In 1964 a banana grower named John Landi wanted passing traffic to stop at his roadside stall. He had heard of a Big Pineapple in Hawaii and figured something enormous would do the trick. Builder Alan Harvey began work in September of that year and finished in three months; the Big Banana opened on 22 December 1964, thirteen metres long and five metres high. It was the first of Australia's "Big Things," the oversized roadside monuments that now number more than a thousand across the country, from prawns to merinos to a giant Ned Kelly. None of them would exist without this one. The hinterland behind Coffs was carpeted in banana plantations through the twentieth century, the steep hillsides striped with rows of green. Bananas no longer dominate the local economy the way they once did, but the Banana remains the city's mascot, its grinning yellow face a fixed point in the Australian imagination.

Before the highway, the sea did the heavy lifting. Timber felled in the ranges came down to the coast and out along the Coffs Harbour Jetty, a long timber wharf where coastal steamers loaded cargo bound for Sydney. When it was built in the nineteenth century, it was the longest coastal timber jetty raised by the Harbours and Rivers Section of the NSW Public Works department, and that distinction earned it a place on the State Heritage Register in 2021. Walk out along it now and the planks creak underfoot, the water slapping the piles below. The jetty no longer ships timber. It ships people out over the water for the view back at the green hills, and at dusk the whole structure turns gold. A short walk away, the first-order Fresnel lens that once burned at the South Solitary Island lighthouse sits on display, retired from its lonely post offshore.

A breakwater walk leads out to Muttonbird Island, and to the Gumbaynggirr it is Giidany Miirlarl, the Moon Sacred Place. In their Lore, the Moon Man came here to rest and heal after battle, carried to the island by the Plant People, whose generosity was rewarded with eternal life. Under a full moon, the story goes, he still returns to watch over the country. The island is a sacred ceremonial site, and some of its stories carry cultural protocols around who may visit and when. It is also a rookery: every year from September to April, thousands of wedge-tailed shearwaters, the muttonbirds, return to burrow in the slopes and raise their young, filling the dusk with their wailing calls. This is one of the few easily reached places in New South Wales where they nest. Stand here at sunset and the two meanings of the island, the sacred and the wild, fold into one.

Offshore lie the Solitary Islands, scattered specks of rock where the cool currents of the south meet the warm tropical flow from the north. The mixing produces a marine park of unusual richness, where temperate kelp and tropical coral share the same water and divers surface grinning. Onshore, Coffs sits at a rare geographic seam: this is one of the few stretches of the Australian east coast where the Great Dividing Range crowds all the way to the ocean, leaving almost no coastal plain. The result is a city wedged between mountains and sea, and a hinterland steep enough that people jump out of planes over it for the view. To the north and south the beaches run for miles. To the west the ranges climb into rainforest and waterfall country. Coffs is the hinge between them.