Noosa Heads

The coast, the river and the ranges behind them are the country of the Kabi Kabi people, who fished the river and its lakes and moved inland along the ranges behind. European settlement arrived through timber and gold: when the Gympie field opened in 1867, the Noosa River became a supply route to it, and Tewantin grew as the river port where timber and stores were loaded on to boats.

Noosa Heads itself stayed tiny well into the twentieth century — a scatter of fishing shacks and holiday cottages behind the dunes, reached along sand tracks. What changed it was surfing. In the early 1960s surfers found the long, slow right-hand waves that wrap around the headland points, and the town acquired a reputation that spread through surf films and magazines.

Development pressure followed, and the argument about it has shaped Noosa ever since. Campaigns from the 1960s onwards protected the headland, and the local council adopted planning rules that keep buildings low, so that no towers were ever built and Hastings Street stayed a low-rise street. UNESCO recognised the shire as a biosphere reserve in September 2007, the first in Queensland. In 2008 Noosa was merged into a larger Sunshine Coast council against strong local opposition, and after a referendum it became a separate shire again in 2014 — an unusual reversal in Australian local government, and a good measure of how strongly the place guards its own character.

Noosa is a surfing town of a particular kind. The headland's points suit long boards and slow, drawn-out waves rather than the sharp barrels of the Gold Coast, and the town has kept a longboarding culture that its March festival celebrates with older boards, older riders and deliberately relaxed contests. The water is used in every other way as well: ocean swims, paddleboards on the river, kayaks in the lakes, and a triathlon in spring that fills every bed in the shire.

The second strand of local identity is conservation. Residents campaigned for the national park, for the height limits and for the return of their own council, and the biosphere designation is a point of pride. Koalas in the park, water quality in the river and the number of visitors the town can absorb are all live subjects, argued over with unusual persistence.

Socially the town is understated rather than flashy: linen, bare feet, expensive sunglasses and no interest in high-rise glamour. Many residents moved here from southern cities, and the population is older and wealthier than the Queensland average, which shows in the galleries, the food festival and the number of bookshops and cafés. Hinterland villages such as Eumundi keep an alternative, market-garden streak that dates from the 1970s.

Noosa Heads itself has only a few thousand residents, and the Shire of Noosa around it somewhere over fifty thousand, spread between the beach villages, the river towns and the farms inland. The population is markedly older than the national average, and grows every holiday season with visitors who outnumber residents.

Almost all local work is tourism and the services behind it: hotels, restaurants, cleaning and maintenance, retail, construction, health and aged care. That has produced the town's sharpest problem. Housing here is among the most expensive in Queensland, a large part of the housing stock is let to visitors, and the people who staff the restaurants and resorts increasingly commute from Cooroy, Nambour or further south. Short-term letting and its limits are a standing political argument.

The bigger shops, medical services and schools are at Noosa Junction, Noosaville and Tewantin rather than on Hastings Street. Days begin early, with swimmers and walkers on the beach and the headland track before breakfast; summer afternoons are broken by storms; traffic and parking are the main daily irritation in January and at Easter. Floods on the Noosa River, bushfire in a dry spring and erosion of Main Beach after big swells are the recurring practical worries.

The river and the sea supply the basics: prawns and mud crab from the Noosa River and the lakes, spanner crab, whiting and reef fish, sold from fish shops along Gympie Terrace and at Tewantin and cooked with very little done to them. Eating outdoors is the norm, whether that means a restaurant table under the trees on Hastings Street, fish and chips on the river lawns or a surf club dining room above the sand.

The hinterland is the other half of the story. The ranges and valleys inland grow macadamias, avocados, pineapples, custard apples and tropical fruit, ginger is processed at Yandina, and small dairies in the hills behind make cheese and cream. Much of it reaches the coast through the markets: the big craft and produce market at Eumundi on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and smaller produce markets along the coast.

Noosa has a large number of restaurants for a town of its size, and the style is broadly modern Australian with strong Italian, Japanese and South-East Asian threads. Coffee is taken seriously, breakfast is a serious meal, and small breweries and distilleries have opened at Noosaville and in the hinterland. The food festival in May is now one of the larger events of the local year.