The gold coast is many things to many people - holiday playground, theme park nirvana, surfing utopia or crass, contrived and overdeveloped urban nightmare, depending on who you talk to. Long-term resident Tim Baker details the numerous and varied attractions of his adopted home. . .

“They indulged in the fantasy without thinking how silly it was. That’s what I liked about the Gold Coast, the blossoming of all these different fantasies, how they all merged together, got mixed up and became strange new hybrids.” 
Matthew Condon in A Night at the Pink Poodle.

There’s a little known Gold Coast tourism poster from the ‘80s that was never allowed to see the light of day, pulped almost the moment it came off the presses. It features a steamy bedroom scene; one man and two women sprawled on a double bed, their glistening nakedness barely covered by a crumpled sheet. They gaze out of a Surfers Paradise high-rise apartment on to the azure blue Pacific Ocean under the ever-shining Queensland sun. One can only imagine what kind of breathless gymnastics have left them so spent and sweaty. Or am I jumping to conclusions? Perhaps they’ve just popped in for an afternoon nap after a game of beach volleyball.

But in the squeamish early stages of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-’80s, this was deemed too provocative, encouraging of promiscuity and, by implication, unsafe sex. Yet it’s this hint of the salacious, the naughty wink to the saucy possibilities represented by all those beachfront boudoirs, that has been at the core of the Gold Coast’s appeal for decades.

Romance with a beach view
I’ve been trying to figure out the enduring power of the Gold Coast, that continues to draw millions of visitors a year, even as the academics and cultural elites from the south sneer and deride their crass northern neighbour, the mad uncle in the attic. And I’ve concluded thus: The beach, sea air, sunshine and subtropical climate is thought to make us horny and troppo (or at least sub-troppo), move us to toss away strict, laced-up notions of propriety, and dare to act out long-stifled, forbidden fantasies - as if we were never designed to migrate this close to the Tropic of Capricorn, or inhabit the giddy altitudes of those beachfront high-rises.

Many of us experienced our first gritty, romantic clinches on beaches around the country in Summer holidays - though if they were ever consummated it was generally in cramped cars or as clumsy grapples in the sand.

Yet here is a place where it’s possible for literally thousands of beachgoers to be comfortably entwined, with a view of the ocean, simultaneously, day and night. Here, just a short stroll from the water’s edge, are modern comfort and convenience, clean sheets and bathrooms and towels to retire to, before the first flames of that beach-inspired desire have time to cool. Deep down, perhaps all of us come to the Gold Coast harbouring a secret desire to be bonking with a beach view.

This isn’t a recent phenomenon. In the early 1900s, when the first tent cities sprang up on the sand dunes of Coolangatta in holiday season, outraged residents protested the threat to public morals posed by single women camping alone. And the advent of mixed bathing inspired this risqué report in the Brisbane Truth in 1910:
“A TRIP TO THE TWEED, COCKY IN CLOVER. BREASTING THE BREAKERS. MAIDS, MATRONS AND MIXED BATHING . . .
“Joy possesses the city man at the sign of the glorious beaches on Queensland territory. The sand is white, the breakers tall and foamy. Maids and matrons go forth into the breakers in the midst of scores of unknown men, but, except for the fact that many of the women wear tight-fitting and very abbreviated swimming jerseys, the demands of propriety are not much infringed upon. Occasionally a mild sensation is created by the appearance of a lady bather in SHELL PINK BATHING GARMENTS of diaphanous texture, or by that of a corpulent city man bare above the waist and bereft of shame . . . Some of Brisbane’s most select society girls have a habit of parading the beach attired in swimming costume, and accompanied by good young men who can participate in such peculiar pleasure without suffering any damage to their character and morals. The young ladies, presumably, are living as close to Nature as laws of the land will allow.”

When the first of the Coolangatta guesthouses went up around 1912, there was an eager traffic of young men and women from Brisbane and Ipswich keen to sample the new craze of surf bathing and the convivial atmosphere for romance it seemed to generate. Train travel from Brisbane to the Coast tripled inside a decade. Guesthouses provided food and board for a modest tariff, with the women upstairs and the men downstairs, and a nightwatchman to guard the staircase - the honour of the women lodgers considered the earnest responsibility of the management. This didn’t deter the more adventurous male suitors from shimmying up drainpipes in their quests for romantic entanglement.

An array of beach games were designed and staged on Greenmount Beach to allow the young holiday makers to become better acquainted in the relative safety of daylight - pillow fights on logs, fancy dress pageants, Hawaiian-themed pantomimes and, later, the famous Hokey Pokey. Is this really so different from the modern phenomenon of Schoolies Week and its promise of wild times and beach holiday romance?

Is it, then, pheromones and not marketing promotions that have fuelled the Gold Coast’s phenomenal growth? Could the tourism authorities have saved themselves a whole lot of time and money, tossed some baby oil and prophylactics into the sweaty throng and simply let nature take its course? But then that would have denied us the unfolding, indefatigable theatre for the nation that is Gold Coast tourism promotion.