Sunshine Coast properties

The Kabi Kabi and the Wakka Wakka

The Kabi Kabi and Wakka Wakka peoples were the area's earliest residents. The Kabi held about 21,000 square kilometres along the coast, from the 27th parallel north to where the Burrum River meets the sea. Wakka Wakka country lay to the west, roughly triangular and about 13,000 square kilometres, including a small piece of the Dawson and meeting Kabi country in the north at Walla.

The two groups were friendly, intermarried and shared the same class restrictions. Both were nomadic, gathering food along the way between camps. Gubbi Gubbi is an Aboriginal language spoken on Kabi Kabi country. Its region covers the Sunshine Coast Region and Gympie Region council areas and takes in Caloundra, Noosa Heads and Gympie, reaching north towards Maryborough and south to Caboolture.

Contact, bunya and timber

In 1770 James Cook was the first European known to have seen the Glass House Mountains, which stand south-west of Caloundra. In the 1820s three former convicts landed on Moreton Island after losing their way while fetching cedar, and lived with the Kabi Kabi for eight months. Through the 1830s and 1840s many runaway convicts from the penal colony to the south settled in the district.

In 1842 Governor George Gipps set aside a "Bunya Bunya Reserve" to protect the bunya tree, covering the district from Mount Beerwah north to roughly Eumundi. He acted after Andrew Petrie told him how much bunya groves mattered in Aboriginal culture. Across the 1840s and 1850s that reserve and the country near it were the scene of some of the bitterest fighting of Australia's Black War. Because of the Bunya Festival, held every three years, the Blackall Range became a hiding place and a rallying point for attacks on white settlements. Timber cutters and cattlemen had begun to exploit the area by the 1850s, and the reserve was scrapped in 1860.

Many towns here began in the 1860s and 1870s as ports or jetties serving the timber trade, in country that once held magnificent forest. Roads often started out as snigging tracks used to haul timber. Logs of cedar were floated out along the creeks, rivers and lakes, and the resulting wood was shipped as far away as Europe.

The Gympie gold rush of 1867 sent prospectors up the Sunshine Coast mountains to open easier ways of reaching the gold fields. After a railway line reached Gympie, the coastal and river towns were bypassed; most of them had served the early river trade. Small farms of fruit and dairy had replaced the timber and cattle work of earlier decades by the 1890s. Sugar cane and pineapples became especially important crops for the district, and new hamlets and towns appeared. At first, produce went by horse to Landsborough, and in 1891 it went to Eudlo.

Seaside shacks and a new name

After the First World War came the "seaside shack", a coastal "getaway" within reach of modest means. From 1914 to 1946 shacks went up all along the North Coast, so named because it lay north of Brisbane. They were very cheap, and an early exercise in recycling: many used second grade or disused timber, and builders drew on whatever came to hand, from fibro cement and metal containers to spare materials off farms. Disused trams, too, were sold off as shacks.

After the Second World War in particular, the coast became a place for holidays and surfing, and the building boom of the 1960s and 1970s carried that further. The area was then known as the Near North Coast. When the South Coast was renamed the Gold Coast, interest grew in a new name for the Near North Coast to draw tourists. Silver Coast, Diamond Coast and Suncoast were all considered. Suncoast was rejected because a proprietary company held the copyright, and in 1967 the area was officially renamed the Sunshine Coast.

In 1967 the region was also defined as the former shires of Landsborough, Maroochy and Noosa, with Bribie Island left out. Tourist attractions and theme parks were created around the renaming, among them the Big Pineapple at Woombye. After the 1980s the region grew quickly, and by 2016 it was counted among the fastest-growing regions in Australia.

Sugar, merger and the region today

The closure of the Moreton sugar mills in 2003 left the district's 120 cane growers without a market for their crop. In 2008 the Shire of Noosa, the Shire of Maroochy and the City of Caloundra combined to become the Sunshine Coast Region, after a 2007 referendum. The merger stayed controversial in Noosa Shire, where 95 per cent of voters had rejected it. In March 2013 a further vote saw 81 per cent of residents choose to leave the merged region, and a November 2013 election brought in a new mayor, who took office with the new council on 1 January 2014.

Since 2014 the district has been split between two local government areas: the Sunshine Coast Region in the south and the Shire of Noosa in the north. The region has more separate national parks than any other in Queensland, among them the Glass House Mountains, Noosa and Kondalilla parks. Three UNESCO biosphere reserves lie side by side here, and no other place in the world has that arrangement. The protected area at Currimundi Lake gained environmental park status in 1975, and in 1994 it was declared a conservation park.