'Hello Dolly' as new wave hits Surfers

By GREG ANSLEY

Surfers Paradise is cleaning up its act. At the cost of cheap T-shirts and tacky souvenirs, the seedy strip of shops that ran down the old Chevron Hotel site has been levelled and remodelled with a new village-style mall intended as the catalyst for an even broader spruce-up.

This part of town was never much fun, packed with downmarket hawkers and infested with vermin.

It was, Gold Coast councillor Lex Bell admits, plain tawdry.

Maree Reason, general manager of the Surfers Paradise Central Management Association, described it as a scar on the face of Surfers.

Now it is being given an entirely new image, with $A750 million in projects and infrastructure, including a bypass that will pull traffic out of central Surfers and narrow the main road from four to two lanes.

The two lost lanes are being paved and planted in huge date palms.

The old Chevron site is now the Chevron Renaissance, a $A400 million development designed on a Mediterranean theme, housing restaurants and boutique stores.

The next-door site has also been sold for a $A250 million development.

Surfers Paradise, enthuses Reason, is back.

Dolly Parton, the platinum blond American country singer who immortalised her own life in Dollyworld theme park, is about to invade the Gold Coast.

Parton plans to build a theme park in the heart of Surfers Paradise, called Dolly Parton's Aussie Stampede, expanding out of the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee where Dollyworld is about to add a Waterworld to its attractions.

The move to Surfers is more aptly named than the famous songstress probably realised, despite the incongruity of cowboys in a strip of real estate that glories in beach, sun and surf.

It comes at the head of a rush of similar plans following a nine-year hiatus in the development of theme parks.

Also in the pipeline are Watabes Wedding Park - for Japanese couples tying the knot abroad - the move of Brisbane's Australian Woolshed to the Gold Coast, and an Aboriginal cultural centre near Sea World.

Sea World is also planning a rodeo-themed attraction, and has a longer-term plan for other developments worth about $A150 million.

And getting to the parks - new and old - is about to become much easier.

The huge eight-lane highway linking the Gold Coast to Brisbane, knocking about half an hour off the trip, runs right past the theme-park belt and will be opened later this year.