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| Main Beach, Noosa: the last summer holiday season was the best in a decade. Picture: Megan Slade Source: News Corp Australia |
The light is fading and something quite magical is happening in the treetops along Noosa’s Hastings Street.
Cars on the pedestrian-friendly boulevard slow to a crawl. A little girl’s strawberry gelato drips gently as her eyes grow wide. Even the famed holiday strip’s signature brush turkeys, loitering in the bushes like a street-gang of young toughs, seem to pause mid-scratch. Everyone looks up as strings of delicate fairy lights flick on, hundreds of metres of lights looping the length of the street, each one beaming out 24 watts of environmentally friendly optimism and bringing a sprite-like sparkle to the heart of a town where until recently gloom reigned.
“Do you like them?” asks Jim Berardo, as if there might be someone who isn’t partial to fairy lights. An American with a background in hospital administration, Berardo moved to Noosa in the late 1990s, opened two restaurants and became the driving force behind the acclaimed Noosa International Food and Wine Festival. The lights were his idea. “I got so sick of everyone saying Noosa had lost its mojo,” he says. “We needed to give it a kick.”
A car pulls up near the roundabout between Berardo’s white-on-white fine-dining establishment and his beachside bistro. A tangle of tanned limbs and bikinis piles out to pose in front of the fig tree at its centre. Over the festive season the evergreen shed its outmoded multicoloured bulbs for a dressing of 1930s-style teardrop ornaments and a permanent sprinkling of fairy lights. “Everyone needs a photo under the tree now,” Berardo says. “It’s like our little Opera House.”
Tourism fuels this exclusive Sunshine Coast enclave and Hastings Street is the financial engine. It’s no exaggeration to say that, two years ago, the strip was running out of gas. Restaurants sat empty. Boarded-up shopfronts littered the western end of Hastings Street and there were no fewer than 19 for-lease signs lining its length. Some locals swore they spotted tumbleweeds cartwheeling down the street after dark.
Now, cocktail-fuelled laughter wafts from the deck of Gaston Bar & Bistro and there’s not a for-lease sign in sight. Strings of icicle lights dance in a warm onshore breeze that carries a lingering hint of suntan lotion. The piano player at the Rococo bistro neatly detours into some Elton John glitter-rock and suddenly it feels like a party. Berardo grins. He’s got goose bumps. Noosa is back, baby.
Sandwiched between the natural bookends of Noosa National Park and the shining expanse of the Noosa River, and boasting a sheltered, north-facing beach of unparalleled beauty, Noosa has long been among the sparkliest jewels in Australia’s tourism crown. It’s a paradise, its small-town, eco-friendly vibe preserved through a half-century of strenuous anti-development efforts that kept buildings no higher than the tree line, traffic lights at bay and the beachfront, headland and estuary untrammelled by sprawl. A heady fusion of barefoot glamour, natural splendour and food, glorious food has lured well-heeled visitors from the southern capitals and abroad since the town swapped its hippie-surfer-haven vibe for serious continental chic in the 1980s.
But in 2011, a one-two punch of economic and environmental factors brought Noosa to its knees. The global financial crisis was a catastrophe; the town’s reliance on Sydney and Melbourne money made it vulnerable and tourists stayed away in droves. Many people offloaded their holiday homes in a bid to cut debt — property prices in Noosa Heads tumbled by as much as 40 per cent in the post-GFC years — and new developments went into receivership.
Then Mother Nature turned on the weather- dependent tourist town, unleashing a downpour of almost biblical proportions. During the peak summer season of 2010-11, endless rain put the kibosh on sunbaking, bushwalking and al fresco dining. Many southerners cut and ran for the sunnier skies of home a week into their holidays, and a trip to the beach was the last thing on the minds of flood-affected Queenslanders. A tsunami in Japan and the New Zealand earthquake also robbed the resort of two key sources of international visitors.
And the rain didn’t stop. In 2012, the weather bureau recorded 158 rain days and the wet-weather malaise tipped into 2013. “The GFC hit Noosa hard but then the rain just killed it,” says Pascal Turschwell, a born-and-bred Noosa resident who opened Gaston Bar & Bistro on the corner of Hastings Street four years ago. Turschwell’s father, Luc, is credited with creating Noosa’s now-celebrated dining scene. In the 1970s, when Noosa still belonged to the surfers and the longboard-friendly point break was the primary lure, the Frenchman opened his first al fresco restaurant, Belmondo, and followed it with a 200-seat open-air venue, Cafe Le Monde, which has since become a Noosa institution.
Pascal, 40, has therefore witnessed decades of culinary activity on Hastings Street but he says the years between 2010 and 2013 were “definitely the worst slump” he’s seen. “The place was empty and it was doom and gloom everywhere. I think people were trying to be positive but when you’re losing 10 or 15 grand a week it’s hard.” Those who didn’t go out of business remortgaged homes and maxed out credit for a white-knuckle ride.
Not everything that goes down must come up. But, to the relief of Noosa’s 52,000 residents and the sunseekers for whom this paradise is a kind of spiritual home, those operators who kept the faith were rewarded this summer with the kind of holiday season Noosa hadn’t seen in a decade. High-end holiday rentals over Christmas- New Year were at 100 per cent occupancy. Bumper-to-bumper traffic snaked two to three kilometres back from Hastings Street and, on Main Beach, there was barely room to get a towel down. “It was absolutely chock-a-block,” says Noosa Surf Club’s Barry Leek, adding that the club’s upstairs bar-restaurant, where million- dollar views can be had for the price of a beer, had never been busier.
People were not just turning up, they were spending too, with most top-drawer restaurants booked solid for lunch and dinner for weeks on end. Tourism Noosa boss Damien Massingham was ecstatic. “It would have to be nine or 10 years since that last happened,” he says. “There was a real buzz about the place, there were people everywhere, having a great time. Things have definitely turned around.”
Final-quarter National Visitor Survey figures for 2014 released last month justify Massingham’s optimism. Interstate visitors to Noosa were up 26.6 per cent compared to the same period the previous year to 285,000, while Sunshine Coast region visitor numbers were up 15.7 per cent. This boost occurred when interstate visits for Queensland as a whole rose just 2.3 per cent. Spending by domestic visitors to Noosa has been increasing for the past two years and is now $585 million, with the Sydney market’s contribution being particularly significant — it surged 14.9 per cent to $135.3 million.
International visitor numbers are also on the rise. In the year to last September, Massingham says, Noosa has seen visitors returning from its core high-spending international markets, with the number of nights they spend back to pre-GFC levels. The high-spending US market increased its expenditure in Noosa by 22 per cent and the UK market, Noosa’s biggest from overseas, was up 22.5 per cent. Germany is at a record high, up almost 12 per cent, while the price-sensitive New Zealand market — which was in decline — is up 9.6 per cent. In total, the amount spent by international visitors increased 13.5 per cent to $172 million, the third annual increase in a row.
In total, visitors to Noosa (including day trippers, who contributed $114 million) spent $871 million in the year to last September. Massingham expects the recent bumper summer season to send the figures “well north of that” once the official statistics appear midyear. In fact, the town once fighting for survival is firmly on track to reach its goal of attracting a billion tourist dollars annually by the end of 2016.
Noosa’s latest reversal of fortune dates to 2013, when the town’s tourist operators took a good look in the mirror and decided the doldrums were no place to be. “About two years ago we started to say, ‘We can’t do anything about the high Australian dollar, the economy or high fuel prices but we can look at ways we can enhance the visitor’s stay and let’s get our backyard right again’,” Massingham says. “And I’ve got to give a lot of credit to properties that spent a significant amount of money reinvesting in their product.”
Noosa’s five-star Sheraton Resort & Spa led the way in late 2013 with a $10 million makeover that saw it relegate its original salmon-pink paint job to the 1980s, where it belonged. The 24-year-old resort is now a showpiece, a more contemporary, environmentally sensitive off-white with bright and airy spaces and a new, celebrity-chef led restaurant in Peter Kuruvita’s Noosa Beach House. In late 2013, Super A-Mart founder John Van Lieshout reopened Seahaven Resort, a long-time family favourite bordering almost 20 per cent of the main beach, after a nine-month, $16 million overhaul that saw the building gutted and rebuilt into a sleek, modern resort.
With the big guns taken care of, Noosa started filling in the gaps. Retailers moved in, along with accommodation like the refurbished 10 Hastings Street Boutique Motel & Café. Old-school Italian joint Lindoni’s Ristorante, a 26-year-old Noosa institution where Mick Jagger once dined, packed up its giant emblematic drip candle and owner Rio Capurso teamed with Brent Ogilvie to open a sultry, ultra-modern incarnation called Locale at the far end of the street. Betty’s Burgers, an on-trend burger shack which exhorts diners to upload photos of their meal to social media, opened in December in a prime Hastings Street spot that had sat vacant for three years. It was immediately packed with holiday-makers. “There’s been a massive swing towards more casual dining and we saw a great opportunity with our concept,” says 35-year-old owner David Hales. “It’s a younger scene here now — a lot of people were saying how great it is to come in off the beach and sit on the couch in their bathers.”
The clacky-heeled socialites skewered by Prue and Trude, the snobbish alter egos of TV’s Kath & Kim, as being the type to holiday in “Noorrsa” in its late 1990s heyday have been replaced. The mood is more relaxed: organic is pushing gourmet off the shelves, “social dining” is the new buzz phrase and there’s a focus on fun-not-formal street food. “There’s been a big change in the kind of people coming here now,” says Berardo. “We’re seeing a lot of families with parents in their 30s and a couple of children. People who had holiday homes here for 20 years, who brought their children here, are now getting up there in age and so they’re passing on the properties to their sons and daughters and there’s a new generation coming through. Which is fantastic because it means there’s a new life for Noosa — a new permanent life, not just a short-term one.”
Noosa is still a long way from reaching peak beard, but the hipsters responsible for remodelling the inner-city suburbs of our capital cities are circling. High-end fine-dining is still taken care of with places such as Berardo’s and mod-Japanese superstar Wasabi Restaurant & Bar. But those so inclined can also have quinoa and lychees in a mason jar for breakfast, buy a fair trade tea towel or vintage teakettle from the eccentric gift shop Lamington, then head up the hill to Village Bicycle for tacos and craft beer and out to Captain Sip Sop’s Barber Shop & Outfitters for some low-fade styling.
This changing of the guard was overdue, says Noosa newcomer Ben Walsh, who opened the debonair new cocktail bar and restaurant Miss Moneypenny’s on Hastings Street in November 2013. “You would come up here and it was like stepping into a time machine,” says the former Sydneysider. “It would be the same stuff all the way down the street — at 6pm every night the white tablecloths go down on the tables, the menus are all pretty much the same, the cocktails are from the ’80s.” Harvey Wallbangers are not on the menu at Miss Moneypenny’s. The $1.2 million fitout is city-slick and the cocktails, such as the Istanbul Old Iced Tea made with gin, quince liqueur, elderflower and Turkish apple tea, are cutting-edge.
Walsh ran bars in Sydney’s Kings Cross and the Hunter Valley but had a hankering for a sea change. “I kept coming up here looking but around 2010-11 it wasn’t looking good,” he says. “I kept a close eye on it until I realised things might be on the turn.” He took on a 500 square metre patch of dirt where the old Ma Mensa restaurant had sat derelict for two years and started from scratch. The result, he says, sits comfortably in the new Hastings Street: it has high-end appeal without being pretentious or intimidating. “You don’t come in here to hear the clinking of glasses,” he says. “You come in to hear conversation and people having fun.”
It’s lunchtime in mid-February and the sun is high over Main Beach, where the teeming crowds of the festive season have thinned but not disappeared. The place is still buzzing, a fact that caught Lorraine Banks, owner of beachfront stalwart Bistro C, unawares. (She waited until what is typically a quieter period to close for a major revamp and opened two weeks later to find it still “flat chat”.) Shane McCauley is the only person on the beach wearing a suit. The co-principal at Richardson & Wrench Noosa is sitting under a spiny pandanus tree in front of his office on the beach side of Hastings Street. He’s eating a sandwich and talking happily about the resurgence of the town he’s called home for 13 years.
After bottoming in early 2013, Noosa’s prestige real estate market has begun clawing its way back to its halcyon days in the mid-1990s. “In the last 12 months we’ve seen an increase in the number of property sales and, in the last six months, we’ve seen an increase in prices,” McCauley says. Over the summer, R&W Noosa sold three beachfront penthouse apartments — one for $7.15 million — and shifted a two-bedroom apartment in the centrally located Mantra French Quarter Resort for $660,000 — the highest price in the 20-year-old building’s history. “We haven’t seen those prices ever — and they’re purely investment,” he says. “Tourists used to comment all the time on all the for-lease signs but now the streets are vibrant and there’s obviously confidence back in the Noosa market.”
Despite the buoyancy of local realtors, figures from the Real Estate Institute of Queensland’s latest quarterly Market Monitor show there is still a way to go. While the housing market in Noosa is slowly picking up, the apartment market continues to decline. The median unit price in Noosa Heads dropped a further 3.5 per cent last year and is now 29 per cent below the levels of five years ago.
When Hastings Street first switched on its $200,000 worth of tree lighting — funded by local businesses — it went beyond simply slapping camouflage makeup on a bruised face. It was, says Bob Ansett, the spry 81-year-old former car rental boss who’s lived here since 1995, part of the recovery process for the once-depressed precinct. “It changed the mood of people,” he says.
Ansett and his wife Josephine rise every day at 5.30am to jog the five kilometres from their Sunshine Beach home through the Noosa National Park to Main Beach, where they join a fluid crew that may include former Pacific Dunlop CEO Rod Chadwick, Queensland tourism tycoon Murray Charlton or Formula One driver Mark Webber for a swim in the bay before breakfast at Cafe Le Monde. Ansett was the driving force behind Friends of Noosa, a high-profile group of cashed-up locals including Flight Centre’s Graham Turner and former Toll Holdings chief executive Paul Little, who came together to fight the forced council amalgamation that occurred in 2008. They argued that the former Bligh government’s decision to lump Noosa with the Sunshine Coast Regional Council was a mistake that resulted in lost business opportunities and depleted services, and didn’t take into account Noosa’s unique character and anti-high rise development policies.
They fought hard and won. On January 1, 2014, after a referendum that showed 80 per cent of residents supported de-amalgamation, Noosa broke free. “When we succeeded in regaining our right to govern, almost instantly there was a change in the atmosphere,” Ansett says. The new council instigated an online training program, Welcome to Noosa, aimed at boosting the quality of customer service and Noosa was ready to turn a fresh face to the sun.
When you live in paradise you must be prepared to defend it. Well before sustainable development became a catchphrase, the Noosa community fought to protect an environment that local surfer and author Mike Davis describes as “the place where God kissed the planet”. The community has weathered attempts to carve up Noosa National Park with roads and sand mines; it’s prevented high-rise buildings in Hastings Street, and fought off efforts to put a Club Med on Noosa Spit (now protected public parkland). When Main Beach started to disappear due to erosion caused by a 1970s development blunder that saw the entire river mouth artificially relocated, a pumping system was installed to routinely replenish the sand. Noosa is a survivor.
“The best thing to come out of the hard years is that Noosa has reinvented itself,” Jim Berardo says. “It’s still not cheap, but it has morphed into a kinder, gentler, more welcoming place. It is still strongly opinionated about its future and where it’s going to go, hence the fight we had for the de-amalgamation. Some people think that’s elitist — most people just think it’s protecting this priceless jewel that we all share and love. Whether you have money or not, you can still go out in Noosa National Park and hit the first break there and be in heaven.”
source:theaustralian.com.au
