Once overlooked by the Gold Coast glitterati, the southern end is attracting surf royalty, multimillion-dollar property deals, five-star apartments and some seriously good food.
“Go! Go! Go! Go!” yells Haley the swim guide as she slips off the side of the rubber ducky. But there’s a moment of hesitation as my brain questions the logic of jumping into the Pacific Ocean 14 kilometres from land. But “go” I do – into an ocean that now looks a deeper, darker blue than I’ve ever seen before as we scan the depths for whales.
But the monsters we’d been watching just seconds earlier, 50 metres off the stern and heading straight for us, have disappeared like whales at a casino when the taxman turns up.
It is a fitting introduction to this bottom corner of the Gold Coast: a little bit unexpected and hard to pin down.
For decades, Coolangatta was the poor relation to the glittering towers of Surfers Paradise. The best surf was there, but so was the airport. If you wanted the full Gold Coast experience, you headed north.
That is changing. Down around Coolangatta, Kirra, Rainbow Bay and Bilinga, the old beach-town charm is being joined by serious money and a growing collection of flash restaurants, hotels, luxury apartments and a few wild experiences to boot.
Bilinga has the prize as the suburb with the fastest growing apartment values in Australia, having risen 14.2% a year over the past decade. And the freestanding homes aren’t too shabby either. Mick Fanning’s beachfront home in Bilinga recently sold for $16.05 million, setting a new benchmark for the southern Gold Coast.
The world’s surfing royalty has long known about this stretch of coast. Kelly Slater, Mick Fanning, Joel Parkinson and Stephanie Gilmore all own apartments around Rainbow Bay, drawn by Snapper Rocks, a manmade break that is one of the planet’s great waves.
Actors Kevin Costner and Jake Gyllenhaal have been spotted at Rainbow Bay Surf Life Saving Club. Celebrity has followed the money. The $160 million Esprit development has added another luxury address at Rainbow Bay, while restaurants such as Siblings and Hanks at Kirra are polishing streets that once traded on fish and chips and surfboard wax.
The result is a curious new version of the southern Gold Coast — still laid-back, still close enough to the wildness of the Pacific to jump into it in a wetsuit, but increasingly expensive and a little bit glamorous.
Kirra on the rise
Our base for exploring the southern “Goldie” is a penthouse in Rise Kirra Point, where the word “upmarket” takes new meaning. The penthouse occupies two levels of the building housing Kirra Point Holiday Apartments. It is a private residence on steroids: five bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, two enormous living areas, a brown pool table, internal lift and a bathtub seemingly designed for two round people. The lights require an iPad – and a three-day course – to operate.
I pace out the downstairs section and it is the exact same dimensions as an Olympic pool. The dining room table, all tastefully beige, is the size of a small New York Apartment – about as big as our private rooftop pool, perfect for a skinny dip and belting out a Forbes Australia story in the glorious winter sun.
Within minutes of arriving at the 15th floor penthouse, I spot three whales with the binoculars provided. And the skyscrapers of Surfers Paradise look way better as a distant silhouette than they do up close.
The building is owned by Peggy and Bryan Flannery, who made their fortune in mining, selling coal miner Felix Resources for more than $500 million in 2009. The Flannerys have kept the penthouse next door for themselves. Peggy, who grew up in Cunnamulla and has said she didn’t see the ocean until she was 12, is making up for lost time. The keen philanthropist is driving the development of the block next door – an 87-apartment twin-tower project.
A split-level penthouse in that development is being offered off the plan for $18 million ahead of its expected 2029 completion. If it sells at that price, it would comfortably eclipse the current $14 million penthouse record for the suburb.
It is the sort of development that would have seemed improbable here not so long ago. But the Flannerys are not alone in their bet. Builder-turned-developer Paul Gedoun’s S&S Projects has a billion-dollar pipeline of five developments at Rainbow Bay.
The transformation is perhaps most obvious at the dinner table.
At Hanks restaurant in Kirra, the room has the polished confidence of an eatery that expects you to stay for another drink: a marble bar and backlit bottles in front of the deco mirror. The food is equally assured. There is tuna tartare with crisp accompaniments, cauliflower served in a generous slab, and an overnight lamb shoulder that has been slow-cooked for 24 hours, pressed into a block and crisped on the outside. It arrives looking like a chocolate brownie and tastes like a really good yeeros – and that’s high praise from me.
Two doors down, Blly Chow is doing modern Asian. The room is noisier and more casual, but the Malaysian-influenced food is serious: fried chicken with date relish; tempura eggplant with miso caramel, peanuts and herbs; wok-fried vegetables and a generous slab of pork belly. Dessert – bao nut, caramelised apple, marzipan, almond crumble, amaretto caramel and cinnamon-ginger gelato – is insanely good, but so rich it needs halving.
And then there is Siblings, the big, busy restaurant getting rave reviews in the old Kirra Beach Pavilion right on the sand. The previous tenant, for the last 40 years, was a Pizza Hut.
That says it all.
We have three attempts to swim with whales with the brilliant Cooly Eco Adventures teams. But each time the whales have three attempts to not swim with humans.
It hardly matters.
There is something about being so far offshore peering into the depths, appreciating the cathedrals of light shafting down through that deepest possible blue.
I’ve been whale watching on a large boat and loved it, but being on a rubber ducky and watching whales breech and play while manoeuvring to swim with them adds a level of engagement that is so much more. The skipper Jay is asking for our help in spotting and I’m proud of my efforts to get a few out the back: “Seven o’clock.”
Every shout from the skipper — “eleven o’clock!” “Stand by!” — sends a jolt through the boat. Every dark shape on the horizon becomes a possibility. When the call finally comes to jump, you are suddenly completely alive. Looking down. Heads up to hear Haley’s calls. Head down to look.
By late morning, we are back on shore, shivering and unsuccessful. We have seen plenty of whales, but we have not swum with one.
It hardly matters. We are buzzing with life. And there’s a good coffee right over the road at the Cubby Bakehouse.
The southern Gold Coast may be getting richer and glossier, but thankfully, it still knows how to leave you standing on a beach, shivering in warm sunlight, wondering what just happened.
