Gold Coast Flashback: Mayor Sir Bruce Small’s bold 1968 predictions for city’s development

GOLD Coast city leaders like to dream big. And these ideas were no exception.A 10,000-seat music bowl for Burleigh and a new council administration centre were on the cards.

GOLD Coast city leaders like to dream big.

For decades we have seen grand ideas and bold proposals put forward, some coming to fruition, some are shot down while others disappear into obscurity.

In recent years we have had our fair share of suggestions, from incumbent Mayor Tom Tate’s cruise ship terminal to Ron Clarke’s hopes for a tunnel running under Surfers Paradise and to Stradbroke Island.

The Gold Coast is no stranger to big ideas.

The Gold Coast cultural precinct at Evandale, known as the Home of the Arts (HOTA) was first dreamed up more than a decade ago but it took years and many different designs before locals got their first taste of it this year.

This project’s incredible success this year came 50 years after the city’s then-mayor made some bold predictions for the city.

HOTA is becoming a reality. Supplied by Gold Coast City Council

Then-Mayor Sir Bruce Small was an icon and a big thinker who was responsible for putting the city in the map internationally, promoting the Meter Maids and building major housing developments.

A year into his time in the top job he unveiled a laundry list of incredible ideas which he hoped to see come to fruition.

Sir Bruce Smal

Gazing into his crystal ball in 1968, the mayor said the city was heading in a good direction.

“For hope springs eternal and I confess that I have dreamed and dreamed of the future of this wonderful Gold Coast of ours – and my dreams have kindled all the excitement and anticipation one could possibly desire,” he wrote in a letter to the Gold Coast Bulletin.

Sir Bruce was a larger than life figure.

The mayor’s big dreams included:

• An ‘enticing vision’ of a music bowl at Burleigh. Its shell was to cater for the arts, music theatre and every desirable type of entertainment with opening air seating for 10,000 people.

• The estuary at Currumbin developed as a deep water harbour – reclaiming large areas for varied sporting, civil educational and residential amenities.

• A 50 acre park reclaimed on the foreshores of the Broadwater, combining the canalisation of Loaders Creek and flood relief.

•A ‘lovely waterway’ through Biggara Creek to an 86-acre wasteland canal development which he said would be profitable enough to cover the costs.

• Opening up Coolangatta Creek and beautifying Tugun and Bilinga.

• A modern council administrative centre landscaped on 25 acre site in Main Beach between Sundale Bridge and Narrowneck.

• A new airport terminal which Sir Bruce said needed to be ‘worthy of the Coast and its expanding tourist traffic and providing facilities and amnesties appropriate to our city’s stature.

• A new landscaped parkland called Hamilton Park near Paradise Island.

Sir Bruce liked to think big

Sir Bruce admitted that many of these ideas would need to be carefully checked economically and practically.

“Happily reassured of its soundness, its feasibility and its economics, I find in it a promise of the realisation of the prime urge that brought me to the mayoral chair and I rejoice in the prospect of seeing the entire Gold Coast- a place so beautiful and attractive that its equal cannot be found anywhere,” he said.

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The Coast’s skyline had changed dramatically by the time Sir Bruce died in 1980.

“I believe that the very striving for all of this – given a new spirit of unity, of determination, of dedication, can spell a happy new year for us all.”

The Broadwater Parklands was eventually built and the airport upgraded but most of his ideas never came to fruition.

Sir Bruce died in 1980 but he did live to see the council’s headquarters built at Evandale.