March. April 103AGphone came, a new road from Bundaberg cut down
travel time and a primary school opened.
Each new phase of development optimism usually
followed the sale of beachfront land to a celebrity. Film
producer John ‘Strop’ Cornell (a writer and producer
on the original Crocodile Dundee movie) was an early
investor, and he sold up to Michael Baevski, of the Myer
retail family, who had also snapped up the old sand
mining lease for an eco-retreat called Sunrise at 1770.
Former sports star Grant Kenny was another, with his
Pavillions on 1770 resort.
According to real-estate veteran Garry Rapley, there
have been enough “boom” years for most developers
and land traders to make a buck, if not a fortune, but
it has been off a very low base. “When we came here
in 1989, the population was about 120, now it’s about
2000,” Garry says. “For many people that is one of its
great attractions, but it also makes it difficult to put in
a hospital or the other things that will attract an older
resident population.”
The best years, says Garry, were from 2000 until
2008, when the global financial crisis began. Sales
and prices went through the roof again in 2011 when
Gladstone, an hour up the road, became the hub of
the Queensland mining boom. But over the past few
years, as the mining boom passed and holiday homes
hit the market at less than replacement cost, tourism
to the Discovery Coast took a series of body blows as
a sightseeing plane crashed with a tragic loss of life, a
daytripper boat servicing Lady Musgrave Island caught
fire and sank, and the Round Hill Creek bar silted up
so much that commercial boats still cannot use it. In
late 2018, a ring of bushfires advancing from Deepwater
Creek to the south and Eurimbula to the west caused
mass evacuations when it looked like Agnes Water would
burn. It didn’t, but the crisis knocked another hole in
the Christmas holiday trade.
The boom-bust cycle has become a way of life for
the residents of the Discovery Coast. But even after
decades of dashed hopes, there is a resilient spirit about
the place and the people. And despite the problems, the
smart operators in tourism and business are doing quite
nicely. It’s not the new Noosa, and many residents are
more than happy about that.
I already live in the old Noosa for much of the year,
so it’s what brought me here, along with other bashed-
up baby boomers and superannuated surfies looking for
a quiet place under a banyan. And every morning I walk
down the deserted beach, longboard on my head, to surf
those point waves I fell in love with so long ago, I thank
someone’s god for floods and fire and long dirt roads, and
the fact that Agnes Water is still not quite on the radar.The boom-bust cycle has become a way of
life for the residents of the Discovery Coast.
A sandboarding stop at
Jenny Lind Creek, part of a
Bustard Head day trip with a
commercial tour operator.