Before the Gold Coast was all balconies and glass towers, it was something quieter: a humid stretch of bush and shoreline, its soft-edged contours barely marked on colonial maps. For decades, it escaped the compulsive rendering that gripped more populous regions of Australia—Sydney’s sandstone coves or Melbourne’s riverine fringe. The southern coast of Queensland, distant from administrative centers and lacking a port of scale, was not so much ignored as left to breathe. And yet, artists did eventually come—not all at once, but tentatively, sketchbooks in hand. Their arrival came not in waves, but in scattered footsteps.

The first to draw the Gold Coast did not come seeking art. They came with compasses and chains, in the service of colonial measurement. Among them was Robert Dixon, a former naval officer turned surveyor, who in the early 1840s traversed the hinterland under direction of the New South Wales Surveyor General. His task was to document and divide the land, but what remains are a series of delicate, penciled coastlines and streambeds—cartography that verges on drawing. Dixon’s sketches, preserved in the Queensland State Archives, show an embryonic Gold Coast: a coast unshaped by settlement, a place where visual documentation was still technical rather than expressive.

The sketchbook as instrument, not indulgence

This early visual mapping was pragmatic. Trees were not scenery but obstacles; rivers not poetry but problems. Yet even in these utilitarian records, there is an inadvertent aesthetic. The linework is spare but rhythmic, revealing a land neither dramatic nor barren—merely ungrasped. What’s missing is telling: there are no boats, no cottages, no signs of leisure. The coast was uncommodified, and therefore rarely depicted beyond the bounds of surveying.

The mid-19th century saw the beginnings of artistic depiction in the broader region, though rarely focused on the Gold Coast itself. Conrad Martens, the English-born painter who had voyaged with Darwin, brought his steady hand to the shores of New South Wales in the 1850s. While his work stayed largely to Sydney and surrounds, it established a formal approach to coastal depiction: fine watercolours with gentle tonal gradients, produced for collectors with refined tastes and colonial pride. Martens never painted the Gold Coast directly, but his influence lingered, setting a model for how Australia’s edges could be seen—not wild, but civilized, orderly, framed.

Artists who came north tended to stop short of the coast. The Brisbane River valley and Moreton Bay offered better light, easier access, and, crucially, a growing audience. The Gold Coast—still known then as the South Coast—remained peripheral.

Southport and the slow dawn of visibility

Only with the completion of the South Coast railway extension to Southport in 1889 did the area begin to attract broader attention. The rail line connected the sleepy coastal strip to Brisbane, opening it to day-trippers and amateur sketchers. Southport, still genteel and sparsely developed, became a retreat for Brisbane’s more refined classes. It was here that the visual language of the Gold Coast began to coalesce—not yet high-rise, not yet crowded, but depicted now with a touch of leisure in mind.

The art that emerged in this transitional period was often private. Painted postcards, family albums, and watercolour studies passed from hand to hand, rarely entering public galleries or exhibitions. These small works—a fig tree sketched by a visitor in Coolangatta, a watercolour of the Nerang River at dusk—were not made for the market. They were mementos. Their purpose was not prestige but recollection.

At the turn of the 20th century, formal artists still overlooked the region. Queensland’s artistic attention gravitated toward pastoral scenes inland or political imagery in Brisbane. Coastal landscapes were seen as pleasant but unchallenging—aesthetic dead ends.

Bustard’s Burleigh and the first real image

One painter who disrupted that impression was William Bustard, a Welsh-born artist who arrived in Queensland in the 1920s and became closely associated with its light and flora. In the mid-1930s, he painted “View from Burleigh Heads,” a serene oil landscape looking inland from the coast. The brushwork was restrained, the colours warm and dry, the scene almost empty. But what made the painting notable was not its technical ambition—it was the act of selection. In choosing the coast as a subject of serious treatment, Bustard acknowledged something that had gone largely unspoken: that the Gold Coast could carry visual weight. His painting hung in the Queensland Art Gallery, quietly repositioning the coast not just as a place to be visited, but as a place worth seeing.

Bustard’s work, though traditional in form, offered an early suggestion that the Gold Coast was not merely decorative. The hinterland behind the surf, with its low hills and misted canopy, held tonal complexities beyond beach cliché. In retrospect, “View from Burleigh Heads” feels less like a conclusion and more like a beginning—an anchor point for what the coast could become in paint.

Still too quiet for spectacle

Despite this, there remained a gap. Until well into the 1950s, the Gold Coast was visually underrepresented in Australian art. Its distance from major institutions, its lack of art schools, and its association with holidaymaking rather than habitation all contributed to its marginal status. Art was still something brought in—landscapes painted elsewhere, framed in Brisbane, sold from Sydney. There was not yet a local school, nor even much of a local market.

But in that silence, something began to accumulate. By mid-century, enough sketches, watercolours, and travel works had been made to suggest a latent archive. A coast quietly recorded, line by line. An accumulation of sight without spectacle.

This slow accretion of visual memory would prove significant when the boom came. Once the skyscrapers rose, artists—both local and visiting—would begin to ask what had been lost, what had come before, what had been ignored. And they would find, in the sketchbooks and small oils of the early coastal recorders, a kind of ghost image. Not glamorous. Not iconic. But real.

Chapter 2: Postcards and Promises – Tourist Imagery in the Early 20th Century

The Gold Coast becomes a picture before it becomes a city

Before the Gold Coast became Australia’s glittering, high-rise coastline, it existed in the national imagination as a paper promise: a collection of postcards, pamphlets, and carefully framed photographs that made a case for a lifestyle not yet fully available. In the early 20th century, the southern Queensland coast was marketed not for what it had become, but for what it might be—a place of rest, sunshine, and simple escape. The visual culture of this period reveals a region in the process of being invented, one printed lithograph at a time.

Tourist imagery came early to the South Coast, long before the term “Gold Coast” entered popular use. By the 1900s, Brisbane’s more affluent residents had begun retreating seasonally to seaside spots like Southport and Coolangatta, drawn by the promise of sea air and therapeutic quiet. But what made these destinations real for a broader audience were not the towns themselves—they were still little more than clusters of buildings—but the images circulated in print.

Postcards as place-makers

Among the most potent forms of early coastal imagery were postcards. Between 1900 and the early 1930s, publishers in Brisbane and Sydney began producing hand-tinted cards showing Southport’s jetty, Coolangatta’s beach, and the occasional lone swimmer under a vast sky. These cards were small, affordable, and everywhere—purchased by visitors, mailed to friends, pinned above mantels in cities far away. They didn’t just depict the South Coast; they defined it. In image after image, the land was shown as peaceful, sun-washed, and lightly populated. No industry, no tension, no threat—just sea, trees, and leisure.

A typical example, preserved in the National Library of Australia’s Trove collection, shows the Southport Jetty around 1920. A narrow timber walkway extends toward an empty sea, with a few low structures nestled in the background. There’s no one in the image. Yet its emptiness is its sales pitch: space, calm, and the fantasy of personal coastal possession. For city-dwellers living in tighter, faster, dirtier environments, these images offered something deeply seductive—a suggestion that life could slow down, could spread out.

These postcards were not art in the traditional sense, but their impact was greater than many paintings of the era. They shaped perception. They created a visual shorthand for what the coast was supposed to mean, and in doing so, they prefigured the built environment that would eventually arrive. Architecture would come later to fulfil the vision. First came the vision itself.

Brochures, bathing, and the construction of coastal leisure

By the 1920s, promotional materials had become more ambitious. Local councils, business syndicates, and even railway companies began producing brochures that depicted the coast not just as a retreat, but as an emerging resort culture. One 1925 South Coast promotional pamphlet, held in the Queensland State Archives, features stylised illustrations of women in modest bathing costumes, parasols on sand, and family scenes shaded under pandanus trees. The images were generic, but that was the point. The promise was not authenticity—it was reliability.

This was also the era when bathing itself became a spectacle. The image of the beachgoer—sunlit, cheerful, and decorously fashionable—was used not only to suggest fun, but to sell land. Photography played a critical role. Studio photographers from Brisbane would travel down the coast during holiday seasons, producing gelatin silver prints of sunbathers, beachfront picnics, and regatta events. These images appeared in newspapers and promotional calendars, reinforcing the coast as a “natural” site of leisure, despite the fact that so much of it was under development or remained inaccessible.

The act of picturing was part of the act of building. In many cases, these images were taken before the hotels they advertised were finished, before the roads were sealed, before regular services were in place. The future was being sold in fragments: one view of a bright beach, one sketched pier, one optimistic caption.

Infrastructure and image: the Jubilee Bridge as icon

Infrastructure projects often provided the occasion for heightened visual production. The opening of the Jubilee Bridge at Southport in 1925, for example, was more than a civic engineering milestone—it was a photo opportunity. Built to connect Southport to Main Beach across the Nerang River, the bridge physically enabled easier tourist access and symbolically marked the coast’s modern emergence. Contemporary press photographs show crowds in dress whites, banners fluttering, and early automobiles in procession. Though the bridge itself was unadorned, its documentation was ornate—proof of modernity, accessibility, and progress.

What mattered was not just the bridge, but how it looked in the newspaper. A local photograph became a statewide image, and the coast became not just a destination but a claim—a place the modern Queenslander could proudly visit, describe, and perhaps one day inhabit. This convergence of image and infrastructure would become a defining pattern for the Gold Coast: every road, tower, or swimming enclosure became instantly photogenic, as though to justify itself.

What the pictures leave out

And yet, for all this visual enthusiasm, much was omitted. The hinterland rarely appeared, except as a distant blur behind the beach. The weatherboard shacks and raw construction sites that dotted the coast were seldom pictured. Even the sand, so central to the Gold Coast mythos, often appeared suspiciously smooth and golden—retouched to fit the ideal. These images were carefully curated, and their omissions were as foundational as their inclusions.

There’s also a noticeable absence of individual artistic voice. The early 20th-century Gold Coast was imaged collectively, industrially. Unlike in Sydney or Melbourne, where painters could claim unique perspectives on the cityscape, the Gold Coast offered too little critical mass to support such voices. No single artist dominated its depiction. Instead, the coast was filtered through anonymous lenses, shaped by printers and advertisers more than painters or poets.

But these limitations were also the strength of the medium. The Gold Coast became, in effect, Australia’s first truly mass-mediated landscape. Long before the hotels and high-rises, it existed in circulation—in the post, on shop racks, in railway posters. It was not yet a city, but it was already a brand.

A mirage that became material

Looking back, the tourist imagery of the early 20th century now seems uncanny in its accuracy—not to the coast as it was then, but to what it would become. The postcards, brochures, and promotional photographs of the 1900s–1930s depicted a fantasy of ease, sun, and constant access to pleasure. That fantasy drove policy, investment, and development decisions for decades. In time, the buildings would rise, the highways would sprawl, and the people would come. But the image came first. The fantasy arrived on paper, long before it arrived in person.

Chapter 3: From Hobbyists to Painters – The First Local Art Circles

When artists came quietly, with folding chairs and tin palettes

Long before the Gold Coast had a gallery of record or an art market of any size, it had something simpler and more elemental: a handful of painters setting up easels in front yards, beaches, and church halls. These early art circles—formally organised or quietly informal—were not connected by ambition so much as by proximity. They belonged to a region still developing its civic identity, where painting was more a social event than a commercial venture, and where subject matter came directly from what could be seen outside the window.

The foundations were modest. In 1934, a group of amateur painters and Sunday sketchers established the Gold Coast Art Society, marking the first organised attempt to give form and structure to the region’s visual interests. Though lacking permanent exhibition space or institutional support, the Society provided something that had been missing: continuity. It hosted group shows, offered informal instruction, and gave local artists the chance to see their work in public settings—often in borrowed halls or church foyers. The painters themselves were rarely full-time professionals. They were teachers, shopkeepers, retirees. But they painted often and seriously.

Painting the coast before it became cliché

What they painted was rarely abstract and never ironic. The early works emerging from these circles were small-format seascapes, bright watercolours of creeks and cliffs, and traditional oils of pandanus groves or eucalyptus shade. These were not conceptual experiments; they were composed with care, often from life, and always rooted in the local.

One example survives in a small oil attributed to Dorothy Coleman, active in the 1940s and known for her depictions of Main Beach and the Nerang River. Her palette is restrained—muted greens, powder blue sky, patches of dry ochre grass—but there’s a sense of precision, of knowing the place by repetition rather than novelty. Her works, now rarely seen outside of regional auctions, embody the tone of the period: attentive, unassuming, and bound to the land not by ideology but by habit.

Painters like E.C. “Ted” O’Neill followed a similar path. Based in the Currumbin area, O’Neill was a carpenter by trade and a painter by persistence. He produced dozens of canvases between the 1930s and 1950s, many of them sold informally or traded within the community. His compositions often featured low, sweeping views of the surf framed by rocky outcrops, with minimal figures and no commercial signage—a coastal ideal that was already beginning to disappear in reality, but remained intact in his brushwork.

Church halls and coastal canvases: exhibition as community ritual

The exhibition spaces were rudimentary. Records from the Gold Coast Art Society show shows held in school auditoriums, rented storefronts, and civic buildings. Lighting was inconsistent. Hanging systems were makeshift. Yet the events drew attention. In the absence of theatres or concert venues, an art exhibition was a social occasion—a place where neighbours gathered, commented, and bought modest works for modest prices.

Catalogues from these shows, now stored in the State Library of Queensland, list dozens of works with titles like “Afternoon at Tugun,” “Storm Light Over Coolangatta,” or “Jacaranda by the Creek.” There was little stylistic experimentation, but much technical discipline. The painters may have lacked formal training, but they rarely lacked eye. And in a region where photography had dominated the visual imagination for decades, painting offered something different: interpretation.

In many cases, these early exhibitions functioned as civic gestures. Local councils occasionally sponsored prizes; small businesses provided refreshments or framing discounts. There was a sense that painting the landscape was a way of belonging to it—a form of participation in the region’s slow evolution from getaway to home.

Plein air in paradise, before the developers came

Photographs from the 1940s and 1950s, preserved in the Gold Coast City Libraries’ historical collections, show informal artist gatherings in Burleigh Heads, Currumbin Hill, and Tallebudgera Creek. Painters in wide-brim hats sit on stools in the grass, their small canvases balanced on portable easels. A few are women, some quite elderly. Their attention is intense. There’s very little chatter. One image shows three artists painting the same bend in the river from slightly different angles, each composition a quiet argument about light.

What these gatherings lacked in glamour they made up for in commitment. The painters came regularly, usually in the early morning to avoid wind and glare, and often returned to the same spot for multiple sessions. There were no critics, no sales agents, no galleries promising exposure. There was only the pleasure—and discipline—of looking carefully and rendering what was there.

It was an art culture defined by constancy rather than innovation. While abstraction was beginning to transform the urban art scenes in Sydney and Melbourne, the Gold Coast held fast to figuration. Not from conservatism, necessarily, but from instinct. For painters grounded in the visual rhythms of sea and bush, the idea of painting something other than what was visible seemed unnecessary, even artificial.

A slow shift from hobby to practice

By the late 1950s, some members of these circles began to seek more formal recognition. A few pursued training at Brisbane art schools or exhibited in state competitions. Others began to sell their work in small commercial spaces that opened seasonally during the summer influx. But even as painting became a little more professionalised, the core ethos remained unchanged: local landscape, done locally, with quiet devotion.

The work may have lacked the critical acclaim of the Sydney avant-garde or the nationalist framing of the Heidelberg School, but it achieved something those movements rarely did—it remained embedded. These were not images exported for acclaim or politics. They were images made where they were seen, by people who would pass the place again the next day.

And in this, the early painters of the Gold Coast did something important: they created a visual continuity that bridged the pre-tourist past and the fast-changing future. Their small paintings—many now faded or tucked away in private homes—are among the few remaining records of the coast before it was remade in glass and steel.

Chapter 4: Building the Vertical – Architecture as Gold Coast Aesthetic

A coastline redrawn in concrete and glass

In the late 1950s, the Gold Coast stopped looking like a coastal town and started to resemble a dream of the future. It was a future cast in concrete, punched with windows, and stacked high above the sand. Nowhere else in Australia did verticality arrive so quickly or define a region so completely. The skyline that emerged—first tentatively, then aggressively—was more than a response to booming tourism or a scramble for real estate. It was a visual redefinition. The Gold Coast was no longer painted in eucalyptus greens and surf blues. It became a city of forms: geometric, repetitive, and emphatically modern.

The catalyst was a single building: Kinkabool.

Kinkabool and the beginning of height

Completed in 1960, Kinkabool stood just ten storeys high. Yet at the time, it towered above everything else in Surfers Paradise. Designed by Karl Langer—an Austrian-trained architect who brought European modernist principles to Queensland—the building was both unassuming and revolutionary. Its facade was plain. Its balconies shallow. Its overall shape a rectangular box set back from the street. But in its sheer vertical presence, Kinkabool changed the visual grammar of the coast. The horizon no longer stopped at the treetops. The beach now had a backdrop.

The Courier-Mail marked its opening with fascination and skepticism. Some questioned whether visitors would want to stay so far above the beach. Others marvelled at the elevator. But what mattered more than the building’s details was its implication: space could be reimagined upwards. And soon, it was.

The aesthetic of accumulation

What followed in the 1960s and early 1970s was a building frenzy unlike anything else in regional Australia. Tower after tower rose along the coastal strip, from Southport to Broadbeach, each slightly taller than the last. Paradise Towers, constructed a few years after Kinkabool, exemplified the new idiom: white facades, rhythmic balconies, minimal ornamentation. The style had no regional accent. It came from international hotel design, from Miami and Honolulu, filtered through Queensland sensibilities and local materials.

In one sense, this was architectural anonymity. Few of the towers from this period carried individual character. Yet collectively, they produced something striking: a distinct urban silhouette that hovered between optimism and overreach.

For artists and photographers, the skyline posed a new challenge. The natural horizontality of the Gold Coast—its beaches, dunes, and rivers—had been interrupted. The buildings did not blend. They loomed. Landscape painting, long dominated by bush and beach, now had to reckon with concrete. Some painters chose to exclude the towers entirely, as if in protest. Others embraced them as signs of progress.

A small number of photographs from this period—many taken for promotional rather than artistic purposes—document the coastline mid-transformation. Construction cranes tilt against a background of surf; half-finished towers stand beside vacant sand lots. These images, archived by local councils and state records, offer a candid view of a city in visual upheaval. The skyline had not yet resolved itself. It was still awkward, still tentative—but irreversible.

The modernist impulse and architectural ambition

Modernism had arrived late to Queensland. Brisbane’s architecture in the early 20th century was defined more by verandas than vision. But on the Gold Coast, modernism found unexpected opportunity. The city’s lack of established architectural heritage gave builders and developers freedom. There were no sandstone traditions to uphold, no long avenues of terraces to preserve. Everything was up for grabs.

The best of the early high-rises had a kind of purity. Influenced by Langer’s training, and by the broader currents of mid-century design, these buildings emphasized form over flourish. Stairwells were expressed externally. Shade was managed with deep balconies rather than tinted glass. The climate demanded ventilation and sun resistance, not showiness.

Some of these early towers, viewed today, feel modest by global standards. But they marked a turning point in Australian architectural psychology. The Gold Coast became a site of visual ambition—not always tasteful, but undeniably forward-leaning. It was no longer just a place to rest; it was a place to look at, and to look out from.

From subject to backdrop

For local painters, this new environment forced a reconsideration of subject matter. The coastline, once painted for its natural variation, had become more rigid. The built environment imposed lines and edges where previously there had been only gradients of sand and sky. Some artists responded with realism, documenting the transformation in neutral tones. Others turned abstract, using the repetitive forms of windows and balconies as compositional devices.

In several works from the 1970s—most of them in private collections or local art society records—towers appear not as architectural studies, but as framing devices. One painting from 1976, its title now lost but its image archived in a Gold Coast gallery, shows a view of the sea through a tight grid of balcony railings. The ocean is distant, but precisely visible through three horizontal gaps. The message is clear: the coast has not vanished, but it is now something glimpsed rather than occupied.

This reframing—literal and artistic—signalled a broader change. The Gold Coast was becoming a background. In advertisements, the skyline appeared behind cocktails or surfboards. In paintings, the buildings became compositional anchors. The landscape had not disappeared, but it had been subordinated to development.

The city as spectacle

By the late 1970s, the Gold Coast skyline had become its own attraction. Tourists didn’t just come for the beach—they came for the view from their room, for the mirrored glass and rooftop signage. Architects began designing buildings not just to house people, but to photograph well. The city had become aware of itself as image.

This reflexivity would define later decades. But already in this early period, the Gold Coast had created a new kind of Australian visual identity—one not based on heritage, federation, or pastoralism, but on height, sunshine, and engineered pleasure.

The buildings themselves rarely spoke. They had no narrative, no stone inscriptions, no carved allegory. But they said one thing clearly: this place is changing. And the people who painted it, photographed it, or simply stared at it from the beach had to decide what kind of image they were now part of.

Chapter 5: Painters by the Sea – Independent Studios in a Tourist Economy

The painter’s task in a place built for passing through

By the mid-20th century, the Gold Coast had become a place of arrivals. Tourists poured in from Brisbane and Sydney, drawn by the beach, the hotels, the shimmer of modernity. Developers arrived too, transforming sand and swamp into avenues and apartment blocks. But in the midst of this movement, a quieter presence settled along the edges: painters. Some came to escape the city, some to pursue light and solitude. Others had grown up with the coastline itself, watching it shift from tidal backwater to billboard paradise. What united them was not a shared style or ideology, but a shared problem—how to paint a place that seemed designed not for staying, but for selling.

Unlike larger art centres in Melbourne or Sydney, the Gold Coast did not offer an obvious path for serious artists. There were few galleries, no major art schools, and little critical infrastructure. Yet between the 1950s and 1970s, a number of independent painters found ways to work in and around the coast, developing studios in places like Currumbin, Broadbeach, and the hills beyond Burleigh. They lived alongside the tide of tourism but rarely rode it. Their concerns were more intimate: form, shadow, place, memory.

Rigby’s Currumbin and the long coastal view

One of the earliest and most enduring images from this era is John Rigby’s A Solitary Figure Walks Along Currumbin Beach, painted in the 1950s. It shows what its title describes: one figure, dwarfed by sky and dune, the waterline stretching diagonally into the distance. The work now resides in the HOTA City Collection, and it captures something rare—a coastal painting from the period that is neither nostalgic nor promotional.

Rigby, though more associated with Brisbane, painted the Gold Coast before its modern skyline. In his Currumbin piece, there is no signage, no built structure. The palette is subdued, almost chalky. The composition avoids the postcard cliché of blue skies and golden sand. It is a quiet work, nearly melancholic, and in that restraint, it resists the fantasy the region was fast becoming known for.

For painters like Rigby, the coast was not yet a brand. It was a subject.

Elisabeth Cummings and the painter’s return

Born in Brisbane in 1934, Elisabeth Cummings spent formative summers in Currumbin. Though she later became associated with the bush landscapes of New South Wales, Cummings never abandoned her early impressions of Queensland light and space. Her mature work—intensely layered, semi-abstract, emotionally charged—returns often to memory as subject matter. Her handling of form, often derived from fragmented interiors or imagined gardens, reflects a painter deeply influenced by coastal atmosphere.

Cummings’s connection to Currumbin is not literalist—she does not render the beach or the skyline—but her painting process echoes the way the Gold Coast once was: layered, intuitive, slowly accreted. In interviews, she has spoken of the ocean’s closeness, the shimmer of heat off water, the rhythmic call of the surf. These are sensory traces, and they remain in her brushwork even when the subject is inland.

In this way, her art does something unusual: it recalls the coast without illustrating it.

Living among the postcards: June Stephenson’s Broadbeach

Some artists chose to embed themselves directly in the tourist zone. June Ethel Stephenson, who moved to Broadbeach in the 1970s, lived and painted within a landscape already saturated with visual repetition. Motels, palm trees, road signs—these were no longer images to be discovered but motifs already consumed.

Stephenson’s work during this period balanced delicacy with resilience. Her botanical studies and shoreline watercolours, though modest in scale, contain an insistence on observation. They depict what was still there, often overlooked: native plants beside hotel fences, tide marks on uncrowded sands. There is a sense in her work that painting could still record something real, even as the wider image of the coast became increasingly detached from place.

Stephenson did not resist the tourist economy—she lived in it—but she refused to be absorbed by its style.

Julie Rrap and the outsider-insider paradox

Another figure shaped by the coast, though not defined by it, is Julie Rrap. Born in 1950 and raised on the Gold Coast, Rrap would go on to become one of Australia’s most prominent conceptual artists, known for her photographic and sculptural interventions into themes of body and image. Her later work is intellectually and stylistically removed from the painters discussed above. But her biography is telling.

Rrap grew up amid the Gold Coast’s rapid transformation, watching as its visual identity was built and sold. Though her mature work rarely references the region directly, its ironic awareness of image-making—of performance, construction, and display—owes something to having witnessed a place so thoroughly self-curated.

In a sense, Rrap embodies the next generation of artists shaped not by the coast’s natural forms but by its mediation. Her work asks: what happens when the background becomes the content?

Studios without street numbers

What distinguishes these mid-century painters is not shared method, but shared placement. Most worked in isolation or loose informal networks. Few had dedicated gallery representation, and fewer still were documented in state-level exhibitions at the time. Their studios were often extensions of homes—converted sunrooms, garage annexes, shaded verandas. Paintings were dried on back fences. Framing was done by hand or not at all.

This physical embeddedness gave their work a texture absent from more cosmopolitan scenes. The light was specific. The materials were adapted to heat and humidity. And the subject matter—whether figurative or abstract—emerged from lived experience rather than theoretical position. These were not artists parachuting in for inspiration. They were locals, or long-term settlers, responding to what changed around them.

Many sold their work directly: to neighbours, through craft fairs, or in summer gallery spaces that opened briefly in rented storefronts. Prices were low, prestige minimal. But the paintings stayed in the region. Today, many remain in private hands—quiet domestic fixtures, rarely catalogued but stubbornly present.

Art made in the shadow of image-making

By the late 1970s, the Gold Coast had become not only a tourist destination but an image factory. Its aesthetic had gone from accidental to institutional: signage, brochures, and beachfront branding all pushed a singular visual story. For painters working outside that logic, the task became more complicated. To depict the coast sincerely was to risk cliché. To ignore it was to miss the point.

The solution, for many, was to narrow their focus—to paint what remained in reach, what was still uncommodified. A shadowed corner of a garden. The moment before the sun flattens the landscape. The stillness of a tide pool ignored by swimmers.

These were not grand gestures, but they were acts of resistance, or at least persistence. In an environment increasingly shaped by surface and turnover, the local painter became a kind of archivist—not of history, but of attention.

Chapter 6: The Gallery Game – Commercial Spaces and Local Patrons

From cottage exhibitions to a city collection

As the Gold Coast’s population and tourist numbers surged through the 1960s and 1970s, so too did attempts to build a local market for visual art. Artists needed places to show and sell work; collectors needed venues to survey and acquire it; and the increasingly sophisticated tastes of residents and visitors began to exert pressure for dedicated exhibition spaces. Unlike large cultural capitals such as Sydney or Melbourne, the Gold Coast did not spring out of an entrenched gallery system. Instead, commercial and civic spaces grew up slowly, often improvisationally, responding to local momentum rather than steering it.

Several small, privately run galleries appeared in Surfers Paradise and neighbouring suburbs during the later decades of the 20th century, offering walls for local painters, photographers, and sculptors to exhibit their work alongside prints and decorative art. These spaces were rarely grand. Often they were shopfronts in tourism precincts, open during peak seasons when visitors wandered in off the streets, curious and inclined to browse. A directory of contemporary art galleries from today includes numerous such spaces that build on this tradition—21 Karen Contemporary Artspace in Burleigh Heads, Dust Temple Art Gallery in Currumbin, and others that reflect the Gold Coast’s ongoing gallery culture. Gold Coast Australia

Commercial galleries played at least two roles. One was representation: artists could show and sell their works, receive feedback, and build local reputations. The other was place‑making: even modest gallery signs and window displays signalled that this city respected and consumed art, not just sun and surfing gear. Unlike the concentrated gallery strips of larger cities, Gold Coast galleries were dispersed and often eclectic in programming, but they cumulatively created a sense that visual art belonged in the cityscape.

The Gold Coast Art Prize – a market and a mission

A critical milestone in this developing gallery ecosystem was the establishment of the Gold Coast Art Prize in 1968. Originally run by the local council, the annual prize was conceived not only as a competition but as a mechanism for acquisition and collection building. Works entered into the prize exhibitions were shown publicly, debated by juries, and often purchased for the emerging municipal collection. Over time the prize became a focal point for contemporary practice in the region, attracting painters and media artists from across Australia and giving local audiences regular reason to engage with new work. Wikipedia

The prize’s existence—long before the presence of a full‑blown public art museum—gave the Gold Coast a credible foothold in the national art conversation. Commercial galleries and local collectors used the event as a barometer of artistic trends. They observed what juries valued, what kinds of abstraction or landscape were rewarded, and which artists were gaining visibility. In that way the prize was part cultural ambition, part marketplace signaling.

Gold Coast City Gallery – civic patronage meets collecting

The desire for institutional support eventually led to an important development: the founding of what became the Gold Coast City Art Gallery in 1986. Originally part of the Gold Coast Arts Centre precinct, the gallery offered professional exhibition spaces—rooms with controlled lighting, white walls, and rotating programs that could host both local art and traveling exhibitions. For the first time, local collectors and visitors saw contemporary and historical works displayed in a dedicated public institution. HOTA+1

The gallery anchored what was later rebranded Home of the Arts (HOTA), a larger cultural precinct that includes theatre, cinema, and public programming. Over decades, the City Gallery’s exhibitions and acquisitions helped shape a City Collection of over 4,500 works, encompassing painting, photography, sculpture, and ceramics. These holdings reflect both regional concerns and broader national trends in Australian art. HOTA

Crucially, HOTA and its predecessor galleries showed that patronage needn’t come only from private buyers. Municipal decision‑making—funding exhibitions, maintaining a collection, and staging an annual art prize—made the Gold Coast more than a stopover for visiting collectors. It made the city a site where art could be commissioned, displayed, debated, and preserved.

Patrons and collectors: local engagement with art

Alongside public institutions, private patrons and collectors played an essential part in sustaining the Gold Coast’s gallery scene. Individuals and small collectives purchased works from gallery shows, contributed pieces to the city collection, and sponsored prizes or events. In some cases, prominent local business owners helped support exhibitions during peak tourist periods, providing financial underwriting that kept galleries open year‑round rather than only seasonally.

Collectors’ tastes shaped the market: landscapes that referenced the coast’s light and geography were particularly popular in earlier decades, while later trends saw abstraction and colour‑field painting enter local collections, encouraged in part by acquisitions from regional prize exhibitions. Some ceramic and craft works gained market traction too, especially as functional art and decorative objects found buyers among residents and holiday homeowners alike. HOTA

For younger or emerging artists, these sales offered not just income but validation. When a local collector paid for a painting of a less traditional subject—urban periphery, architectural skyline, or interior scene—that purchase signified that Gold Coast art could engage beyond the stereotypical beach view.

Institutional evolution and public visibility

Throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the gallery scene gradually matured. The Gold Coast City Art Gallery became known for its dynamic exhibition calendar, staged both within the city and as part of touring shows brought from national institutions. Its programming expanded beyond regional themes to include wider conversations in Australian art, sometimes situating local practice in dialogue with national developments.

By the early 2020s, after a major redevelopment and the opening of the new HOTA Gallery building, the city became home to one of Australia’s largest regional art museum facilities, with multiple floors of dedicated exhibition space and a visible presence on the cultural map. Wikipedia

A market still taking shape

Even as public institutions solidified their role, commercial galleries continued to provide essential space for experimentation and sale. They remain venues where local artists can take risks with new media, where collectors can discover work outside institutional norms, and where visual art interacts directly with daily life—often set against a backdrop of cafes, shops, and seaside promenades.

In this layered ecosystem—small galleries, civic collection spaces, annual prizes, and local patrons—the Gold Coast’s art market has evolved from a patchwork of pop‑up exhibits into a recognized, if still distinctive, cultural economy. The challenge has been balancing tourism, commerce, and serious artistic engagement; the reward has been a community that can both celebrate its creative heritage and imagine new directions for its visual culture.

Chapter 6: The Gallery Game – Commercial Spaces and Local Patrons

From cottage exhibitions to a city collection

As the Gold Coast’s population and tourist numbers surged through the 1960s and 1970s, so too did attempts to build a local market for visual art. Artists needed places to show and sell work; collectors needed venues to survey and acquire it; and the increasingly sophisticated tastes of residents and visitors began to exert pressure for dedicated exhibition spaces. Unlike large cultural capitals such as Sydney or Melbourne, the Gold Coast did not spring out of an entrenched gallery system. Instead, commercial and civic spaces grew up slowly, often improvisationally, responding to local momentum rather than steering it.

Several small, privately run galleries appeared in Surfers Paradise and neighbouring suburbs during the later decades of the 20th century, offering walls for local painters, photographers, and sculptors to exhibit their work alongside prints and decorative art. These spaces were rarely grand. Often they were shopfronts in tourism precincts, open during peak seasons when visitors wandered in off the streets, curious and inclined to browse. They played at least two roles. One was representation: artists could show and sell their works, receive feedback, and build local reputations. The other was place-making: even modest gallery signs and window displays signalled that this city respected and consumed art, not just sun and surfing gear.

Unlike the concentrated gallery strips of larger cities, Gold Coast galleries were dispersed and often eclectic in programming, but they cumulatively created a sense that visual art belonged in the cityscape.

The Gold Coast Art Prize – a market and a mission

A critical milestone in this developing gallery ecosystem was the establishment of the Gold Coast Art Prize in 1968. Originally run by the local council, the annual prize was conceived not only as a competition but as a mechanism for acquisition and collection building. Works entered into the prize exhibitions were shown publicly, debated by juries, and often purchased for the emerging municipal collection. Over time the prize became a focal point for contemporary practice in the region, attracting painters and media artists from across Australia and giving local audiences regular reason to engage with new work.

The prize’s existence—long before the presence of a full-blown public art museum—gave the Gold Coast a credible foothold in the national art conversation. Commercial galleries and local collectors used the event as a barometer of artistic trends. They observed what juries valued, what kinds of abstraction or landscape were rewarded, and which artists were gaining visibility. In that way the prize was part cultural ambition, part marketplace signaling.

Gold Coast City Gallery – civic patronage meets collecting

The desire for institutional support eventually led to an important development: the founding of what became the Gold Coast City Art Gallery in 1986. Originally part of the Gold Coast Arts Centre precinct, the gallery offered professional exhibition spaces—rooms with controlled lighting, white walls, and rotating programs that could host both local art and traveling exhibitions. For the first time, local collectors and visitors saw contemporary and historical works displayed in a dedicated public institution.

The gallery anchored what was later rebranded as HOTA (Home of the Arts), a larger cultural precinct that includes theatre, cinema, and public programming. Over decades, the City Gallery’s exhibitions and acquisitions helped shape a City Collection of thousands of works, encompassing painting, photography, sculpture, and ceramics. These holdings reflect both regional concerns and broader national trends in Australian art.

Crucially, HOTA and its predecessor galleries showed that patronage needn’t come only from private buyers. Municipal decision-making—funding exhibitions, maintaining a collection, and staging an annual art prize—made the Gold Coast more than a stopover for visiting collectors. It made the city a site where art could be commissioned, displayed, debated, and preserved.

Patrons and collectors: local engagement with art

Alongside public institutions, private patrons and collectors played an essential part in sustaining the Gold Coast’s gallery scene. Individuals and small collectives purchased works from gallery shows, contributed pieces to the city collection, and sponsored prizes or events. In some cases, prominent local business owners helped support exhibitions during peak tourist periods, providing financial underwriting that kept galleries open year-round rather than only seasonally.

Collectors’ tastes shaped the market: landscapes that referenced the coast’s light and geography were particularly popular in earlier decades, while later trends saw abstraction and colour-field painting enter local collections, encouraged in part by acquisitions from regional prize exhibitions. Some ceramic and craft works gained market traction too, especially as functional art and decorative objects found buyers among residents and holiday homeowners alike.

For younger or emerging artists, these sales offered not just income but validation. When a local collector paid for a painting of a less traditional subject—urban periphery, architectural skyline, or interior scene—that purchase signified that Gold Coast art could engage beyond the stereotypical beach view.

Institutional evolution and public visibility

Throughout the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the gallery scene gradually matured. The Gold Coast City Art Gallery became known for its dynamic exhibition calendar, staged both within the city and as part of touring shows brought from national institutions. Its programming expanded beyond regional themes to include wider conversations in Australian art, sometimes situating local practice in dialogue with national developments.

By the early 2020s, after a major redevelopment and the opening of the new HOTA Gallery building, the city became home to one of Australia’s largest regional art museum facilities, with multiple floors of dedicated exhibition space and a visible presence on the cultural map.

A market still taking shape

Even as public institutions solidified their role, commercial galleries continued to provide essential space for experimentation and sale. They remain venues where local artists can take risks with new media, where collectors can discover work outside institutional norms, and where visual art interacts directly with daily life—often set against a backdrop of cafes, shops, and seaside promenades.

In this layered ecosystem—small galleries, civic collection spaces, annual prizes, and local patrons—the Gold Coast’s art market has evolved from a patchwork of pop-up exhibits into a recognized, if still distinctive, cultural economy. The challenge has been balancing tourism, commerce, and serious artistic engagement; the reward has been a community that can both celebrate its creative heritage and imagine new directions for its visual culture.

Chapter 7: Murals and Monuments – Public Art in a Civic Context

When decoration became declaration

Public art on the Gold Coast didn’t begin as a cultural policy. It began as embellishment—decoration for civic walls, plazas, and beachfront infrastructure that emerged during the city’s early stages of self-definition. In the 1960s and 70s, as developers reshaped the coastline and tourists flooded in, local councils and community groups began commissioning murals, mosaics, fountains, and sculptures to signal not just prosperity, but permanence. These artworks weren’t housed in galleries or protected by glass—they were walked past, leaned on, splashed through, and sometimes painted over.

Despite this vulnerability, or perhaps because of it, public art during this period had a distinct visual and civic identity. It was part signage, part storytelling, part aspiration. At its best, it connected the evolving built environment to something rooted—a sense of place that development alone couldn’t provide.

The mosaic era: tiled identity on concrete walls

One of the earliest and most enduring examples of Gold Coast civic art is Pandanus Palms, a mosaic mural created in 1968 by Queensland artist Geoff Holloway. Installed on the side of a municipal building in Surfers Paradise, the work combined abstracted botanical motifs with naturalistic colours—ochres, greens, soft turquoise—rendered in small ceramic tiles. The mosaic format, suited to Australia’s heat and humidity, echoed postwar European public art traditions, but its content was distinctly local.

Mosaics became a quiet trend. They appeared on school façades, surf club entrances, and council buildings, usually celebrating local flora or stylised marine life. The decision to use tiles wasn’t purely aesthetic—it was practical. Durable and weather-resistant, mosaics suited a subtropical climate where painted murals often faded or peeled within a few seasons.

These works rarely bore the names of their creators. Some were installed by known ceramicists; others emerged from community workshops or school projects. But collectively, they built a visual language of coastal ornamentation that resisted commercialisation—not advertising a product, but marking a civic presence.

Sculpting space: Keith Lane’s fountains and civic landmarks

Where mosaics decorated walls, sculpture began to claim public ground. During the 1970s, artist Keith Lane produced a series of abstract sculptural fountains installed in open-air plazas, civic squares, and beachfront parks. Constructed from concrete and steel, often shaped in looping or folded forms, Lane’s work reflected mid-century modernist principles: clarity of form, integration with environment, and tactile engagement.

Fountains had symbolic as well as functional value. On a coastline defined by heat and motion, they introduced a sense of cool permanence. Children played in them, tourists photographed them, and local councils highlighted them in promotional material. Though Lane’s name was not widely known beyond regional art circles, his work left a visual imprint—quietly asserting that sculpture belonged in public, not just in museums.

Over time, some of these fountains were removed or repurposed during redevelopment. Others remain in altered surroundings, their settings no longer matching the civic optimism that once inspired them. Yet their forms continue to interrupt space in ways that signage and landscaping do not. They demand to be looked at.

Murals of memory: the painted walls of Southport and Coolangatta

Murals emerged in the 1970s and 80s as both beautification and storytelling. In Coolangatta, a surf club wall bore a scene of life-saving competitions, depicted in semi-realist style. In Southport, a library mural presented historical figures beside a stylised rendering of the Broadwater. These images were not high modernism, nor were they outsider art. They occupied a middle ground—public narrative illustration, created to anchor civic identity.

Most were council-commissioned or community-led, involving local artists and volunteers. Materials were often donated, and painting was done after hours or over weekends. These murals had the atmosphere of communal effort: visible brushwork, uneven edges, earnest subject matter.

What unified them was their function. They turned walls into sites of memory—publicly accessible and symbolically charged. Some referenced settler history, some natural heritage, others more contemporary life: surfers, boats, festivals, and weather. Unlike gallery works, they did not invite critique. They aimed to reassure, to belong.

And yet, as the city modernised, many were painted over or forgotten. For every preserved mural, several have vanished beneath renovations, development facades, or neglect. Their disappearance reflects a broader challenge: how to preserve visual culture that was never built to last.

Nerang Street Mall and the promise of integration

In 1986, the Nerang Street Mall redevelopment in Southport marked a turning point. This was no longer ad hoc embellishment—it was urban planning with art embedded. Sculptures were commissioned as part of the design process, integrated into paving, fountains, and gathering spaces. Decorative ironwork, patterned tile inlays, and functional artworks (such as benches shaped like waves or sails) turned the street into a curated pedestrian space.

Here, public art was not merely applied to surfaces—it was incorporated into the civic blueprint. For the first time, there was a sense that the city might have a public aesthetic philosophy, however modest.

This shift foreshadowed later developments in municipal art policy, but even at this stage, the integration of sculpture, mural, and design into the streetscape signalled that Gold Coast civic leaders were beginning to see art not as an add-on, but as part of urban identity.

Between permanence and neglect

The fate of these early public artworks varies. Some have been restored or relocated; others survive only in photographs. Their physical fragility is matched by a kind of institutional amnesia—many were never formally catalogued, and their creators go unmentioned in city archives.

And yet they endure in memory. Residents recall the mosaics of their childhoods, the fountains they splashed in, the murals that served as backdrops to civic events. In a city so often associated with transience, these artworks offered continuity.

They were modest in ambition, democratic in access, and deeply tied to the surfaces of daily life. In them, the Gold Coast briefly revealed its intention to be more than a playground—to also be a place with texture, authorship, and civic imagination.

Chapter 8: Retreat to the Ranges – Artists in the Hinterland

When the painters turned their backs on the sea

By the 1970s, as Surfers Paradise stacked its skyline higher and the beachfronts became advertising backdrops, a different artistic impulse took root inland. Some painters and craftspeople began to turn away from the Gold Coast’s coastal glamour—not out of rejection, but out of necessity. They needed space, quiet, and a landscape not yet polished into marketable imagery. They found it in the hinterland: Mount Tamborine, Springbrook, and the winding escarpments of the McPherson Range.

These highlands, rising sharply behind the city’s shimmering facade, had long offered physical distance from the beach. Now they began to offer visual and creative distance too. Artists set up studios in old farmhouses, built kilns from brick and earth, carved their workbenches into the contours of the slope. What they produced there was slower, often more material-bound—less concerned with iconography, more with process. And in doing so, they helped form the region’s first genuinely local art movement, one tied not to spectacle but to place.

Mount Tamborine: refuge, studio, and subject

Mount Tamborine was the logical centre of this retreat. Accessible but elevated, its cooler climate, volcanic soils, and dense canopy made it attractive to artists seeking both isolation and inspiration. In the 1950s and 60s, a small number of painters began moving to the mountain full-time. Some were weekenders from Brisbane; others came from further afield, drawn by word of mouth and the promise of uninterrupted working time.

These early studios were modest. Often self-built, they doubled as homes and workshops. Water came from tanks, light from the broad north-facing windows favoured by painters. The rainforest filtered the sun into dapples. Birdsong was constant. What they painted were not grand narratives or coastal vistas. Instead:

• Close studies of strangler figs and vine thickets
• Distant escarpments under moody cloud
• Domestic gardens overtaken by subtropical growth

This was a landscape less “painted” than observed into being. The forms were complex. The colour palette was earthier than the beachside chroma. As one exhibition flyer from a 1978 group show on Tamborine put it: “These are not pictures of what is out there—they are the way it feels to live here.”

Springbrook and the slow detail of rain

Further south and higher still, Springbrook Plateau attracted artists with a taste for fog and water. Less developed than Tamborine, it offered fewer amenities and more mystery: wet tracks, stone-lined creeks, sudden drops into forested gorges. The artists who worked here tended toward sketching and plein air studies, walking long distances with light boards and graphite pencils to capture the intricacies of lichen-covered trunks, veiled waterfalls, and shifting cloud lines.

A small number of these sketchbooks survive in regional archives and private collections, often unsigned. They show a commitment to intricate mark-making—the kind that comes from stillness rather than hurry. These were not performative works. They were records of attention.

What links the Springbrook sketches to broader Gold Coast art history is their contrast. At a time when the city below was accelerating toward its mirror-glass image, these artists were doing the opposite. They were slowing down, looking more closely, allowing the landscape to dictate terms.

Craft as philosophy: ceramics and woodwork in the ranges

While painters found the hinterland visually compelling, ceramicists and woodworkers found it materially essential. The clay in the ranges was workable. The forests provided both fuel and inspiration. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, a number of small ceramic studios opened around Canungra, Tamborine Mountain, and Beechmont. Some became formal businesses, selling mugs, tiles, and vessels to locals and tourists. Others remained informal, focused on experimentation with glaze chemistry and hand-thrown form.

In woodwork, the approach was similar. Salvaged rainforest timbers were used not for large-scale sculpture but for domestic objects: bowls, utensils, low stools, and turned forms. These items blurred the line between function and art. A hand-carved serving board might be as visually compelling as a painted canvas—and often, more widely used.

What united these practices was not medium, but philosophy. Artists in the ranges tended to work slowly, with hands-on techniques and natural materials. There was a strong undercurrent of self-reliance—build the studio, fire the kiln, plant the garden. This ethos stood in quiet opposition to the Gold Coast’s prevailing image economy. Where Surfers Paradise promised instant gratification, the hinterland demanded patience.

Exhibiting from the periphery

Though isolated, the hinterland artists did not remain unseen. Throughout the late 70s and into the 90s, community halls and repurposed churches hosted regular exhibitions. Flyers from these events—printed simply, sometimes mimeographed—list dozens of contributors showing oil paintings, handwoven cloth, raku-fired pottery, and ink drawings. These were not curated in the strict sense. They were gatherings, and they often drew large crowds from surrounding towns.

Some artists later moved toward more formal exhibition circuits. A few were taken into the City Gallery collection. But for many, recognition was less important than rhythm—the rhythm of studio work, seasonal light, and the turn from concept to object.

This created a kind of local ecosystem. A painter might trade a sketch for a handmade chair. A ceramicist might fire another’s sculpture in exchange for help stacking wood. The work was serious, but the culture was generous. Art here was not about breakthrough or provocation. It was about staying put and making things well.

The other face of the Gold Coast

The Gold Coast has long struggled with its image—a city known for surfaces, leisure, and rapid reinvention. The hinterland art movement presented a counter-image, rooted not in denial but in difference. These were artists who embraced slowness, complexity, and intimacy. They didn’t reject the coast. They simply didn’t need it.

Over time, some of their work entered collections. Others faded from view, their output scattered across homes, markets, and memory. Yet their presence remains critical to any serious history of Gold Coast art. They showed that art didn’t have to chase the skyline. It could thrive in the quiet.

And in doing so, they gave the region something rare: a visual tradition grounded in stillness and craft, rather than spectacle.

Chapter 9: Gold Coast City Art Gallery – Institution Building and Its Limits

The moment the coast got walls for its art

In 1986, the Gold Coast did something long overdue: it gave its art a home. The founding of the Gold Coast City Art Gallery marked a turning point in the region’s cultural history—not because it immediately changed the art being made, but because it changed the terms under which art could be shown, judged, and remembered. Until then, artists on the coast had worked in a fragmented system: pop-up exhibitions, church hall group shows, seasonal gallery storefronts. The City Gallery introduced permanence, professionalism, and the promise of an archive.

Located within the Gold Coast Arts Centre (now the Home of the Arts, or HOTA), the new gallery provided a controlled environment for both contemporary exhibitions and long-term collecting. It signalled a civic commitment not just to culture as entertainment, but to art as a record of regional life—visual, material, evolving.

A collection takes shape

One of the first tasks of the new gallery was to formalise and expand the City Collection. Although the Gold Coast Art Prize had been running since 1968, and works had been acquired sporadically by the council, there was no clear collecting strategy until the late 1980s. Now, with a dedicated team and storage facilities, the gallery began to actively build a coherent public collection.

The early acquisitions reflected both caution and ambition. Landscape painting remained prominent, especially works with a Queensland sensibility—coastal forms, rainforest shadows, dramatic skies. Abstract painting followed, particularly colour-field and geometric abstraction, which were gaining national momentum. Photography entered the collection, often with a documentary edge. Ceramic and sculptural works were added in response to the strong craft traditions of the hinterland and regional towns.

This was not a star-chasing collection. Instead, it developed around a consistent logic: to represent artistic activity within and connected to the region, while also aligning with broader developments in Australian art.

Over time, the collection grew into the thousands, encompassing paintings, works on paper, installations, photographs, and sculptural objects. It became a record not only of what artists made, but of what the city had chosen to preserve.

Exhibition as public encounter

The City Gallery did not function in isolation. From the outset, its curatorial program was designed to engage the public. Some shows highlighted works from the collection; others brought in touring exhibitions from state or national institutions. There were thematic surveys—on abstraction, regional photography, contemporary sculpture—as well as retrospectives of local artists who had worked outside the spotlight.

For many visitors, these exhibitions offered a first sustained encounter with serious visual art in a museum setting. School groups walked through them; tourists stumbled upon them; local artists studied them. The gallery became more than a room of objects. It became a civic habit.

At the same time, the annual Gold Coast Art Prize continued to provide a key exhibition moment. It served both as a snapshot of current practice and as a mechanism for new acquisitions. The prize gave the gallery rhythm—a yearly pulse around which the broader program could be built.

The challenge of definition

But with growth came friction. As the collection expanded, so too did questions about its identity. What exactly was a “Gold Coast” artist? Did the collection favour regional representation or national excellence? Should the gallery focus on celebrating the local, or strive to challenge it?

Critics sometimes accused the institution of being too conservative, especially in its early years. Safe landscapes dominated the walls. Experimentation was limited. Provocative or politically charged work appeared only sporadically. Others argued the opposite—that in its push toward professionalisation, the gallery had become too detached from the community it was meant to serve.

The truth was more complicated. The gallery was navigating a dual identity: regional in geography, but increasingly national in ambition. It had to balance professional standards with public access, acquisition goals with budget limitations, curatorial freedom with civic expectations.

In this, the City Gallery mirrored the city itself—trying to shed the image of being only for tourists, while not abandoning the people who built it.

A cultural institution within a city that changes too quickly

One of the unique challenges of building a public gallery on the Gold Coast is the city’s own instability. Unlike older urban centres with layered architectural and civic memory, the Gold Coast reinvents itself regularly. Towers rise and fall. Streets are renamed. Residents come and go. In this context, the City Gallery offered something rare: continuity.

Its exhibitions told stories that spanned decades. Its collection provided visual evidence that the region had been looked at, interpreted, and cared for over time. Even when individual shows sparked disagreement, the gallery’s existence argued for the value of cultural memory in a place defined by constant flux.

By the 2000s, the gallery had become a central node in the city’s public life. Its exhibitions appeared in tourism brochures. Artists sought to have their work shown there as a mark of seriousness. The City Collection was used in schools, referenced by scholars, and occasionally toured to other regional institutions.

Expansion, reinvention, and the rise of HOTA

Eventually, the institution outgrew its original premises. Plans were drawn for a major redevelopment, and in 2021, the new HOTA Gallery opened to the public. With multiple exhibition floors, expanded collection storage, and a striking architectural profile, the new building symbolised the city’s renewed commitment to culture at scale.

Yet even in its expanded form, the gallery inherited the same tensions: how to represent the region without being parochial, how to support new voices without abandoning continuity, how to collect with both taste and foresight.

What has changed is the visibility. The HOTA precinct is now one of the most prominent cultural destinations in Queensland. The art gallery stands not as a quiet annex, but as a defining structure. Art is no longer hidden. It’s central.

Limits and possibilities

And yet, the institution has its limits. No gallery can reflect a region in full. The Gold Coast remains fragmented—diverse in population, inconsistent in urban form, uneven in its embrace of the arts. For every celebrated artist in the collection, others remain outside it. For every successful exhibition, others fall flat.

But the gallery’s endurance matters. It offers a stable context for visual culture in a city that often struggles to take itself seriously. It holds works that record not just beauty, but complexity. And it gives artists—past, present, and emerging—a place where their work might be seen, judged, and remembered.

In that, it does something no billboard, postcard, or mural ever could. It insists that the Gold Coast is not just a place to look at. It is a place to see.

Chapter 10: Painting the Unseen – Interiors, Suburbs, and Shadows

Looking where the brochures didn’t

By the late 20th century, the Gold Coast’s visual identity had become both clear and constrained. The images that dominated public life—on postcards, posters, and gallery walls—celebrated the same motifs: beaches, waves, skyline silhouettes, and sunlit bodies in motion. It was an image economy built around pleasure, simplicity, and surface. But beneath that glittering façade was another world: the quiet suburbs, the dim rooms, the long corridors of shopping centres, the unused bus stops, the family-run motels in winter.

A few artists—working without fanfare, often without commercial success—began to turn their attention to these unseen corners. They painted the Gold Coast not as it wished to be seen, but as it was lived. Their subjects were interiors and peripheries: motel rooms with single beds and floral curtains, fibro houses under grey sky, empty carparks with cracked concrete and fading signage. These paintings weren’t negative. They weren’t even critical. They were observant. They recognised that the soul of a city is not only found in its skyline, but in the places it forgets to market.

Domestic scale and the power of small paintings

Some of the most affecting works from this era were modest in size. Gold Coast artists in the 1970s and 80s often worked on board or small canvases, partly for economic reasons, partly because they painted what was near: their homes. These domestic paintings—bedrooms, kitchens, shaded patios—evoke a sense of place not through grand architecture, but through intimacy.

A recurring motif in several City Collection works from this period is the suburban interior glimpsed through lamplight: a side table with a radio, a sagging couch, vertical blinds drawn halfway. The palette is subdued—beige, pale green, off-white—reflecting not just style, but mood. These paintings capture the stillness between events, the way a house feels just after someone leaves.

For some artists, this domestic gaze became a form of devotion. It offered continuity in a city defined by demolition and replacement. If the beach changed weekly and the skyline monthly, the living room at dusk stayed the same.

The suburbs as subject, not setting

While beach imagery persisted in gallery shows, a handful of painters and photographers began to look westward—toward the expanding grid of residential developments, shopping strips, and highway sprawl. These areas, barely acknowledged in mainstream Gold Coast narratives, offered something the beachfront did not: pattern, repetition, neglect, and unexpected beauty.

Painters captured rows of low-roofed houses under heavy weather, their facades marred by air conditioning units, security screens, and satellite dishes. There were no surfers in these works, no tourists. Instead, they showed parked utes, corner stores, and driveways leading to nothing in particular. Some artists focused on dusk, when streetlights began to flicker on and shadows fell long across concrete.

The suburbs weren’t painted as satire, but as fact. Their visual language—rectangular repetition, muted colour, vacant foregrounds—reflected a reality that was everywhere but rarely framed.

Photographers echoed this sensibility. A number of local documentary series from the 1980s and 90s focused on the periphery: industrial zones, trailer parks, empty shopping plazas at night. These photographs often had a filmic quality—shot in natural light, carefully composed, with an eye for melancholy. Their impact lay in recognition. Locals saw these images and said, “Yes. That’s exactly it.”

Motel melancholia and transient spaces

One of the richest sub-themes in this body of work was the depiction of motels. For decades, motels had been central to the Gold Coast’s economy, providing short-term accommodation for holidaymakers and workers alike. But by the 1980s, many of these buildings were beginning to show their age. Their bright exteriors faded. Neon signage flickered. The tiled lobbies and synthetic bedspreads felt more sad than celebratory.

Artists began to notice. Several painters created small-format interior scenes of motel rooms: single chairs beside drawn curtains, cup stains on laminate tables, fluorescent-lit mirrors above basic vanities. These works were neither grim nor sentimental. They understood that motels were part of the emotional architecture of the city—spaces of hope, failure, arrival, escape.

The motel painting became, in a sense, the anti-postcard. Where the tourist image promised endless summer, these works documented a particular kind of stillness: the traveller between journeys, the local hiding from home, the manager waiting for the next check-in.

Between painting and observation: works without spectacle

These artists made no claims to movements or manifestos. Their work rarely traveled beyond regional shows. Yet collectively, they reshaped the way the Gold Coast could be seen. Their commitment was to fidelity—not photographic realism, but visual truth. They painted what was around them, not what was expected.

In this way, their practice paralleled international developments in observational realism and documentary art, but without the rhetoric. They weren’t reacting to urban alienation or making political statements. They were painting their own streets.

A kitchen bench with a bowl of fruit. A lone figure walking past a video store. A parked bicycle in a garage half-full of stored boxes. These are not dramatic subjects. But when painted with care and seriousness, they become resonant. They ask the viewer to pause—to notice what is too easily missed.

Reception, misreading, and legacy

These works were not always warmly received. Some critics, especially those from outside the region, dismissed them as drab or lacking ambition. Others saw in them a kind of passive resistance to the spectacle-driven image of the Gold Coast. Neither reading fully captured what these artists were doing.

They weren’t resisting anything. They were simply paying attention. And in a city that had so thoroughly committed itself to brightness and scale, that attention—quiet, slow, and sustained—became radical in its own way.

Today, many of these works remain in local collections, uncatalogued or sparsely exhibited. Others hang in private homes, appreciated for their familiarity more than their style. But their influence endures, especially among younger artists who continue to explore the textures of ordinary life on the Gold Coast—life that unfolds away from the surf, beneath the neon, behind the vertical blinds.

Chapter 11: The Millennium Shift – Digital, Conceptual, and Return to Craft

New tools, old hands, and the evolving image of a coastal city

As the Gold Coast entered the twenty-first century, the dominant visual clichés—surfboards, sunsets, high-rises—no longer satisfied the city’s artists. Many had already spent decades painting and documenting the unseen, the overlooked, or the ordinary. But now, a new shift was underway—driven partly by technology, partly by fatigue, and partly by a maturing art infrastructure that began to support experimentation. The result was not a single movement, but a diversification of practice: video, digital collage, conceptual installations, and simultaneously, a renewed focus on making things by hand.

This period didn’t announce itself with a manifesto. Instead, it unfolded through exhibitions in public galleries, quiet projects in home studios, and pop-up installations that blurred the line between serious art and fleeting experience. The Gold Coast, often caricatured as Australia’s pleasure playground, was now home to artists whose work was critical, reflexive, and unconcerned with mass appeal.

Digital art and the Gold Coast’s mediated reality

One of the earliest and clearest developments after 2000 was the emergence of digital and screen-based work. This made intuitive sense: the Gold Coast had long lived as an image, mediated through photography, advertising, and tourism campaigns. Now artists could intervene in that image directly—manipulate it, subvert it, or multiply it endlessly.

Artists working in video, digital collage, and projection began to appear in gallery programs and prize exhibitions throughout the 2000s. Some focused on the city itself, remixing stock footage of beach culture, property ads, or weather reports into ironic loops or fragmented narratives. Others used technology more subtly, layering digitised textures into printmaking or turning surveillance footage into moving-image installations.

These works didn’t reject the Gold Coast’s visual identity—they repurposed it. The pixel became a tool for critique. The screen, a surface for questioning what the city had become.

At the Gold Coast City Art Gallery and later HOTA, several group shows featured experimental digital pieces, often displayed alongside more traditional media. This juxtaposition worked to sharpen the contrast: hand-thrown ceramic beside algorithmic distortion, pigment beside projection. It also highlighted what was changing—not just the art, but the viewer. Audiences were now used to seeing their city refracted through screens. Artists simply met them there.

The conceptual turn and the material idea

If digital tools opened new surfaces, conceptual approaches opened new structures. A number of Gold Coast-based artists began producing work that was idea-led rather than medium-driven: installations based on urban planning documents, text works about signage and real estate language, sculptural pieces built from reclaimed construction material.

One artist reconstructed a miniature version of a Surfers Paradise apartment balcony using only items purchased from local hardware stores—an object that was neither critique nor celebration, but something stranger: a study of repetition, taste, and longing.

Another created a wall installation using catalogued fragments of beach detritus—plastic tags, zip ties, toy fragments—collected over months from the same 200-metre stretch of coastline. Each item was labelled by date, colour, and material type, turning trash into taxonomy.

This kind of work expanded the visual language of the Gold Coast. It no longer relied on depiction. It operated by accumulation, suggestion, and juxtaposition. The goal wasn’t to show the city, but to make us notice it differently.

The return to touch: printmaking, ceramics, and wood

And yet, as digital and conceptual art flourished, another movement emerged—one that looked backward as much as forward. Across the hinterland and coastal suburbs, artists began returning to traditional craft forms: woodwork, pottery, linocut, textile dyeing, and bookbinding. This wasn’t nostalgia. It was a response to overstimulation, to disconnection from physical material.

Hand-thrown ceramics regained prominence. Small-run printmaking studios began to appear in residential sheds and repurposed garages. Artists working with wood turned offcuts and discarded furniture into intricately jointed objects that blurred the line between sculpture and utility.

This return to craft echoed earlier generations of hinterland artists, but it came with new concerns: sustainability, slowness, and ethical making. Workshops replaced formal studios. Craft markets included limited-edition art pieces. And younger artists—many trained in city art schools—chose to settle in the Gold Coast region specifically for its balance of affordability, natural environment, and distance from dominant art-world pressures.

In this context, the Gold Coast was no longer just subject matter. It became a condition for working.

Photography and the ambiguity of beauty

Photography also expanded during this period—not in technique, but in tone. Earlier documentary approaches had sought to reveal what lay behind the Gold Coast’s sheen. Now, photographers began to explore ambiguity: capturing scenes that were visually beautiful, but emotionally difficult to place.

A palm tree reflected in a half-flooded carpark. A lonely figure staring out from a top-floor window. A luxury development seen through the mesh of a construction fence.

These images weren’t easily categorised. They weren’t satire, nor were they celebrations. They existed in tension—recognisable and strange, seductive and unsettling. They played with the very tools the city had once used to promote itself: framing, clarity, perfect light. But now those tools were turned inward.

This approach resonated strongly in group shows and curated exhibitions throughout the 2010s. The work of Gold Coast photographers began to appear in national forums—not because they rejected place, but because they understood it too well.

A different kind of attention

The millennium shift on the Gold Coast didn’t bring a break with the past. It brought complication. Artists stopped asking, “How should we depict this place?” and started asking, “What kind of place is this to make anything at all?”

The answers came in many forms: projection, pottery, essay, pigment, plywood. Some artists moved fluidly between media. Others committed deeply to one. But what linked their work was a seriousness of intent—a refusal to treat the Gold Coast as a visual gimmick or artistic dead end.

This generation redefined what art could look like here. It didn’t have to conform to older expectations of regional work, nor did it need to mimic capital-city trends. It could be alert, layered, process-heavy, and strange. It could take itself seriously without becoming self-important.

And in this, it opened the door for the next question—not just what to make, but how to live.

Chapter 12: The Contemporary Gold Coast – Art in a Saturated Landscape

Making work in a place already made of images

By the 2020s, the Gold Coast had become one of the most visually saturated environments in Australia. It was no longer just a site of leisure, but a constructed spectacle: a skyline composed for postcards, a beach photographed from every angle, a city that remade itself every decade and documented every iteration. In this context, to be a contemporary artist on the Gold Coast is to work inside an echo chamber—not of ideas, but of images. The question is no longer how to represent the place, but whether it needs representation at all.

Yet artists continue to make work here, and in ways more varied, critical, and technically ambitious than at any previous point in the city’s history. They do so with full awareness of the contradictions: natural beauty framed by overdevelopment; cultural investment beside commercial excess; a region known for ephemerality now attempting to build lasting institutions. Contemporary Gold Coast art is not unified by style or subject. It is defined by navigation—of saturation, spectacle, and sincerity.

HOTA and the scale of ambition

The opening of the HOTA Gallery marked a new phase in the Gold Coast’s cultural infrastructure. The building itself—a bold, angular form with coloured glass apertures—signals a shift in visual identity: no longer trying to blend into the background, the gallery asserts itself as a civic landmark. Inside, its multiple floors and flexible exhibition spaces allow for simultaneous programming across local, national, and international scales.

HOTA’s early exhibitions have ranged from large-scale solo shows to thematic group exhibitions that tackle timely subjects—climate, urban sprawl, digital identity, memory. Some focus directly on the Gold Coast; others place local artists in dialogue with broader global currents. The effect has been to widen both audience expectations and curatorial possibilities.

But with increased visibility comes pressure. Some artists worry that the institutional scale favors spectacle over subtlety. Others welcome the chance to reach larger audiences. Either way, HOTA has become a defining context—something to work toward, or against.

Public art and the dilemma of presence

Alongside institutional expansion, the city has invested heavily in public art. Sculptures now appear in parks, along waterfront promenades, and within new urban developments. Some are site-specific commissions; others are curated through municipal programs. The goal is often twofold: to beautify and to brand.

For artists, this can be both opportunity and constraint. Public commissions offer exposure and resources—but they also come with limitations: thematic guidelines, community approval processes, integration with landscape or infrastructure. The resulting works vary in tone. Some are playful and interactive; others strive for gravitas. A few disappear into the environment. Others provoke strong reaction.

One recurring concern among artists is that public art, once intended to disrupt or surprise, is now expected—absorbed into the landscape like another amenity. The challenge is no longer making art visible. It’s making it felt.

The studio returns: collective practice and local energy

Beyond the gallery and public program, the Gold Coast’s artist-led scene has matured. Across the city and hinterland, collectives and collaborative studios have established themselves as spaces of experimentation and community. Printmaking workshops, open-access ceramics spaces, small-run publication groups, and hybrid venues hosting exhibitions, music, and discussion have become key nodes in the region’s artistic ecosystem.

These spaces aren’t peripheral. They are often where the most compelling work emerges—less polished, more provisional, and deeply embedded in local networks. Artists exhibit among peers, test new ideas, and respond quickly to changes in the cultural and physical landscape.

This has also created a generational layering: artists who were active in the 1990s now share space and dialogue with those who arrived in the last five years. A sense of lineage is taking root—not as hierarchy, but as memory.

Themes of place, erased and reclaimed

Despite the diversity of practice, certain themes recur across contemporary Gold Coast art. One is erasure. Artists repeatedly return to the problem of what’s been lost—coastal vegetation, historic buildings, small businesses, quietness. Their works record absences: footprints in sand already swept away, signs removed from facades, colours fading from heat.

Another theme is replication: towers that look the same, apartments with interchangeable interiors, curated lifestyles presented through identical imagery. Artists respond to this with mimicry, irony, or exaggeration. A photographic series might depict luxury developments as near-identical temples of glass. A sculptural installation might reproduce real estate signage in fragile, collapsing materials.

And yet, these responses are not purely cynical. There’s also a movement toward reclamation: of touch, texture, history. Artists craft works from local stone or salvaged timber. They print with natural dyes, bind books by hand, install temporary structures that leave no trace. In doing so, they try to anchor themselves in a place that keeps changing.

Between performance and permanence

One of the defining features of the contemporary Gold Coast is its refusal to settle. New buildings replace old. Roads are re-routed. Public spaces are redesigned every few years. In this constant churn, contemporary art becomes a tool for both interruption and continuity.

Performance artists use the city’s transitional spaces—vacant lots, scaffolding, temporary walkways—as stages. Their works exist for an hour, a weekend, then vanish. Others make art that changes with time: rusting metal forms, plant-based installations, interactive pieces that fade with use. The city’s instability is not a problem for them—it’s a condition to be worked with.

At the same time, other artists push for permanence. Murals are sealed for longevity. Sculptures are installed with foundations that resist erosion. These gestures are not nostalgic. They are attempts to give weight to art in a place where so little is designed to last.

A new kind of image-making

The Gold Coast’s image has always been its most powerful currency. But contemporary artists now make images that push back. Not necessarily by opposing the old narratives, but by multiplying them—complicating them. The beach is still there, but now it’s framed by cranes. The sunset still draws the eye, but now it reflects in a showroom window. The body remains on display, but now it carries a thousand digital mirrors.

Artists on the contemporary Gold Coast are not trying to escape the city’s identity. They are trying to work honestly within it. Their art does not pretend the place is something it’s not. It asks instead: What does it mean to see clearly in a place made of reflections? That question doesn’t have one answer. But it continues to generate work—quiet, strange, serious, and necessary.