Brisbane west Archives - Over The Walter Taylor Bridge

The Sherwood Community Festival returns to the Arboretum on Saturday 16 May 2026, marking its 30th year, and the all-volunteer committee is calling on locals to give an hour or two of their time to help bring the 4075’s biggest free community day back to life.

After the 2025 festival was cancelled due to poor ground conditions at the Arboretum, the return this May carries extra significance for a community that has rallied around this event for three decades. The festival draws up to 10,000 visitors to Sherwood Arboretum each year and runs entirely on volunteer effort, from the committee that spends twelve months planning it down to the people who set up gazebos at dawn and pack the last chair away at the end of the day.

Without enough hands on deck, an event of this scale simply cannot happen, and with 16 May now just weeks away, the team is actively looking for day-of volunteers across a range of roles.

Find Your Role on the Day

There are five volunteer roles, each suited to different interests and energy levels.

Sherwood Festival returns on 16th May — Photo Credit: Cr Nicole Johnston/Facebook

The Production Team is the crew that transforms an empty arboretum into a festival. They arrive early, put up gazebos, set out chairs, hang signage and get the whole site ready before the gates open. If you like being active and want to see an event come together from the ground up, this one is for you.

The Info Tent is the community’s first point of contact during the day. Volunteers there hand out programs, help visitors find food stalls and stages, and keep people informed about what’s on next. It is a prime viewing spot, and it suits anyone who enjoys a conversation and wants to make visitors feel genuinely welcome.

Workshop Helpers work in the Arts Hub, setting out materials for painting and hands-on crafts, giving a hand to anyone who needs it, and keeping tables tidy between sessions. It is a relaxed role well suited to anyone who enjoys a creative atmosphere and wants to help local families get into making things together.

Stage Runners are the link between performers and the stage, making sure musicians and speakers get where they need to be on time. The Arbor Green and Fig Tree stages both host local bands, schools and performing arts groups across the day, and this role puts you right in the middle of that energy.

Stewards move around the full festival site, helping people find their way and making sure the grounds stay safe and tidy for the thousands of families, children and visitors coming through. It lets you experience the whole festival atmosphere while playing a genuinely useful role.

Thirty Years of Showing Up for Each Other

The Sherwood Community Festival traces its origins to 1995, when a small group of Sherwood Road traders organised a pavement event to bring people to the shopping strip as banks and businesses began to close. That first event had a handful of stalls and a straightforward purpose: keep the community connected to its local street.

Over the following three decades it grew into a full street festival with road closures, then shifted to its current home at Sherwood Arboretum where it has expanded to more than 100 stalls, four performance spaces, free rides and face painting, an Arts Hub, food trucks and a sausage sizzle, all free to attend.

The festival has always run off the same foundation: the generosity of people willing to give a bit of their Saturday to something bigger than themselves. The committee is made up entirely of volunteers, many of whom give a few hours a week across the year to handle everything from grant applications and sponsor relationships to site logistics and entertainment programming.

On the day itself, those roles multiply and the event lives or dies on how many extra pairs of hands show up.

How to Put Your Hand Up

Volunteer registration for the Sherwood Community Festival on Saturday 16 May 2026 is open now. You can sign up for as little as an hour or two, in whichever role suits you best. To register, click here and fill out the expression of interest form. The committee will be in touch to confirm details.

The Sherwood Arboretum is at 87 Jolimont Street, Sherwood. The train station sits at the end of the street, making it easy to get to without a car.

Published 24-April-2026

In Graceville, Botellón sits on a leafy stretch of Honour Avenue where Valentine’s Day can be kept pleasantly low-key. It’s the sort of place that rewards lingering — shared plates, passing forks, and conversation that outlasts the first round.

The venue sits within the Central Buildings, a row of shops designed and built around 1924 by builder and designer Walter Taylor. It’s the sort of place that anchors a neighbourhood. It’s recognisable, well-worn, and still doing what it was made for: bringing people in off the footpath.

Botellón leans into that intimacy rather than fighting it, with a cosy indoor dining room and alfresco seating that suits long, light-strung evenings. The restaurant itself is relatively young by Graceville standards, opening in 2019 and quickly becoming a western-suburbs favourite for Spanish-inspired dining.

That mix — a new restaurant inside an old building — gives it a particular character. The food feels celebratory, but the room still feels like the neighbourhood.

This Valentine’s Day (Saturday, 14 February), Botellón is keeping things straightforward: lunch runs à la carte, while the evening shifts into a set menu ($95 per person). It’s an approach that suits the day’s many versions. Some people want a date-night ritual; others want a catch-up with friends; plenty will come as families, because a shared meal is one of the easiest ways to keep everyone talking.

At lunch, the restaurant’s à la carte format lends itself naturally to seasonal, shareable dishes. In its Valentine’s promotion, the venue features starters such as burrata with smoky escalivada and baked saganaki finished with salsa agridulce and oregano, alongside paella as the centrepiece.

The mariscos paella is described in the same promotion as a generous mix of prawns, scallops, octopus and chorizo, brought together with saffron aioli — the kind of dish that does what good food should do on a day like Valentine’s: it gives the table something to gather around.

Dinner is more structured. It begins with a choice of oysters with mignonette or manchego cheese with caperberries and quince, followed by bread — sourdough with garlic chive butter or a gluten-free house-made loaf — alongside whipped ricotta with chilli honey, walnut and oregano. From there, the menu moves into king prawn with brown butter, soy sauce, paprika oil, parsley, capers and guindillas, plus eggplant chips with lime honey.

For mains, diners choose between paella (chicken and chorizo, prawn and chorizo, or vegetarian) with chimichurri, or a 250 g striploin served with spicy XO sauce or chimichurri. Dessert offers two distinct finishes: chocolate cremeux, or churros with dulce de leche.

What makes the night feel like Botellón, though, isn’t just the sequence of courses. It’s the way the whole format encourages lingering. The venue’s Valentine’s promotion also mentions cava as the celebratory thread, from classic sparkling pours to a playful cava sangria with fruit and brandy. If you’re not marking an occasion with bubbles, you can keep it quieter: a glass of something Spanish and chilled, a long chat, and the kind of evening that doesn’t need a grand gesture to feel special.

In a suburb that prizes its local rituals — cafés you return to, walking routes you can do without thinking, shopfronts that don’t change much even when the businesses inside them do — Botellón has slipped into place with ease.

On Valentine’s Day, it’s less about “the perfect night” and more about a very Graceville idea: good food in a familiar spot, shared with whoever you’re lucky enough to have on the other side of the table.

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Published 6-Feb-2026

Tag: Brisbane west

Sherwood’s Beloved Festival Is Back After a Year Away, and It Needs Your Hands to Make It Happen

Find Your Role on the Day

Thirty Years of Showing Up for Each Other

How to Put Your Hand Up

Love, Paella and Old Shopfronts: Valentine’s Day at Botellón in Graceville