ABC and BBC One · the second spin-off of Death in Paradise · created by Peter Mattessi, James Hall and Robert Thorogood
Where was Return to Paradise filmed?
In May 2024, the week the crew was filming at a bowls club in Wombarra, Peter Mattessi described the viewer he was hoping for. They watch an episode and turn to their partner: the holiday they have booked for next September, or whenever, could be there. They look up where Dolphin Cove is, find Austinmer and suggest going. Mattessi, who created Return to Paradise with James Hall and Robert Thorogood, said it was almost a joke and that he half meant it. His dream was a page in the Qantas in-flight magazine about the real Dolphin Cove.
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places on the route
The Illawarra coast north of Wollongong, and Sydney's northern beaches about 70 km further north — switch with the buttons above. Click a point to jump to its entry.
Where is Return to Paradise filmed? In Australia, mostly on the Illawarra coast south of Sydney, in the old mining villages along the shore north of Wollongong. The viewer who finds Austinmer has found a main street of Dolphin Cove, not the whole of it. Mattessi comes from Melbourne, and this stretch of coast was new to him. He found beaches, the escarpment, ocean pools, trees and charming houses there, and he says that spiritually Dolphin Cove is the Illawarra. What the production could not quite find was a surf club and a house for Mack, so the town was melded with parts of Sydney's northern beaches: the surf club is at Bilgola, 82 kilometres north of Austinmer on the far side of Sydney, and the house is in Avalon. Interiors, the police station's among them, are mostly shot in studios in Sydney.
Austinmer, Wombarra, Coledale, Thirroul, Stanwell Park and the Sea Cliff Bridge all stand on or just off one road, Lawrence Hargrave Drive, within about eleven kilometres of each other, and all six can be visited: a main street, a working bowls club, beaches, a bridge with a footpath. On the other side of the world, Ardal O'Hanlon filmed his brief scenes as Mack's boss in London.
Where is Dolphin Cove?
Dolphin Cove is invented. There is a beach of that name in Australia's Cape Arid National Park, and a Dolphin Cove in Jamaica, and neither has anything to do with the show. The ABC pictures it as a classic Australian beach town: golden sand, a sheltered cove where the locals swim and surf every morning, the escarpment behind. For Mack, who walked out six years earlier and left her fiancé at the altar, it is the last place she wants to be. Anna Samson, who plays her, says the hard part of the role is that none of the scenery impresses Mack, and that this is also the fun of it. The crew might be shooting with real whales breaching in the background, everyone losing their minds, the camera operators scrambling to catch them, and Mack in the middle, not caring. At least one of the town's streets is real.
Austinmer, from the railway station to Lawrence Hargrave Drive. A public street.
Mattessi says the production used Moore Street as a main street for Dolphin Cove, and that it gives the feel of the town. It runs from Austinmer's railway station, where the trains from Sydney stop, to the beach: a broad street under trees, weatherboard houses along it, the escarpment behind and the sea at the end. Old Austinmer still calls the coast road the main road, and it is the busier of the two, but the shops, the school and the churches are mostly on Moore Street.
On 8 March 2024 residents had a letter warning that a junction on the street would be blocked off for a day of filming, with stop-go traffic control, and parking bays were barricaded the night before. As shooting got under way that month, the street had already given the crew three places: the old Uniting church, the corner where Slade Street comes in, and Moore Lane, a narrow lane behind the street. According to the Illawarra Mercury, Moore Street and two lanes near it are a heritage conservation area, and the church and the shops where the crew was to film are heritage listed in their own right.
578 Lawrence Hargrave Drive, Wombarra, 3.7 km up the coast from Moore Street. A working club with a volunteer board.
The Scarborough Wombarra Bowling Club, the Bowlo to its regulars, plays the Dolphin Cove Bowling Club: a bowls club playing a bowls club, with the Wombarra signs kept out of the frame. In one of the first season's stories a body turns up right on its green. The crew came in May 2024, in weather more British than Australian, and shot inside the clubhouse. Nick Bolton, who chairs Screen Illawarra, the local screen group that helped the production find its locations, went along on the Bowlo day and remembers loads of extras.
The club opened in 1956, and volunteers make up its board. It was built, as its new president Gary O'Sullivan put it in 2024, by miners, fisherfolk, mothers and market gardeners. It is known for its original interior and its views of the coast and the escarpment, and its new manager wants to keep it entirely original while improving it for the people who use it. That is the kind of place the production designer, Emma Fletcher, says she went looking for: old bowls clubs, surf clubs on the beach and ocean pools, a postcard of Australia made by people who felt like tourists.
The coast road
Lloyd Griffith recommends the train down this coast: always on time, which he says is enough to make a Brit weep, and some of the finest landscape he has seen from a carriage window. Anna Samson says drive it. The road is Lawrence Hargrave Drive, part of the Grand Pacific Drive. It comes down the escarpment at Bald Hill, passes Stanwell Park and Coalcliff, crosses the Sea Cliff Bridge, and runs south through Clifton, Scarborough, Wombarra, Coledale and Austinmer to Thirroul.
Sea Cliff Bridge
The Sea Cliff Bridge in early morning sun on 23 January 2015, curving out on concrete piers from the foot of the sandstone cliffs, above a shelf of rock at the water's edge.
Lawrence Hargrave Drive between Coalcliff and Clifton, 7 km up the coast from Moore Street. Open to cars, bikes and people on foot.
There are shots of the bridge in the show, Anna Samson says, and lots of car adverts are filmed on it.
The bridge stands off the cliff on concrete piers, up to 70 metres seaward of where the road used to run. The old road clung to the rock face and was closed for good in August 2003 because rocks kept falling on it. The bridge opened in December 2005, and stretches of the old road are still there under the trees, guard rail and all, with boulders lying across them. Its name came from a competition for local primary school children. The winner was an eleven-year-old called Makenzie Russell.
The adverts were there long before Dolphin Cove. Ausfilm, which connects overseas productions with Australian locations, offers the bridge as a stand-in for the coastal drives of California.
Stanwell Park
Stanwell Park Beach on 11 November 2020, looking along the sand to the green headland, with surf breaking on the right and houses along the cliff top on the left.
Stanwell Park Beach Reserve, behind the beach, 10 km up the coast from Moore Street. A public park and beach.
The first season filmed at Stanwell Park as well, the last village before the coast road climbs out of the Illawarra. It sits in a small valley, closed in by Bald Hill on the north side, Stanwell Tops inland and Mount Mitchell on the south. Two creeks end in two lagoons, and the beach lies between the headlands. The reserve is the lawn behind the sand, with a playground and the surf club at its southern end.
Hang-gliders and paragliders take off from Bald Hill and come down on this beach. Lawrence Hargrave, the aviation pioneer the coast road is named after, lived in Stanwell Park and flew his devices off the same hill.
Thirroul Village, about a kilometre down the coast from Moore Street. Public streets.
Thirroul is the next village south of Austinmer, where the coast road meets the highway at the foot of Bulli Pass. Thirroul Village is named among the first season's Illawarra locations, but what was filmed there, nobody has said.
D. H. Lawrence stayed in Thirroul in 1922 and wrote Kangaroo in a bungalow above the Pacific. He described iron roofs huddled from the foot of the mountain down to the railway, and a black wall of cliff close behind.
Sydney's northern beaches
Bilgola and Avalon sit next to each other on the Barrenjoey Peninsula, with the ocean on one side and Pittwater on the other.
Bilgola Beach and the surf club
The Bilgola Surf Life Saving Club seen from the sand on 13 January 2011, with BILGOLA SLSC in black letters on a yellow board above the ground floor and bush on the slope behind.
The Serpentine, Bilgola Beach, 82 km north of Moore Street. A public beach with a working surf lifesaving club.
Dolphin Cove's surf club is the Bilgola Surf Life Saving Club, at the south end of the beach, between Newport and Avalon. The club dates from the summer of 1949, and the land behind the beach climbs steeply to the plateau.
Lloyd Griffith, who plays Colin, picks it as his favourite location: the surf club and the ocean pool beside it. He says he pinched himself every day they were dropped off there, and that when he is out of Australia his mind is in that pool.
Mack's house is in Avalon, the next beach north. Asked the same question, Anna Samson named the house, and then the studio, where no sudden shower or cockatoo can force another take.
Avalon Beach has had television crews before. In 1999 Baywatch filmed there with a plan to move the whole series in, and offered to do up the surf club; residents fought it, the council banned the production, and Baywatch went to Hawaii.
Careel Bay
Careel Bay at low tide on 4 April 2020: bare sand flats, a grassy foreshore under tall trees, and boats moored out on the water.
The Pittwater side of Avalon Beach, about 3 km north of the Bilgola surf club. A public foreshore. A day of filming was announced here; no report of the day itself has followed.
In May 2025 residents got a letter saying the second season would film at the bay on Wednesday the 14th and would need some of the street parking for the day.
Careel Bay is the other side of Avalon, facing Pittwater rather than the ocean. It has the largest stand of mangroves on Pittwater and wide flats at low tide, where shorebirds that breed in Siberia and Alaska feed through the southern summer. Its old name was Evening Bay. The bay is shared by Avalon Beach and Palm Beach, whose sand is Summer Bay in Home and Away.
Was any of it filmed in the UK?
Yes, in London. In the first season Mack's boss at the Met is Jack Mooney, Ardal O'Hanlon's detective from Death in Paradise, and they talk by phone: as Samson describes it, a phone rings, there is a shot of London, and then it is Mooney calling. She said in 2024 that she had never met O'Hanlon, because he filmed his scenes in London while she was shooting in Australia, and she has since called those scenes brief. Mack has a London of her own: after flying back to Dolphin Cove, she looks longingly at a weathercam of the city, grey and windy.
Cornwall belongs to the other spin-off. Beyond Paradise, Kris Marshall's series, is the one filmed in south-east Cornwall, with Looe playing a town the script puts in Devon. Nothing in what the BBC, the ABC and the cast have said about making Return to Paradise points to Cornwall.
Is Return to Paradise coming back in 2026?
A third season was being filmed in March 2026, and that month the ABC said it would screen later in the year, on the ABC and BBC One. The crew was back on Moore Street, at the Scout Hall and other spots along it, and on Wednesday 18 March moved up the coast to Coledale.
Coledale Beach and the campground
Coledale Beach on 7 March 2009, looking north along the coast under the escarpment, with a brick building and open grass on the left.
Coledale Beach, 2.7 km up the coast from Moore Street. A public beach; the surf club's campground beside it takes bookings.
The first season had filmed at Coledale too. This time the crew set up on the campground, the grass beside the beach that the Coledale surf club runs under a licence from the council to raise money. Anna Samson and Lloyd Griffith filmed there with Kerry Armstrong, who joins the cast in the third season.
The viewer Mattessi was hoping for, the one who looks up Dolphin Cove and suggests going, can book a site on the same grass. It runs right down to the sand, and rocky points at either end of the beach keep off the worst of the weather. Dolphins come in to play just offshore.
