what they did or where they lived, but I didn’t want to over-plan it. I wanted enough space for something unexpected to happen. There needed to be some reality in the pictures, but also some humour and quirkiness.’
For example, the black-and-white shot of Dan Fleming from Fleming Fish Co shows him emerging from the water clutching a fish. ‘I remember saying to Dan Fleming, “Mate, I’ve got an idea. I want to photograph you in a dinner jacket coming out of the ocean with a giant tuna.” He didn’t even flinch,’ says Palmer.
‘He was completely up for it. It was the middle of winter, absolutely bloody freezing, and he never complained once.’
Capturing places and personalities
‘With the Husk family, it was almost the opposite because we didn’t really have the shot at first. Halfway through the shoot, it started raining, and it was bitterly cold. Instead of stopping, the girls started dancing around in the rain and having a great time. Suddenly the picture was just there,’ he says.
‘It captured something about the warmth and personality of that family much better than anything I could have planned.’
The pictures span from a bit absurd – like Burringbar-based Cheeses Loves You’s cheesemaker Deb Allard hugging all her delicious cheeses – to the ethereal and beautiful Mindy Woods, a proud Bundjalung woman, captured on Country, cooking over flames.
For Earth Beer, they found an old boat sitting out the back. ‘I said, “Why don’t we make it look like you’re doing a beer delivery?” Somehow that evolved into this slightly ridiculous woman-overboard scene. We were just having fun, and one idea kept leading to another,’ says Palmer.
‘And then there were Kevin and Peter, the cane farmers. They let me come along to photograph one of their cane burns … I found out a few days later that they’d accidentally burnt an extra field because they’d become so caught up in what we were doing with the photos. There are a couple of pubs I can’t drink in around Murbah for a few months.’
Palmer muses, ‘I think a lot of my favourite pictures came about that way. I might have arrived with an idea, but then you respond to the person, the weather, the landscape or something completely unexpected and the photograph becomes something else.’
Regional arts projects bedded in community
As Entwined emphasises, The Tweed is full of unusual, creative, inspiring people with a vision for sustainable, local produce. ‘You’ve got farming families who have been there for generations, but also hippies, artists, surfers, people who have moved there to heal or reinvent themselves, people wanting to live differently and, occasionally, people who seem to have gone there because they’d quite like to hide away from the rest of society,’ says Palmer.
‘Then mixed in amongst all of that you have this new generation of chefs, growers, distillers, brewers and producers creating really sophisticated businesses and some of the best food in the country.’
Other events at Savour the Tweed celebrating inspiring scene include Ben Devlin, chef and co-owner of Pipit Restaurant in Pottsville, creating art from local ingredients at the Gyotaku Fish Art and Dining evening.
His portrait appears in Entwined, showcasing the ancient Japanese gyotaku technique. The name translates as gyo (fish) and taku (impression), and it’s a ritual fishermen used to record prized catches.
Since 2020, Devlin has created gyotaku prints as an expression of their local menus, and at Savour The Tweed guests can dine on a five-course, seafood-led tasting menu, and take home a handmade print.
At the Tweed Regional Gallery & Margaret Olley Art Centre in Murwillumbah, the Wollumbin Art Prize and Wollumbin Sunrise Breakfast Apex Dining is a great way to combine art and food.
The breakfast includes artisanal products from 14 farms nearby – such as Tropical Fruit World, eggs from Alstonville Poultry Farm, organic crumpets from Sourdough Crumpet Co, and Tweed Valley pork. Again, faces from these farms appear in Entwined, such as Bob Brinsmead, who moved to Duranbah in 1972 to start Tropical Fruit World.
In the gallery, the biennial $30,000 Wollumbin Art Award is on show. The prize is open to artists living in The Tweed and surrounding areas and this year was judged by Professor Lisa Slade, curator, art historian and Hugh Ramsay Chair in Australian Art History at the University of Melbourne.
The exhibition includes Stephen Bird’s winning ceramic work, Alfred (2026), Penny Evans’ Bundjalung Award winning dhurrubuu – FollowMe (2026) and Pascale Bardos’ Holding Time (2026), which won the Emerging Artist Award.
To wrap up the weekend’s festivities, visitors are invited to the free family day at Kingscliff’s Salt Central Park for live music, food and community connection. Entwined comes to the park to remind us of the faces behind the magic.
