Visitors to Australia often spend a lot of their trip on the road, exhausting themselves in pursuit of “bucket-list” sights. I was after a more laid-back break, said Chris Haslam in The Sunday Times, so I opted for a gentle meander along Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, visiting the sort of small towns “few tour operators bother with”, and inspecting every beach I passed along the way.
Beginning 60 miles north of Brisbane and extending for a further 40 miles, this coastline is fringed in some places with “Home and Away neighbourhoods” where litter is “non-existent”, car parks are free, and public lavatories and showers are “immaculate”. Most beaches are watched by lifeguards, and – as if heedful of the general air of suburban calm – box jellyfish rarely visit and saltwater crocodiles are never seen.
Visiting the peninsula then known as Wickham Point, in 1864 the Scottish banker Alexander Archer observed that it would make “a capital sea bathing place”. Today, the peninsula is occupied by the town of Caloundra, where the Sunshine Coast (a name adopted in 1967 with tourism in mind) is usually said to begin. On one of its beaches, I saw an angler whose rod bent “like a palm tree in a cyclone” when he got a bite. “Bastard tiger sharks,” he said: they kept stealing the fish from his line. Another of the town’s beaches is named after a ship, the SS Dicky, driven ashore by a storm in 1893. I came across its ribs, sticking out of the sand “like dinosaur bones”.
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Heading north, I visited upmarket resort towns such as Peregian and Sunrise Beach, where the streets are lined with art galleries, wine bars and boutiques. But things tended to get wilder as I went on. Backed by a nature reserve, Wurtulla Beach felt wonderfully untamed. Stumers Creek is a “magnificent” river where kids play on inner tubes. And past Noosa, where the Sunshine Coast ends, I entered the majestic wilds of the Great Sandy National Park, including Fraser Island, where dingoes and sea eagles still hold sway over the vast sandy shore.