North, north, north.

We’re driving north, away from the population centers of Sydney and Brisbane. Before we’re done, we hope to reach the Daintree, where paved roads end. Our ultimate objective is Cape York Peninsula, a point of land that nearly touches Papua New Guinea.

We’re searching for Australia’s great outdoors: primeval jungles, misty waterfalls, deserted beaches. Given low population density, finding them should be a snap. (Australia has only 3 people per square kilometer. The US has 31; Mexico has 53.)

An hour or two north of Brisbane, we arrived in Noosa Heads and headed out to the beach for a swim.

Hmmm. Not paradise yet.

Admittedly we arrived during school holidays, but even in the off season, it’s clear that Noosa is popular—a quick weekend getaway for city-weary Brisbane workers.

High-end clothing boutiques line Hastings Street just off Main Beach. Crowded sidewalk cafés provide innovative and healthy snacks (if you don’t mind waiting). I had trouble finding a place to park. in Noosa Heads, business is booming.

All this commerce relies on the presence of the beach. Like Cancún, if the sand goes, the businesses go. Unfortunately, the beach at Noosa Heads is going—north.

Sand is uncooperative stuff. You build a nice little resort community. A few decades later, the beach starts drifting away. To hold it in place, you built a jetty, stabilizing the coastline in one part of town. The jetty in turn causes sand starvation elsewhere. Oops. Tourism suffers. Business owners complain. Politicians, eyeing their seats, take note.

I walked north along the beach to Noosa Spit, where I found the local council’s solution to the drifting sand problem.

This is a sand pump. In some ways it’s very cool. It sucks sand from a buildup against a jetty and pumps it through a 14” mile-long plastic pipe back to Main Beach—to where it’s needed—recycling in the purest sense of the word. Ocean currents drive sand north, the pump circulates it back where it came from—a never-ending whirlpool of sand grains.

Think about the air conditioner in your car. You can set it to admit fresh outside air, or you can slide a lever to recirculate old, stale passenger compartment air. The latter is what Noosa is doing—but with sand.

I’m generally in favor of employing engineering to make lives and communities better. But this seems a little strained. A beach ought to be a living thing, moving about in response to currents and storms, clinging to places where mangroves grow, yielding a little land here, building new land there.

Noosa’s efforts to maintain the status quo undoubtedly is vital to the businesses that depend on all those visitors. But the place feels contrived. Certianly not as extreme as this artificial beach in Japan, but then, where do you draw the line?

Photo: koolbluez, Frihost Forums

Don’t get me wrong. Noosa is a nice vacation spot. The water is warm, the breezes gentle, the community neat and quite attractive. In my Silicon Valley years, I was grateful for the presence of Santa Cruz—with its tacky Beach Boardwalk—just an hour’s drive away. But at this point in our Australian journey, we’re looking for unalloyed nature. This isn’t it.