The Queensland resort town is grappling with traffic snarls, a population boom and rising rents – so why are out-of-state tourists still clamouring to visit?
By Joe Hinchliffe
Even in the teeming rain, even amid the broiling humidity and summer crush of tourists, Noosa retains its magic.
For some, it is found bobbing out past the sea of stripey cabanas on Main Beach, gazing towards the sandmass hills of Cooloola, beyond the Noosa river. For some, it lies in a pandanus palm-fringed cove, carved out of the verdant headland that shelters calm waters most days – and produces long, curling waves on others.
For some, it can be found in the fact that the Sunshine Coast resort town is such a very long way from the gloomy winters and icy waters of Victoria.
Map of Noosa relative to east coast of Australia
Victorians have long been known as the biggest devotees of this piece of Sunshine State paradise. So how is it that Noosa has managed to maintain its appeal for those south of the border? Why has it proven a perennial favourite, relatively unscathed by the fickleness of travellers looking for that next big destination?
Noosa inched another step closer to Victoria last November – culturally, at least – when a local paper reported a unit sold for a cool $12.5m. Tom Offermann, a real estate agent, told the Sunshine Coast News the “fellow who sold it” was “the only Queenslander left” in the building.
The body corporate, he said, were all from Victoria and, with this most recent sale, now all the owners in the building were too.
Offermann, though, doesn’t bother making making introductions on Guardian Australia’s behalf. He first sold the Noosa apartment to that now much wealthier Queenslander 30 years ago, and knows he won’t talk to press. But perhaps, speaking on his clients’ behalf, Offermann can offer an answer: why does this place holds such special appeal to the moneyed set south of the Murray?
For a start, Offermann says, there’s the direction the beach faces: north. This, coupled with protection of the headland, make Noosa one of three world surfing reserves in Australia and one of 13 in the world.
It also means when much of the rest of the east-facing sunshine coast is windswept and wild, Noosa remains calm, clear watered and family friendly.
Then there’s the generally pleasant weather and warm water throughout the year. New South Wales also offers “a pretty amenable climate” and “access to beautiful beaches”, he says, but for Victorians, Noosa is “an escape”.
“And if you’ve gotta get on a plane anyway, you may as well fly to Noosa.”
But Noosa is “not just a beach”, Offermann adds.
“[Victorians] like to be around a lot of restaurants … They like the services on offer, the big cinema,” he says. “It’s a combination of things the little coastal villages don’t have”.
Such cosmopolitan connotations are so conjured upon the Victorian imagination by the name alone, it seems, that when a proposed resort in nearby Caloundra sought southern investors its developers unveiled a series of imageless billboards in Melbourne that simply read: “Not Noosa …”
In early 2021, the property agent behind that $250m development told local press it was “about reinvigoration, about raising the aspiration and sophistication and quality in Caloundra” – all descriptors supposedly synonymous with its neighbour to the north.
The Noosa brand, however, does not always rub off. In little more than a year, the Caloundra project collapsed without turning a sod.
Not that Noosa’s appeal is strictly confined to Victoria; it’s also a magnet for Sydney’s rich and influential. Who could forget the public fracas involving topless former Australian cricket captain and Sydneysider Michael Clarke and TV presenter Karl Stefanovic in early 2023?
Nonetheless, Celeste Mitchell, a locally raised and based travel writer, says that though the coast north of Brisbane has seen a huge influx of southern migrants and visitors over the last 12 months, Noosa remains the premier destination.
Mitchell lives in Alexandra Headland and grew up in Caloundra, both toward the southern end of the Sunshine Coast. Her home town, she says, is more associated with the “old-school family holiday” where “not a lot happens after dark”, a place of caravan parks, flats and humble fish and chipperies.
So it perhaps of little surprise that when Mitchell’s friends from her time working in Sydney come for a Queensland coastal getaway, they choose to stay in Noosa too.
“Noosa sits alone, on its own,” she says. “It is that bit further up the coast, it’s got the protection of the national park, it’s got two biosphere reserves, you’ve got the Noosa everglades as well.
“It is a really naturally beautiful destination – but it also has that air of exclusivity”.
But though she, too, might head to Noosa for a date night with her husband or to celebrate a milestone, it is not a place Mitchell would even attempt to visit on the weekend – “let alone on the holidays”.
“Noosa ticks so many boxes and it is undeniably beautiful,” she says. “But it is also very small, a small place to get in and out of.
“There is really one street in, with dead ends at both ends”.
So is Noosa in danger of being loved to death?
The periodic snarls along the Hasting Street strip behind Main Beach have seen the council debate a proposed congestion tax. Mitchell says the resort town is grappling with a range of issues plaguing destinations around the world experiencing overtourism.
“It is just more people than ever wanting to go to these places, and sometimes they aren’t really set up for that,” she says.
Tony Wellington, a former mayor, says the pinch that puts on Noosa property has become particularly acute in the years since the pandemic.
One stress point is an influx of people seeking to live there, which Wellington says saw town planners forced to “absorb more people than we had originally planned as the ideal carrying capacity for the shire”.
The other is what he calls the “short-term accommodation (STA) issue”.
Noosa appears to have more Airbnb style rentals than Sydney’s CBD, Wellington says. He’s going off those STAs registered with their respective councils and knows the figures are rubbery – in addition to the officially recognised 2,745 in Noosa and 2,468 in Sydney City council shire, many more will simply be unregistered.
“[But] whatever the final figure of STAs, we’re talking about thousands of properties that have been removed from the long-term rental market,” Wellington says. “The result is not only a hollowing out of communities, particularly along the coastal areas, but also a massive shrinking of available properties for residents and essential workers.”
As a result – perhaps – Tim Lawrey, who manages a clothing and coffee shop just off the main strip, is now resorting to a question being asked in job interviews in tourism hotspots Australia wide: “Have you got accommodation?”
“Backpackers used to come up, get a place for $400, and split the rent among themselves,” Lawrey says. “Now that same place is $700, $800 and they just can’t afford it.”
Yet Noosa remains a magnet. Alan Hashem was running a property inspection app which he founded and says funded a lavish lifestyle, including a Woolloomooloo penthouse.
The Covid-19 pandemic upended Hashem’s life, but it also came with a “silver lining”. Suddenly asking himself “at what point is enough enough?”, Hashem sold his business, bought a campervan and took off for life on the road.
In Noosa, though, he has found somewhere he is now looking to settle down.
“This place is in the sweet spot,” Hashem says. “And I think everybody has figured that out”.
