Southport (occasionally known as Hythe) became a major timber port, and there was a large colliery further south at Catamaran, known as the poor man's Venice, and, in a development that would seem to be a good seventy years before its time, unemployed people were resettled in a commune near Southport during the depression years of the 1890s.
And years before Peter Cundall and Gardening Australia a Southport resident ex-convict named Dickenson wrote Australia's first local gardening manual.
Things started to fall apart after World War One. The most accessible forests had been logged, demand for coal fell away, and there was a major exodus as people moved to areas of the state where the employment prospects looked better. The limestone mine at Ida Bay closed, and the 1967 Black Tuesday bushfires where one hundred and ten separate fire fronts burnt through some 2,640 square kilometres (264,000 hectares) of land within the space of five hours almost destroyed the town of Southport.
The result of all that is, as can be seen from the accompanying photographs, an interesting contrast to the other Southport we know so well on the Gold Coast. Both locations, of course, have rather pleasant, though definitely contrasting, views across the water.