Let me take this opportunity to bring greetings from a much younger Sandgate, also by the sea, and just as much loved by its community as is Sandgate in Kent.

Sandgate is twenty kilometres northeast of Brisbane, a residential suburb with trains running half-hourly to the city, yet with some of the qualities usually associated with a country town. It includes Shorncliffe and Brighton (we do have an English heritage) and provides magnificent views across the bay to Moreton Island with its huge sand hills.

Keep Sandgate Beautiful Association was formed with aims to enhance natural beauty, conserve assets and foster balanced development and, like the Sandgate Society, it is non-political. Among the assets to be conserved are a series of freshwater lagoons which support a wealth of bird life and heritage buildings which, despite our relative youth, are of historical significance.

Cabbage Tree Creek shelters a prawning fleet as well as many pleasure craft. These are very much in evidence each Easter when the Brisbane to Gladstone yacht race starts from Shorncliffe Pier. Other sporting and cultural interests are also provided for.

Sandgate, Australia

Formerly bypassed in favour of inner suburbs and the more glamorous beaches of Surfers Paradise and Noosa, Sandgate is now being discovered as a very desirable location with its own particular charm.

Visitors should look north from Shorncliffe at low tide and down on the pattern of pools across the black sand flats and on to the Glasshouse Mountains named by Captain Cook. It’s a view which justifies a twenty-hour flight from Heathrow.