Not only is the Sunshine Beach Caravan Park no longer in existence but it has been, unsurprisingly, replaced by a collection of multi-million dollar beach front houses with triple garages and fancy cars in the driveways.  All a bit dispiriting for us, though not for the undoubtedly happy residents.  Our memories are of a primitive van park directly overlooking the ocean and small children in a borrowed caravan for a week of perfect Queensland winter weather with no other buildings in sight except for a weird Swiss Chalet style restaurant – all long gone. But there is a Chalet Lookout, so that’s probably where it was.  Just as weirdly, they’ve invented a new beach – it used to all be Sunshine Beach, which hadn’t stretched the place-naming imagination too much, but it’s now been subdivided into Sunrise Beach as well, so even less mental effort there.

The van park was not our only connection here though.  In the mid-70’s, we stayed a few times in an affordable but comfortable flat, also on the beachfront beside the surf club at Noosa Heads.  One of our favourite-ever holiday places but gone for many years now.  Even then, Victorian numberplates were much in mid-year evidence, so the proportion is maybe still the same but the numbers are much much higher.  We’ve always liked Noosa (despite the canyon-like development of Hastings St) and so we treated ourselves to fancy lunch at Seasons on the beachfront (which might have been Barry’s in days gone by?).

Of course, there’s no longer a caravan park at the end of Hastings St but there are plenty of others only slightly further afield, all full due to southerners.  We eventually found a very satisfactory, if not very close, HipCamp at Maroochy River which gave us a lovely flat grassed area where we stayed with as many as a dozen other campers, all at respectable distances.  We met a couple of kids (so, probably late 20’s) who had a new Torus van, having decided to travel around Oz for a couple of years, living mainly off the girl’s online earnings as an Occupational Therapist – he was a marketer and was just dying to fix Torus’s marketing – what admirable bravery!  We even had our hostess Kate come and deliver fairly-priced bags of firewood on her quad bike each afternoon!

Maroochydore is the home of Accelerate Autoelectrics who I had spoken to over two years ago at the beginning of our travels and the beginning of our struggles with the power array in ATGANI and its tug – these issues have never been fully sorted out, in my opinion, despite many pieces of “professional” attention.  So, for one final time, we consulted and then gave them our rig for an entire day while they changed all the bits that they claimed weren’t quite right and gave us a commensurate invoice.  Now at least, when we put the van in the sun, the batteries charge up in about half the time that they used to, so it looks like something’s changed.  It seems as though auto-electricians might be the tradie equivalent of economists – 6 of them in a room will give you 12 opinions.  While all this was happening, we spent our time at the Alexandra Heads surf club on a perfect day, so not much damage done.

It wouldn’t be the Sunshine Coast without a walk in the National Park and we covered the entire Noosa headland with walks out to Hell’s Gates and to the ridge above Alexandria Bay and Devil’s Kitchen.  Further glorious weather (Ha! Carts were off at Manly) meant that crashing waves weren’t in evidence but the pics show it was truly beautiful.  However, no whales were sighted from any of the headlands which seemed unsatisfactory so next stop was the Maryborough & Hervey Bay district, once again down Memory Lane.

Maryborough is the birthplace of exactly two important people:  Lesley Fraser and Helen Goff – Lesley went on to become the girl wonder whilst Helen merely adopted the name P L Travers and set about creating Mary Poppins.  Today, the town celebrates this at almost every corner, although, given that Travers permanently removed to London, how she would have felt about it all is a bit unknown.  Nonetheless, the Walk and Don’t Walk signs here are at least as good as Ampelmann in Berlin.

The aforementioned girl wonder’s memories of Maryborough were slight, given that she left when she was two and only came back for a year when she was three.  But regular holiday visits to her grandmother, including exciting train trips all the way from Brisbane, meant that armed with a couple of street names, some brotherly instructions and her own vague memories, she was able to identify the house of her birth and the second one plus her grandmother’s home.  The houses looked to be in much the same shape as they would have been in the 1950’s, right down to a huge and fondly remembered mango tree in one back yard, and it was fun to try to find them.  There was also a remembered “holiday house” down on the beach at Hervey Bay near the jetty at Pialba, but we didn’t locate that one. 

The other terrific attraction that Maryborough offers is a set of DIY arts and history walks around town, featuring the usual “bar that used to be a bank” and a bunch of murals, but superbly topped off by the Cistern Chapel.  A bunker like public toilet beside the Town Hall has been wildly decorated by a couple of local artists (the second one came in to finish the job after the first guy went absent on a bender) supported by various local institutions.  Every wall and ceiling is covered with decoration that suits this best-of-all throne rooms.  There’s an equally wonderful painting in the Town Hall itself but the Cistern wins for me.

Old home times were all very well but we’d also come for the whales, so we eyed the forecast (not great), we checked out the boats (all sorts), paid our money (lots) and took our chances.  What could possibly go wrong?