102 Australian Geographic
In autumn 1970, Kojak was commissioned by his
boss, John Elliott, chairman of the local Bicentennial
committee, to buy a jackhammer, carry it down the cliff
at Round Hill, drill a hole in the rock, and drive a couple
of big steel spikes down into it. These were to be the
foundations for the Doorway to Destiny, a monument
designed by Sir Raphael Cilento to commemorate the
bicentenary of Cook’s landing at 1770. So many people
were expected to attend the unveiling that the beach
at Round Hill was lined with hessian-covered tempo-
rary toilets. The night before the landing re-enactment,
Kojak killed a kangaroo and hid it in the bushes where
a costumed, musket-wielding crewman could sling it
over his shoulder.
This was the first and last time that a kangaroo was
harmed for the re-enactment, but the annual Captain
Cook Festival has lived on, and Kojak will be there in
the front row this May for the 250th.
By 1976, Tom Jeffery had had enough. His health was
failing and the workload of maintaining the flourishing
campground and the squatter colony wasn’t helping.
The developers were circling. Jeffery sold 365 acres to
developer Lance Woodrow for $1000 an acre, but before
Woodrow could put in a development application, the
Miriam Vale Shire Council insisted that every illegal
shack had to come down. Even Lance wasn’t sparedwhen his own shack was bulldozed by a council con-
tractor in the early hours of the morning. “If I’d been
sleeping in it, I would have been killed!” he shouted at
the councillors during an expletive-filled harangue at
the next meeting.
This was the start of ‘the new Noosa’, a term ban-
died about by developers even before the old Noosa had
fully come of age as a sophisticated beach resort. But
the physical similarities – a beautiful strip of coast and
estuary surrounded by national parks – couldn’t disguise
the major differences, such as the lack of decent roads
and infrastructure, emergency medical care and a decent
supermarket. The sea-changers weren’t quite ready for it.
Lance secured state government approval for a
sand-mining operation just south of Agnes, mean-
ing the dirt road from Miriam Vale would be sealed
and new infrastructure put in place for the miners.
Agnes and 1770 would prosper, he told the locals. But he
hadn’t counted on a strong conservationist backlash led
by museum curator Arthur Jeffery, who may have spent
much of his working life at the Mount Isa mines but
wasn’t about to see the paradise of his youth destroyed.
The mining leases were rescinded.
Through the 1980s and ’90s, many developers came
and went, parroting the “new Noosa” mantra, but never
quite pulling it off, even after the electricity and theIt’s certainly no Noosa, but
that doesn’t seem to bother too
many residents of the Agnes
Water-1770 coastline.