Coolangatta - Culture and History

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This was published 15 years ago

Coolangatta - Culture and History

While it is true that Captain James Cook sailed up the Gold Coast in 1770 there are few points where he felt compelled to give the coastline a name. One of the places recorded by Cook is Point Danger which was aptly named and later became the site of a lighthouse - now a memorial to Cook. It lays claim to being the first lighthouse in the world to experiment with laser technology but the experiment was unsuccessful and it returned to the more conventional mirrors, magnifying glass and powerful electric lamps.

The area was later explored by John Oxley who discovered and named the Tweed River in 1823. The town was actually named after a ship , the Coolangatta, which was wrecked on the coast in the 1840s. It is said that the word was an Anglicised Aboriginal word meaning 'beautiful place'.

By the 1880s the beauty of the area had been recognised and people started moving into holiday cottages. Some, of course, decided to stay. The arrival of the railway in 1903 gave the settlement a boost but it was really postwar mobility and the desire of people from New South Wales and Victoria to head to the sun that made Coolangatta a popular resort. It can claim to be one of the first resorts on the Gold Coast and consequently its age shows in some of the buildings and amenities. Unlike Surfers Paradise (which also predates the postwar boom) it has not been radically modernised. It is, therefore, still a resort which is orientated towards family holidays rather than the gaudy 'sophistication' of the destinations further north.


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