Huge pop stars lived in my suburb, but there are other reasons to love it

Detailed summary

This part of the world has basked in reflected glory for a long time, but I’d take birdsong and gentle waves over a disco beat any day.

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Come walk with me through Scarborough, as blissful a place as you might find.

It won’t take long, for it’s not a huge slab of land. It’s actually only a fragment of the larger Redcliffe Peninsula, the seaside locale to Brisbane’s north-east where two bridges – one named for the famed engineer Manuel Hornibrook, the other for the WWI veteran Ted Smout – shoot across Hays Inlet in Bramble Bay.

Like any peninsula, Scarborough has water on three sides, with the ceaseless ripples of Moreton Bay kissing its beaches.

As majestic as that sounds – and there’s plenty of natural beauty to celebrate in this part of the world – it would be folly to ignore the humans who have called it home.

Think footballers like Artie Beetson, Bunny Pearce and Petero Civoniceva, and actor William McInnes. Then there’s the Bullivants, Vaughan and Carmel – once owners of the Nature’s Own vitamin and supplements business. They built neighbouring his and hers mansions on Prince Edward Parade after amalgamating a few smaller allotments on one of the suburb’s more salubrious boulevards, with its groves of towering Moreton Bay figs.

Snoops were often seen snapping photos of the homes, one an ostentatious triple-storey structure, and the other more like a doll’s house on steroids, where life-sized animals appeared to cavort in a lush, poolside garden.

If Scarborough has celebrity runs on the board though, it’s mainly courtesy of the Bee Gees. The suburb of Redcliffe to the south even has a laneway named after them, decorated with statues of brothers Barry, Maurice and Robin Gibb. But it was in Scarby, as some locals call it, that the siblings (including youngest brother Andy, a star in his own right) actually lived.

When the Gibb clan migrated from England in 1958, they moved into a guest house in Oxley Avenue then settled in Fifth Avenue.

Opening of the article, excerpted from The Age. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.