Noosa headland (coastal rocky reefs)

Walk to the very end of Noosa National Park and the land does something it does almost nowhere else along this soft-shored coast: it runs out into the sea as bare stone. The beaches on either side are sand the waves have rebuilt a thousand times over; the headland stays put because it is made of harder stuff, a promontory of volcanic and sedimentary rock the sea has worried at for ages and failed to shift. That is why it is a headland at all. Read it as the seaward end of the range, the last hard bones of the coastal high country, standing out into the water where everything softer has been washed away.

Which makes it easy to stand on and easy to overlook, because the better story is under the water. The same hard rock carries on below the tideline as a reef, and what the East Australian Current puts on it, coral and cool-water sponge together, is worked out elsewhere in these pages (see two oceans on one rock). What is Noosa’s alone is the load that reef carries from above.

There is an odd asymmetry in the way the place is cared for. The bush on top of the headland is a gazetted national park, walked by rangers, hemmed with signs, and watched over by the very crowds that wear its tracks. The reef a few metres below the same crowd is loved only by association and seen up close by hardly anyone, so it gets none of that daily vigilance. A visitor will stop to keep off a nesting scrubfowl or a hip-high dune plant and never think about the coral and sponge working away beneath the swell.

Noosa National Park’s headland is among the most walked and most loved stretches of coast in Queensland, and almost everyone who stands on it is looking out at the view rather than down through it. A much-loved shore is a much-used one. Foot traffic frets the intertidal rock, boats and snorkellers work the water overhead, and the run-off of a busy town settles over a community already living close to the ceiling of what it can bear. A degree of warming or a season of silt lands on animals with nothing left to give. The offshore reefs, out past the surf off Double Island Point or ringing Mudjimba, take the warming alone; this one takes the warming and the crowd together.

Read from the top, the headland is a lookout, one of the finest on the coast. Read from the water, it is a two-oceans reef pressed against the last of its tolerances beneath one of the busiest crowds the coast can throw at it. To love a place this much and still leave it well enough alone is a hard thing to ask of a crowd. This headland is where the coast asks it.