One day, just over a year ago, as the Covid property boom hit its stride, well-known Noosa estate agent Lance Bussell came home from a hard day of open houses and silly offers and said to wife Megan: “How’d you like to be mortgage-free and retire right now?”
“Her eyes were as big as saucers,” Lance recalls as we watch another beautiful sunset over Round Hill Creek.
Megan, a career health professional, picks up the story: “I said, I’ll take that. I’d been nagging him for years. We’d travelled so much in our lives and never stayed anywhere as long as we had in Noosa, and now we could see the urban sprawl starting to happen and the changes in the town. It just seemed the right time to go.”
I’d gathered a small group of former Noosans together over sunset drinks to discuss a property-price driven migratory pattern that probably won’t make demographic history but is certainly having an influence over the once-sleepy coastline of the Discovery Coast of Central Queensland, a stretch that incorporates the townships of Agnes Water and Town of 1770.
People – mainly developers – have been calling it the “new Noosa” since the first beachside subdivisions in the 1980s, and there has been a long, slow drift of Sunshine Coasters five hours north ever since. But the Discovery Coast, and particularly the commercial hub of Agnes Water, has never been, is not now and never will be the “new Noosa”.
While there are certainly geographic similarities, with north-facing beaches, point breaks and a rim of national parks, socially and culturally, this still-remote coast, an hour and a half away from Bundaberg and Gladstone, is a galaxy away from our realities. And therein lies its appeal.
I’ve been hooked since 1978, when I first drove in the three hours of rough dirt track from Miriam Vale to surf the end of a cyclone swell with just a couple of mates for company, and sleep in a fisho shack in front of the break for a dollar a night.
In the ‘80s I took my young family there a few times, camping beachfront at 1770, paddling my surfboard out to the anchored prawn trawlers to grab a bag of tigers they never wanted money for – “just get a round at the Tree”. In love all over again, all of us.
After we moved to Noosa in 1990, the camping trips became split between Agnes and K’gari, but the passion for the former never diminished, and during a week there in 2017, we tyre-kicked our way around a couple of holiday apartments that were on the market before falling in love with a spacious, high-ceilinged place with a big deck overlooking a rainforest and just a five-minute walk down a pleasant path to the beach, another five minutes along the sand to the surfing point.
We were thinking about it on the way home, but I got as far as the Fingerboard turnoff, 30 kilometres out, and remembered the advice of two old surfing mates: never miss an opportunity to buy real estate at the beach. I swung the car around at the Fingerboard gas station, went straight back into town and paid a deposit.
Never, ever a regret about that decision, although Agnes was still doing it tough those first few years, and as an investment it was a shocker, even though I’d bought at the bottom of the market.
Sales and prices had gone through the roof in 2011 when Gladstone, just up the road, became the hub of the Queensland mining boom. But the mining boom passed and holiday homes hit the market at less than replacement cost, and tourism to the Discovery Coast took a series of body blows as a sightseeing plane crashed, killing one passenger, a daytripper boat servicing Lady Musgrave Island caught fire and sank with no loss of life, and a fishing trawler claimed the lives of six local men when it sank in Bustard Bay.
Add to the misery the fact that the Round Hill Creek bar silted up so much that commercial boats couldn’t use it.
Then in late 2018, a ring of bushfires 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.
Tough for local business, but for us, for lifestyle, it was the perfect yin to Noosa’s yang.
The Covid pandemic hit hard in the first half of 2020, but in the second half Queenslanders, unable to travel elsewhere, set off to tick their bucket lists.
The effect, in beautiful, still lazy, Agnes Water, was quite remarkable. Everyone wanted to visit, then they wanted to move there. Which gets us back to the sunset drinkers.
Noosa locals Ray and Yvonne Chadzynski, like the Bussells, had decided that Noosa’s growing urban sprawl and holiday crowds were becoming less desirable. They sold their home in February 2020, ordered a campervan and prepared to spend the next few years exploring Australia.
Razor, a well-known figure in the surf and adventure sports industry, with several successful start-ups behind him, had travelled widely overseas, as had Vonnie, and they relished the opportunity to become transient domestic road warriors in their golden years. And then they couldn’t.
Says Razor: “We came up here to see friends who had been nagging us for years to check it out. I hadn’t been since 1979, and now they had a real road! I drove through town and it hadn’t changed. “Then we drove into Sunrise at 1770 [gated estate] and within five minutes Yvonne was saying, I could live here!”
“They moved to Agnes in July 2021, and are now planning to build at Sunrise where Ray has recently become chairman of the body corporate.
Michael Burns has been a traveler all his life, but he credits spending his early childhood years on remote island communities with his desire to wind up in Agnes. The fact that he’d been there on a yacht in 1975 also helped.
Readers might remember his late mother Rhonda Burns, a wonderful patron of Noosa arts and culture, or Mike’s Burns Gallery of Fine Arts in Eumundi.
But there’ll be none of that hyperactivity in Agnes, where he and partner Lori settled early last year, after buying a house online, sight unseen from Victoria.
“I’m definitely retired now,” says Mike, “but I’m still a good judge of a property.”
Indeed he is. It’s a lovely, sun-drenched beachside bungalow, with gorgeous Hal Barton originals on the walls, reminding me that he’s both an art dealer and a Noosan at heart.
For every new arrival from Noosa, there’s an older one who influenced the decision.
Dog whisperer and former world tandem surfing champion Chris De Aboitiz is a prominent one.
After a dozen years in Agnes, Chris has developed several successful local businesses, including his stand-up paddle hire and school at 1770, and the wildly successful Summit dog-friendly accommodations and campground, just on the edge of town.
He says: “We moved to Noosa at the end of the ‘80s when it was either just the right size or maybe a bit too small, but it stayed right through the ‘90s, then it got too busy.
“Now Agnes has grown from too small to just about right, but it’ll go through the same process here and one day it’ll be too busy. But I’ll be dead by then!”
Maybe we all will be, but the growth creep is definitely on.
The Discovery Coast population has doubled since Covid began, and two over 50s resorts and a big Stockwell shopping centre are underway. Longtime locals love the amenity, recent arrivals are a little bit concerned. But only a little.
On our last evening in Agnes for this month we catch up with former Noosans Mark and Janene Hultz, managers of the Sandcastles Resort where our property resides, about to retire the very next day. Over the five years we’ve owned here, we’ve become good friends, and we’re delighted to see them bowing out on a high, after struggling through the difficult years.
Says former airlines flight engineer Mark: “After 15 years out of Noosa and seven of them running Sandcastles, we’re looking forward to taking a backseat, travelling in our camper and spending time with the grandkids.”
Janene concurs about time with the grandies, but both of them have been community activists since arriving in town all those years ago.
Their lovely home overlooking Bustard Bay will remain their base, and I’m sure they’ll remain a positive force in the local community.
This is just a small sample of people who have traded Noosa for Agnes. You wouldn’t call it an exodus just yet, but it’s disturbing how many familiar faces you see in the supermarket and the tavern.
