Coffs Harbour
I’m acutely aware that I should be observing myself observing the process of getting to know this area, our house and just familiarising myself with Australia, for the purpose of my PhD studies but it’s an interesting exercise in itself…
There are so many ways in which Australia, or at least New South Wales which is the state I am most familiar with, seems to have an American (or Americanised) landscape. What I mean is that in Britain houses are predominantly brick-built with tiled roofs and have more than one storey. It’s unusual to see fly-screens and screen doors, external water tanks or water pumps, flags, or houses raised on stilts or staddles. To my eyes there is a huge amount of billboard advertising here, and that, combined with single-storey shops, offices and houses, reminds me much more of the American small-town landscape with which I am familiar from visits to New Jersey (OK, not exactly a representation of the whole of the USA) and from movies.
Another similarity with America is that owing to the vastness of the country, I suppose, the car is king. I strongly resisted the idea of having two cars in Bristol and I still think I was right. But in Bristol you could walk or take the bus pretty much anywhere you wanted to go, and taxis, buses and trains were only a short distance away. Korora was ‘sold’ to us partly on the basis that we would be within only a few minutes’ distance of everything we needed – and we are, but we didn’t appreciate that the timings were given based on driving somewhere. You’d have to walk a long way to find a local shop, the local beach or any entertainment. Ella’s school is probably a kilometre and a half away from our front door and I imagine we will be unusual in walking her to school rather than driving. But this isn’t unusual: you’d have to be living in the central shopping zone to be near enough to the amenities to be able to walk there!
That is a long way of saying that much of the ‘fabric’ of Coffs Harbour as a large town, a local hub, an industrial centre of the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales is comprised of long strips of mixed businesses, houses, petrol stations and shopping malls with tons of advertising, and lots and lots of cars… and to this extent it is probably little different to any other sizeable settlement in this country. What marks it out as a tourist centre is the large number of motels, hotels and resorts sign-posted along the Pacific Highway. And what brings the tourists – and makes it a place worth coming to – is the breathtaking coastline and the hinterland.
Coffs Harbour is situated half-way between Sydney and Brisbane (roughly speaking), at the only point in the Great Dividing Range where the mountains tumble down into the sea. We’ve yet to discover what the humidity is like in summer, but the temperatures aren’t supposed to creep above 30º C between November and February – I’ll tell you what that feels like in due course. So far it’s been extremely pleasant, due in part to the microclimate facilitated by the local geography. We’re not talking gentle rolling hills here – we’re talking mad up-wellings of rock and no significant ‘coastal plain’ at all, perhaps because Coffs Harbour isn’t at the mouth of a river so there has been no historical estuary or riverine flood plain to flatten out the hills towards the sea. There are no cliffs really, either. Instead the land rises out of the sea and rises backwards to meet the rest of the Great Dividing Range with its steep valleys and elevated grazing country.
This has amusing consequences in terms of land for sale. You see pictures everywhere of parcels of land for sale, and of course we’re interested in buying a piece of land and building a house on it eventually. We have a fantasy of a rural idyll with a few chickens, perhaps a horse, some sheep, a half-dozen cows… Michael going back to his farming roots while I tend the orchard and the vegetable patch in between producing artistic masterpieces. Sadly, though, it will be damned difficult to do any of this within sight of the sea! Yesterday we went for a drive up Bruxnor Road simply because it’s over the other side of the Pacific Highway from us, and we’d seen a particular advert for 10 acres of land and a house that was vaguely affordable. We weren’t looking to walk in and put down a deposit but we thought it would be an interesting exercise to take a look at the property, assuming we could find it by dint of looking out for estate agents’ ‘For Sale’ boards. And we did find a lot of ‘For Sale’ boards – situated on properties that can’t have had a gradient of less than 1:4 on any of them, and yet these are seen as prime building sites! What’s more, people here actually build on them! I’m not joking: we almost burnt out the clutch on our NEW car on arrival in Korora because the driveway is very steep. It must be 1:4 – it’s certainly as steep as my allotment in Bristol, for those who visited that. And here people build on steeper land! We’ve spotted several roads being built around here as a preparation for residential developments and honestly, our car wouldn’t get up them and I wouldn’t know how to drive up them, even engaging our Subaru’s low/high traction system. In fact, there’s one road that we spotted just off the highway, and we simply can’t fathom how you’d get a car up there at all – although presumably diggers haven’t had any problems… They are hardy souls, Australian developers (and house owners!), but I don’t think the average cow would fare very well in such circumstances.
Surfers, swimmers, whale-watchers, paddlers and fishermen, however, get a great deal. The geography has created a series of beautiful curved, sandy beaches with lots of room for everyone, and we plan to make the most of them even if we end up buying land up in the hills somewhere. Here you can find gentle valleys, fields of cows (it’s predominantly dairy farming here; it’s too far south for sugar cane and too humid for much arable farming) and horses, gracious homesteads and stretches of sub-tropical rainforest between larger expanses of eucalypt woodland. It’s beautiful – quieter, less brash, calmer than the coastal strip. There are some larger settlements such as Nana Glen (home of Russell Crowe – we met his father today!) and Bellingen, and you’re close enough to Coffs Harbour to go and do the shopping.
There are so many ways in which Australia, or at least New South Wales which is the state I am most familiar with, seems to have an American (or Americanised) landscape. What I mean is that in Britain houses are predominantly brick-built with tiled roofs and have more than one storey. It’s unusual to see fly-screens and screen doors, external water tanks or water pumps, flags, or houses raised on stilts or staddles. To my eyes there is a huge amount of billboard advertising here, and that, combined with single-storey shops, offices and houses, reminds me much more of the American small-town landscape with which I am familiar from visits to New Jersey (OK, not exactly a representation of the whole of the USA) and from movies.
Another similarity with America is that owing to the vastness of the country, I suppose, the car is king. I strongly resisted the idea of having two cars in Bristol and I still think I was right. But in Bristol you could walk or take the bus pretty much anywhere you wanted to go, and taxis, buses and trains were only a short distance away. Korora was ‘sold’ to us partly on the basis that we would be within only a few minutes’ distance of everything we needed – and we are, but we didn’t appreciate that the timings were given based on driving somewhere. You’d have to walk a long way to find a local shop, the local beach or any entertainment. Ella’s school is probably a kilometre and a half away from our front door and I imagine we will be unusual in walking her to school rather than driving. But this isn’t unusual: you’d have to be living in the central shopping zone to be near enough to the amenities to be able to walk there!
That is a long way of saying that much of the ‘fabric’ of Coffs Harbour as a large town, a local hub, an industrial centre of the Mid-North Coast of New South Wales is comprised of long strips of mixed businesses, houses, petrol stations and shopping malls with tons of advertising, and lots and lots of cars… and to this extent it is probably little different to any other sizeable settlement in this country. What marks it out as a tourist centre is the large number of motels, hotels and resorts sign-posted along the Pacific Highway. And what brings the tourists – and makes it a place worth coming to – is the breathtaking coastline and the hinterland.
Coffs Harbour is situated half-way between Sydney and Brisbane (roughly speaking), at the only point in the Great Dividing Range where the mountains tumble down into the sea. We’ve yet to discover what the humidity is like in summer, but the temperatures aren’t supposed to creep above 30º C between November and February – I’ll tell you what that feels like in due course. So far it’s been extremely pleasant, due in part to the microclimate facilitated by the local geography. We’re not talking gentle rolling hills here – we’re talking mad up-wellings of rock and no significant ‘coastal plain’ at all, perhaps because Coffs Harbour isn’t at the mouth of a river so there has been no historical estuary or riverine flood plain to flatten out the hills towards the sea. There are no cliffs really, either. Instead the land rises out of the sea and rises backwards to meet the rest of the Great Dividing Range with its steep valleys and elevated grazing country.
This has amusing consequences in terms of land for sale. You see pictures everywhere of parcels of land for sale, and of course we’re interested in buying a piece of land and building a house on it eventually. We have a fantasy of a rural idyll with a few chickens, perhaps a horse, some sheep, a half-dozen cows… Michael going back to his farming roots while I tend the orchard and the vegetable patch in between producing artistic masterpieces. Sadly, though, it will be damned difficult to do any of this within sight of the sea! Yesterday we went for a drive up Bruxnor Road simply because it’s over the other side of the Pacific Highway from us, and we’d seen a particular advert for 10 acres of land and a house that was vaguely affordable. We weren’t looking to walk in and put down a deposit but we thought it would be an interesting exercise to take a look at the property, assuming we could find it by dint of looking out for estate agents’ ‘For Sale’ boards. And we did find a lot of ‘For Sale’ boards – situated on properties that can’t have had a gradient of less than 1:4 on any of them, and yet these are seen as prime building sites! What’s more, people here actually build on them! I’m not joking: we almost burnt out the clutch on our NEW car on arrival in Korora because the driveway is very steep. It must be 1:4 – it’s certainly as steep as my allotment in Bristol, for those who visited that. And here people build on steeper land! We’ve spotted several roads being built around here as a preparation for residential developments and honestly, our car wouldn’t get up them and I wouldn’t know how to drive up them, even engaging our Subaru’s low/high traction system. In fact, there’s one road that we spotted just off the highway, and we simply can’t fathom how you’d get a car up there at all – although presumably diggers haven’t had any problems… They are hardy souls, Australian developers (and house owners!), but I don’t think the average cow would fare very well in such circumstances.
Surfers, swimmers, whale-watchers, paddlers and fishermen, however, get a great deal. The geography has created a series of beautiful curved, sandy beaches with lots of room for everyone, and we plan to make the most of them even if we end up buying land up in the hills somewhere. Here you can find gentle valleys, fields of cows (it’s predominantly dairy farming here; it’s too far south for sugar cane and too humid for much arable farming) and horses, gracious homesteads and stretches of sub-tropical rainforest between larger expanses of eucalypt woodland. It’s beautiful – quieter, less brash, calmer than the coastal strip. There are some larger settlements such as Nana Glen (home of Russell Crowe – we met his father today!) and Bellingen, and you’re close enough to Coffs Harbour to go and do the shopping.
posted by Sara Bowen at 7:26 am
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