Gold Coast

The coast, its creeks and the forested ranges behind are the country of the Yugambeh people, whose clans, among them the Kombumerri around the Nerang River and the Broadwater, left middens, fish traps and ceremonial grounds along the waterways. European interest began with timber: from the 1840s cutters worked up the rivers for red cedar, and farms of sugar cane, bananas and dairy cattle followed on the cleared flats.

Holidays came next. Southport grew from the 1870s as a seaside resort for Brisbane's well-off, reached first by coach and then by rail. In the 1920s a hotel opened behind the dunes further south and gave its name to the district around it, Surfers Paradise. After the Second World War the South Coast became a mass holiday destination, the first high-rise went up in Surfers Paradise in 1960, and in 1958 the local authority took the nickname that had grown out of the area's soaring land prices and called itself the Gold Coast, which was declared a city the following year.

From then on growth was almost continuous. High-rise towers replaced beach houses along the strip, canal estates were dredged out of the swamps behind it, and the theme parks arrived between the 1970s and the 1990s. A street motor race began in the early 1990s, a private university opened at Robina in 1989, the light rail opened in 2014, and the city hosted the Commonwealth Games in 2018. What was a string of villages is now Australia's sixth-largest city and one of its fastest-growing.

Everything here begins with the beach. Surf life saving clubs, board-riding clubs and nippers programmes run through family life, the surf report is local news, and the point breaks at the southern end of the city are treated as serious cultural property. The coast has produced a long line of world surfing champions, and the sand-bank wave at Snapper Rocks draws crowds from around the world.

The city's reputation elsewhere in Australia is for glitter, high-rise and holiday excess, and Surfers Paradise does little to dispel it, with its towers, nightlife and the meter maids in gold bikinis who have topped up expired parking bays along the beachfront since the 1960s. Away from that strip the culture is suburban and outdoorsy: barbecues, junior sport, fishing, and the quieter cafés of Burleigh and Palm Beach, where the surfing and health-food culture of the southern beaches has become a style of its own.

There is a working film industry at the studios north of the city, an arts precinct with a gallery and open-air stage beside the Nerang River, and two universities that have given the coast a large student population. Rugby league and Australian football both have professional teams here. Two national habits are worth knowing: dress is extremely casual, and Queensland's refusal of daylight saving means the clocks differ from New South Wales, a street away, for half the year.

More than half a million people live in the City of Gold Coast, and the number grows every year with arrivals from Sydney, Melbourne and overseas. Unusually for an Australian city there is no single centre: Southport holds the offices, courts and hospital, Surfers Paradise the visitors, Robina and Helensvale the big shopping centres, and the rest is a chain of beach suburbs, canal estates and new housing on the western flats towards the motorway.

Tourism and construction drive the economy, with retail, health, education, marine services and film work behind them, and a growing number of residents commute to Brisbane by train. Work in hospitality is seasonal and often casual, and the city has a large population of young people, backpackers and retirees at the same time.

Daily life follows the water. Mornings begin early on the sand, with swimmers, runners and surfers out before work; afternoons in summer are broken by thunderstorms; weekends mean the beach, the Broadwater or sport. The standing local arguments are about the pace of high-rise approval, the cost of housing, traffic on a coast with one motorway, and beach erosion, which is fought with sand pumping and seawalls after every big storm.

Seafood is the foundation. Prawns, spanner crab, Moreton Bay bugs, snapper and mackerel come from local waters, and oysters are grown in the Tweed River just across the border. Surf life saving clubs run public dining rooms with ocean views, an institution particular to this coast and still among the better value meals in it.

The eating map splits between the towers and the southern beaches. Surfers Paradise reflects decades of Japanese, Korean and Chinese visitors in its restaurants and late-night noodle shops, Broadbeach has the largest concentration of restaurants on the coast, and Southport keeps a small Chinatown. Burleigh Heads and Nobby Beach lead the other style: bakeries, smoothie and bowl cafés, wine bars and small kitchens built around surfing hours and early mornings.

The hinterland supplies avocados, macadamias, custard apples, bananas and coffee, sold at the weekend markets at Carrara and in the smaller farmers' markets along the coast. Burleigh and Currumbin have produced some of Queensland's best-known craft breweries, several of them started by surfers.