Walking On Sunshine

You’d Never Guess This Little Piece Of Paradise Is Tucked Away In Queensland’s Hectic Sunshine Coast Tourist Mecca

- Chris Stafford

An hour’s drive north of Brisbane, Queensland’s Sunshine Coast spans 60km from Caloundra to Noosa. Once a subtropical swamp and tea-tree wilderness, this string of coastal towns is now Queensland’s third most populous region and one of the fastest-growing in the country.

But in the hinterland behind Peregian Beach, just south of Noosa, you’d never know it. Though the bush around Peregian is threaded with new housing estates, a shopping centre and a golf course around the vast waterway of Lake Weyba, Mark (aka ‘Puff’) Dragan and partner Alexi Cox’s nine acres of heaven are at once close to everything but also beautifully secluded in their bushland setting.

You enter the Dragans’ property past a long row of beehives into a rural vista of rolling green pasture dotted with stands of gnarled gums and dams reflecting the blue of the sky. If it seems isolated, it’s because the couple’s land is enfolded into a 90-acre cattle property owned by Alexi’s family where she and Mark share-farm pasture-raised chickens.

In fact, eggs were just the beginning of their enterprise. Now they run 950 chooks producing around 400 dozen googies a week and what started as a farmgate egg stand is now a fully fledged organic produce business.

“We sell what’s grown on site and some locally produced organic fruit and veg that people bring in,” says Alexi. “Our resident beekeeper has his hives on our property and we also sell his honey in our shop.”