Long before the surf clubs and the holiday flats, this was, and remains, the Country of the Kabi Kabi, also known as the Gubbi Gubbi, and the Jinibara people. The two nations share the region but read it differently. The Kabi Kabi are the coastal people, the saltwater people, their land running up the beaches and estuaries from south of Caloundra far to the north past Noosa. The Jinibara are the mountain people, custodians of the ranges inland, including the volcanic peaks of the Glass House Mountains. For tens of thousands of years their people have carried detailed knowledge of these forests, heathlands and wetlands, knowing the seasons of this Country in a way that the holidaymakers passing through rarely glimpse. The land has names far older than the ones on the road signs.

The first European to mark this coast did it from a ship's deck. In 1770, sailing north along the east coast aboard the Endeavour, Captain James Cook saw a cluster of strange, steep peaks rising abruptly from the coastal plain and named them the Glass House Mountains, reminded, the story goes, of the glass furnaces of his native Yorkshire. They are the remnants of an extinct volcanic range, hard cores of rock left standing after softer ground eroded away, and to the Jinibara they are sacred. They make the Sunshine Coast instantly recognisable from land, sea or air: a row of abrupt green-and-grey towers, utterly unlike the flat country around them, presiding over the whole region.

A visit here is, finally, about the water. The beaches run one into the next, each with its own character. Mooloolaba is the polished one, its Esplanade lined with cafes a short stroll from the sand. Maroochydore Beach is a long, surf-friendly arc at the river mouth, patrolled almost all the time. Around Caloundra the coast turns intricate: Kings Beach with its ocean-fed saltwater pool, the boardwalk between Kings and Bulcock, Shelly Beach and its rock pools, Moffat Beach for a quiet walk. The local wisdom is painted on every patrol flag, swim between the red and yellow, surf between the black and white, and stay where the lifesavers can see you. It was on these beaches, in the surf-club era, that the volunteer lifesaver became a national figure.

Turn your back on the sea and drive west and the Sunshine Coast changes entirely. The land climbs into the Blackall Range, where the air cools and the light goes soft. Up here the villages, Montville, Maleny, Mapleton, feel less like suburbs and more like proper hill towns, with timber shopfronts, waterfalls in the national parks, and lookouts that drop away to the patchwork of the coastal plain and the distant blue line of the sea. This is the region's other face: not surf and sunscreen but tea rooms, rainforest walks and the deep green of the Great Dividing Range, whose long spine runs the length of the country and sends its eastern edge nearly to the beach.

What ties the coast and the hinterland together is a certain unhurried temperament. The Sunshine Coast is one of the fastest-growing regions in Australia, yet it still wears its old identity lightly: a place that began as timber ports and tropical farms and never entirely lost the holiday-town ease. Seafood is everywhere, the fish-and-chip shop being a fixture of every town worth the name. Craft breweries have taken root around Maroochydore. Getting around is cheap and simple, helped by a flat fare that makes the local buses an afterthought of cost. Come for the beaches, the locals will tell you, but give yourself a day in the hills, an evening with a plate of fish by the water, and a slow morning doing nothing in particular. That, more than any single sight, is the point of the place.