In July 1968, representatives of the American firm Wendell West laid plans before the Byron Shire Council for an estate of extraordinary ambition. The land, some 3,700 acres, was to become a "community resort" of around 22,000 people, an enormous figure for this stretch of dairy farmland. The pitch came with star power. The crooner Pat Boone, then a household name in the United States, lent his backing, and the development borrowed its name from his own home suburb of Ocean Shores in Washington State, where the same developer had earlier run a celebrity golf tournament bearing Boone's name. It was the era of the grand American land deal, sold on glossy promise and famous faces. State planners approved the scheme in 1969. But the city of 22,000 never materialised. The town finally established in 1977 turned out to be a far smaller, gentler place than the brochures imagined, and most locals would say it was the better for it.

Geography split the town in two. Southern Ocean Shores climbs the edge of the Brunswick River catchment, its streets winding up elevated ground where many homes look out to sea. Northern Ocean Shores spreads flat along the beach, with the north arm of the Brunswick River threading through it and the Billinudgel Nature Reserve pressing close against the houses. Seven kilometres of open surf beach run from the river's North Head to Wooyung. It is a coastal and estuarine world, where the rhythm of tides matters more than the rhythm of any resort schedule. A famously good golf course, laid out in the early 1970s, remains the most visible legacy of the developers' grander plans, a manicured fragment of a resort city that never grew up around it.

Long before any American developer drew a map, this was the country of the Midjimbul and Durumbil clans, the traditional custodians of the area, and their presence is written into the land. Aboriginal sites survive here, including shell middens along Marshalls Creek, the patient accumulations of countless meals over countless generations. When Europeans arrived, the Brunswick district, which takes in Ocean Shores, became the first place of colonial settlement in what is now the Byron Shire, dating to 1846. The town that exists today is a layering of all this: ancient custodianship, nineteenth-century settlement, and a twentieth-century property dream that mostly stayed on paper.

Lacking the city it was promised, Ocean Shores built a community instead. The Ocean Shores Community Association has worked local causes since the town's founding, and the calendar fills with the kind of events that knit a small place together: a weekly farmers' market at nearby New Brighton, and an annual arts expo born in 2004 when residents, drawn together by a fight over the Pacific Highway's route, decided to make something creative out of the friction. In March 2022, the town shared in the catastrophe that struck the whole Northern Rivers, when floodwaters tore through and left many buildings destroyed, a reminder that life on this beautiful coast has never come without risk.