Q1 rises 322.5 metres from the sand, its name given in honour of Australia's Olympic sculling team of the 1920s, its silhouette shaped to throw a curving wake of glass against the sky. When it opened on 26 October 2005, after a three-year build, it claimed the record as the tallest residential tower on Earth when measured to the tip of its spire, holding the title until Dubai's Marina Torch overtook it in 2011. The deck has room for around four hundred people, and it ranks as Australia's only beachside observation deck. From the deck, the geography of the Gold Coast lays itself out with unusual clarity. Brisbane smudges the northern horizon. The hinterland ranges roll away to the west in folds of blue. Byron Bay marks the southern limit, and the Pacific fills everything to the east, an immensity of moving water that changes colour with every passing cloud.

In 2010, the deck shed its earlier names, Q1 Observation Deck and then QDeck, and reopened as SkyPoint after a refurbishment. A year later came something stranger. On 14 January 2012, the SkyPoint Climb opened, an external walkway that lets harnessed guests step outside the glass and ascend the structure toward the spire. When Ardent Leisure advertised twelve guiding positions, more than a hundred people applied. The climb takes about ninety minutes. Clipped to a steel line with the wind pulling at your jacket and the coastline tilting beneath your boots, you experience the building not as a viewpoint but as a thing you are physically standing on, a sensation no window can offer.

The deck rewards patience. By day the ocean reads as flat hammered metal, the canal estates glinting like spilled mercury through the suburbs. As the sun drops behind the hinterland, the light turns the high-rise wall of Surfers Paradise to amber and then to a forest of glowing windows. After dark the coast becomes a circuit board, streetlights tracing the long ribbon of the beachfront south toward the New South Wales border. A museum, a weather station, a theatrette and a lounge bar fill the two levels, but the real exhibit is the one beyond the glass, refusing to hold still.

For all its permanence in the air, the deck has had a restless life on paper. When Q1 opened in 2005 the observation level belonged to the tower's developer, Sunland. Within a year it was sold to the MFS group and rebranded the QDeck. When MFS collapsed into receivership during the financial turmoil of 2009, the deck changed hands again: Ardent Leisure, the company behind Dreamworld up the coast, bought it for 13.5 million dollars and poured a further million into the 2010 refurbishment that gave it the SkyPoint name. The ownership churn is invisible to anyone stepping out of the lift. What they see instead is the thing that drew all those buyers in the first place, a view that justifies the building's existence and made it, for a while, the highest paying attraction on the Australian coast.