Take Cascade Gardens, for instance. Located just south of Surfers Paradise on the way to Broadbeach, the 13 acre gardens hug the Nerang River and stand about three blocks back from the beach.
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It was developed by the Surfers Paradise Rotary Club in the late 1960s as a drive-in picnic spot and quickly became popular. In addition to a large grassed picnic area, many of the trees and original rain forest were kept, interrupted only by a string of man-made slate waterfalls connected by walking circuit to its southern boundary.Above right is an infant Nora pictured in 1969 with her mum watched carefully by grandma.
The fact the park still exists in the face of the city's growth is remarkable in itself, but that's not where the history ends.
The site was a popular picnic and camping site for the Kombumerri Aboriginal tribe before European settlement. It's also the last resting place for Edmund "Neddy" Harper, a city pioneer who arrived in the region in about 1842 as part of gang of cedargetters who created the city's first industry.
Harper built a wharf on the site and ran a ferry service across the Nerang River and died in 1896. According to one web site:
When he died in 1896, aged seventy, he was buried on a rise nearby.
Today Ned Harper’s land is overshadowed by Jupiter’s Casino and the giant Pacific Fair shopping complex in what is now Broadbeach, but his grave survives. It stands in the middle of the Cascade Gardens, a popular picnic spot. Over the years there have been isolated reports of the ghost of old Ned Harper taking his exercise among the flowerbeds and man-made waterfalls.
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