Is there an Australian equivalent to the Hamptons or Palm Beach or Aspen?

Porpoise Spit is very nice, I've heard.

Seth Efrica?

Actually, the super wealthy in Sydney go to Palm Beach. It’s where Home and Away is filmed.

Similar to the US Palm Beach?

Yes OP there is absolutely nowhere to go in a country with a coastline of 36,000 kilometres:

Nowhere like Palm Beach, Whale Beach or Avalon in Sydney, Byron Bay in far north New South Wales. Noosa and Maroochydore in Queensland, Portsea, Loren, Summers or Sorrento in Victoria. Margaret River in Western Australia.

For skiing there are plenty of resorts but for NSW it has to be Thredbo Or Charlottes Pass. For Victoria? Mt Hotham, Falls Creek or Mt Buller. Or we head over to NZ - usually to Queenstown

Then there’s countryside and wine country, such as the Hunter Valley and the Southern Highlands in NSW, Maleney and the hinterland of the Gold Coast in Queensland, the Yarra Valley and Mornington in Victoria and the Barossa and Clare Vallies in South Australia.

Then there’s Tasmania...but you get the picture. It’s a very large country. We get by...

What about Darwin?

Ha R6! For Darwinians I guess that that’s probably Bali.

r6 "nearby" Broome WA in the KImberley region has some resorts

Can't you read, R5? "An obvious version of the resort culture you see in North America or Europe". Sorry, R5, but no one outside Australia has ever heard of those places you mentioned. There is no Vail, Palm Beach, St. Tropez or St. Moritz or Hamptons that are famous throughout the rest of the world. Also, OP mentioned "culture", not just scenic places. I don't know if or how that applies to the places you mentioned.

There is a unpublicised enclave for rich people and their mansions in the Southern Highlands around Burradoo, Bong Bong and Bowral.

All the mansions are surrounded by acreage, big hedges and established gardens and are invisible from the street.

Actually, R9, I am able to read. I suspect that you can’t. You certainly can’t comprehend. Why would anybody in this country care about what anybody in the USA knows or cares about anywhere here?

With all due respect, Americans aren’t exactly famous for their knowledge or interest about places beyond their own square state. And you’ve just proved that - well done!

R11 Exactly! Americans are complete and total dumb asses. They all fail geography.

Not this American. I’ve been to Australia several times during my Navy days. Sydney, Melbourne, Darwin, even Port Hedland (urp). Friendly people even in the big cities. But you can have Port Hedland...great barbecue thrown by the locals but a dull town. Well, not that dull. Apparently a sailor from the British Navy had been raped by some of locals the week before our arrival. Got drunk and belligerent over a girl...beaten up, carried off to a nearby junkyard and buggered to within an inch of his life.

But they were nice to us Yanks.

Well, R4, sorry I peed directly in your face from thousands of miles away.

I didn't know about these places, and I was curious about them, so I asked perfectly politely.

And you know something? I'm really going to go out on a limb here, but I'm willing to bet Americans have the rest of the Non-Australian planet along for the ride when it comes to intimate knowledge about these places.

Unless Alain Resnias made a film called "Last Year at Maroochydore".

SPOILER!!! He didn't.

Well, let’s take a little look at Maroochydore, according to R4 a world-renowned resort quite on a level with Baden-Baden or the Lido and a mystery solely to stupid Americans.

According to Wikipedia, the post office opened in 1922 and the library in 1975. There are over 16,000 inhabitants. It is “a suburb”, although precisely of what, the entry does not make particularly clear. In pictures it resembles the usual cement high-rises associated with lower-middle-class coastal development. The relocation of the Golf Course has allowed the Sunshine Regional Council to develop the old golf course into a new city centre for the region known as Sunshine Central. It is the sixth town mentioned in the original Australian version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which, while a stunning honor, would seem to imply that it is in fact not a top destination as these things go. It was the location of a tragic air crash in 1950.

Now why this place isn’t on the very top of my brain when it comes to developments in international resort culture can only be due to innate American stupidity, especially since I’m sure the international jet set has it marked down on their day-planner for a good two weeks at the height of the season. How its myriad attractions, which, in addition to the post office, include a – I am not making this up – landmarked trailer park, have not put Jupiter Island well and truly in the shade I’ll never be the one to tell.

Australians spend all their time dreaming about how they can leave Australia. Their equivalent to any resort is any place that isn't in Australia.

What a fucking cunt r5 is! The OP was genuinely interested about his country, and yet all he could offer is scathing contempt and pointless xenophobic generalizations.

Meh, he got up on the wrong side of the wombat is all.

My question pertains to development generally, as most resorts worldwide have roots in attempts to either cure illness through the taking of waters, sacred and otherwise, or flee, guess what, seasonal epidemics. It would be interesting to see if Australia followed this pattern in the 19th century, which generally led to everybody giving the healthful waters and fresh air a miss and going in for baccarat and flamboyant architecture.

And another goddamn thing! You fucking goddamn shithead Yanks should fucking want to come visit here because of our fucking famous hospitality and our goddamn beautiful manners Down Fucking Under!

Portsea looks Hamptons-esque in terms of the housing stock.

Australia is a very long flight from America and Europe r9. Obviously that places limits on people hopping over to Australia for a beach trip.

Pam Ann sings about the delights of Australia in 2020

There is really no place nice in Australia. Oh there are places that are "nice" "in comparison" but outside the capital cities, everything is shit.

I have several friends from Australia and I truly adore them. They're kind, fun, all slightly eccentric and sexy as hell. But, although they are all well to do, they don't consider Australia to be the place where they want to live well. They're proud to be Australian but prefer to enjoy life in Europe or the US.

As most Australians seem to be very low key about everything, I think people looking for a life of luxury prefer to go somewhere else. Even the best parts of Sydney (South of the Bay) are rather provincial.

When I've asked Australians about interesting places to visit, they oddly come up short. Funny, because they're often so boastful. Perhaps they're saving the best for themselves or afraid of being judged. i noticed that when I brought up Kangaroo Island (which I visited a few years ago), people perked-up and mention of cities other than Sydney and Melbourne seems to get a nice response form people who aren't from those places. I rather liked Adelaide.

Places like Palm Beach and the other exclusive enclaves around Pittwater, and indeed in the Southern Highlands, are not "resort towns". The wealthy people who holiday there all own homes there (in that sense like the Hamptons). Some even commute from there, with a pied a terre in the city centre in case they work late or go to a show.

R9, many countries are besotted by Home and Away, which has been running for 20 years or so, and which is famously shot at Palm Beach. One of the reasons it's popular in places like the UK is the gorgeous scenery, with big blue skies, blue seas and sunshine everywhere you look. So millions of people have heard of that place, just not you.

Australians are, per capita, the world's greatest overseas travellers, so yes, the wealthy take their kids to Europe for their "gap" year, and they ski in Aspen or France instead of our admittedly paltry snowfields. They go on shopping expeditions to Singapore and Hong Kong and lie on the beach in the Maldives.

The not-wealthy (but not extremely poor) in Australia holiday in Bali or Fiji and backpack through Europe in their twenties. They also like spending a year touring Australia.

R25, if you think Adelaide is interesting you really should get out more. No Australian asked to name an interesting place would come up with that.

Adelaide was a nice provincial city. Melbourne was OK---locals have told me it's less interesting than Sydney but more livable,. Sydney really didn't seem all that interesting, at all, so I skipped it. My experience with Aussies is that some really are cosmopolitan from all that travel but many are like "Texans", seen a lot but also oblivious to it. When they come to the US they want to see a lot of junky places marketed to foreigners like Fisherman's Wharf and Hollywood or really stock destinations like Disney.

Noooosa

[quote] There is a unpublicised enclave for rich people and their mansions in the Southern Highlands around Burradoo, Bong Bong and Bowral.

"Burradoo, Bong Bong and Bowral".... Are those name serious?!!

They're no stranger than a lot of names in North America that are Native American words, such as Lake Winnipesaukee (for non-US readers, once a very upper-class retreat in New Hampshire).

The repetition of a word in Australian Native languages works as an intensifier.

So it seems as if most of these areas are single-family homes and there are fewer hotels, etc., which would make sense given population, and as one poster pointed out, the relative lack of international presence. Were any of them founded around a curative or a retreat from urban epidemics?

And of course you have the Gold Coast, which functions more as a middle-class resort area, like Pensacola used to be in Florida. Or Miami Beach, back before it got glammed up.

OP, if you mean a beach where all the jet setters go, that would be Noosa Main Beach near Brisbane.

R28, graysh!

The Gold Coast seemed more "mid-market" than middle class.

Don’t the Australians super rich just lounge around on yachts when they want to go away? There seems to be a rich yacht life over there.