Palm Beach, Queensland

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Palm Beach is a suburb of the Gold Coast, Queensland between Tallebudgera Creek and Currumbin Creek. It is an area with little in the way of natural features to enclose it or to set it apart from other places at the Gold Coast, though it has twice been voted cleanest beach in Queenland. Certainly subdivided by the mid 1950s the subdivision is unusual in the way in which it straddles both sides of the highway. Streets along the highway are named from first to twenty-eighth starting at the southern end of the area and each second one terminates at the highway. Between the beach and the highway in the southern part of the area the narrow Jefferson Lane links across streets. In this lane are some of the earliest and most basic of Gold Coast beach "shacks", some on blocks of land valued in millions of dollars. There is some suggestion that these in fact predate the subdivision and other remnants of an earlier settlement. Other housing and development in the area is ordinary.

Recent extensions of the Palm Beach area to the west have created new subdivisions with different characteristics including a small section of canal development. The area is bounded to the north by the Tallebudgera Creek and the national recreation camp and to the south by tower developments at the mouth of Currumbin Creek. The creek mouths of Tallebudgera and Currumbin have been stablised with training walls built during the 1970s. Both of the Creek entrances are dredged on an annual basis. There are nearshore bait reefs along Palm Beach and offshore there are fishing reefs that are some of the most productive of the Gold Coast.

Laguna Lake is in the south western part of the suburb has a park around its edges. The Tallebudgera Creek Tourist Park provides holiday accommodation mainly for families. The adjacent Tallebudgera Recretaional Camp is a national fitness camp visited by children from throughout Queensland. The Neptune's Surf Life Saving Club was the first female only SLSC in Australia and still provides patrol services for people swimming in Tallebudgera Creek estuary.

[edit] Coastal management

Coastal management structures at Palm Beach include training walls at Currumbin and Tallebudgera Creek entrances and mini groynes at 11th and 21st Avenues. The Gold Coast Oceanway is of particular poor quality through Palm Beach due to the majority of the beachfront being effectively in private ownership.