About The Headland

On this coast the land ends in a headland almost everywhere the towns meet the sea: Tacking Point at Port Macquarie, Crescent Head and Hat Head above the Macleay, Scotts Head and Nambucca Heads, Sawtell and the Muttonbird Island headland at Coffs. A headland belongs to no single town; it is the landform this whole coast shares. That is the masthead's name, and a quiet nod to its method: a headland is the point you walk out to and see the shore run away both north and south, the vantage from which the whole beat reads at once.

The Mid North Coast is roughly 229,000 people across a five-council core: the coastal cities of Port Macquarie-Hastings in the south and Coffs Harbour in the north, and the valley shires of Kempsey on the Macleay, the Nambucca Valley and Bellingen strung between them. The region is bound by one health district, one economic-development region, the Pacific Highway corridor and a shared, still-running flood recovery. Over it sit some of the richest public records of any region, and very little of it gets read end to end.

We read it. The Headland answers the standing questions of anyone who lives here: what did my council actually decide, and what does it cost me? What is the flood recovery delivering, on the documents? What is being built, is the health system keeping up, and how is the industry that defines the coast, the blueberries and the bananas, actually faring? Every factual claim in every story links to the primary source we actually read, and the way the site is made is set out plainly on how this site works.

Contact

News tips, corrections and advertising enquiries all go through the tips page. Tips can be anonymous, and every claim is verified against primary sources before anything is published.