Evans Head river-and-surf cottage

This 80 square-metre fibro cottage occupies a corner block in Evans Head, a small holiday town on the New South Wales Northern Rivers coast, half an hour south of Ballina and an hour from Byron Bay. The house is the real thing: a 1950s beach shack with painted fibro walls, casement windows, a wide covered deck built off the living room, polished hardwood floors and a corrugated roof. Two bedrooms plus an enclosed sleep-out that takes another two beds, one bathroom, an outdoor shower for rinsing off boards and a carport with room for a boat. The block is fenced, planted with frangipani and a mature mango tree.

Evans Head is what the Northern Rivers looked like before Byron went global. There are no high-rises, no traffic lights on the main street, and the town's population of about 3,000 doubles at Christmas and then goes quiet again. Prices here still sit roughly half of comparable Byron Shire stock while the beaches are arguably better. Freehold title, standard NSW conveyancing through a solicitor or licensed conveyancer; foreign buyers require FIRB approval and pay the NSW surcharge purchaser duty.

Three hundred metres one way is the Evans River — flat, tidal, warm water where families swim, kids learn to fish for bream and flathead, and stand-up paddlers head upstream in the morning. Four hundred metres the other way is Main Beach, a long, clean, patrolled stretch of golden sand with a reliable beach break and, at the northern end, the Razorback lookout over the Bundjalung coast. Behind town, Bundjalung National Park runs uninterrupted for 20 kilometres of undeveloped beach, wetland and littoral rainforest — you can walk for hours and see nobody.

Day to day the town has an IGA, a bakery, a butcher, a pharmacy, a bottle shop, a doctor, a primary school and the Evans Head Bowling Club and Surf Club, both of which do cheap meals with a view. The Illawong Hotel does pub food and live music in summer; Cardiff's and a couple of café-bakeries handle coffee and breakfast. Larger shopping, hospital services and the high school are in Ballina or Lismore, both around 35–45 minutes away.

Access is unusually good for a town this quiet: Ballina Byron Gateway Airport is 35 minutes north with direct daily flights to Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane; Gold Coast Airport is 90 minutes. The Pacific Motorway bypasses town, so through-traffic never arrives. Buses connect to Ballina and Grafton; the Casino XPT rail station is an hour inland.

For a buyer who wants the classic Australian east-coast beach-shack lifestyle — warm water, patrolled surf, a river for the kids, a fishing club and an airport within reach — Evans Head remains one of the last genuinely affordable entries on the NSW north coast.