Earlier editions of the print version of Eco have highlighted the very significant social, economic and environmental values of Pumicestone Passage and identified various threats to those values.

The Passage has values of international and national environmental significance under the Federal Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. These include major Ramsar wetlands; numerous international migratory bird species covered by bilateral agreements with Japan, Korea and China; and several land and marine threatened species such as the false water rat, dugong, turtle and possibly even the sawfish.

The Glasshouse Mountains National Landscape, a listed National Heritage Area, can be glimpsed from the Passage and adds greatly to its overall scenic values. However, the Passage is also a mecca for recreational fishermen, boaties and for swimmers looking for sheltered waters. It underpins Caloundra’s tourist accommodation and hospitality industries, fishing and boat supply businesses, and several ecotourism businesses like boat cruises and kayaking. Lindsay Holt reports.

This “jewel in the crown” of the Coast’s natural assets is now threatened by the wrong-headed decision of State Infrastructure and Planning Minister, Stirling Hinchliffe, to use his ministerial powers to fast-track urban development of Stockland’s Caloundra South site through a Structure Plan process he has forced upon the Sunshine Coast Council. On 2 September he went even further by calling-in the Stockland’s Bellvista Stage 2 development application and threatened to call-in the Caloundra South Structure Plan if Council didn’t take a decision on the Structure Plan in an impossibly short timeframe.

Stockland’s Caloundra South development and other potential future urban developments

Important infrastructure agreements and sustainability requirements remain to be resolved and are at stake. The Minister used simplistic and highly questionable arguments to justify his interventions, which deprive residents of the Sunshine Coast and our Council representatives of a fair chance to decide our own future and achieve sustainable outcomes.

Minister Hinchliffe is fast-tracking Caloundra South as a development of a city about the size of Gladstone, comprising a minimum of 22,000 dwellings for a minimum of 46,000 people in the Bells Creek catchment of the Passage, and featuring a major retail and commercial hub.  This is in addition to an estimated 9,450 dwellings and 19,755 population in current and future planned development in the adjoining Lamerough Creek catchment of the Passage.

The total urban population in the Lamerough and Bells Creek catchments will therefore be about 66,000 – that’s equivalent to creating a city one and a half times the size of Gladstone on the southern boundary of Caloundra. It’s also equivalent to the total population of the Caloundra City Council area just 13 years ago in 1997! Just imagine all those people plus the holiday-makers, tourists and day-trippers wanting to fish and go boating in the Passage and swimming at Bulcock and Kings Beaches and beaches like Moffat, Shelly, Dicky and Currimundi that are within easy range.

On top of this, urban expansion is proposed for Beerwah, Landsborough and the Glasshouse Mountains township, while Minister Hinchliffe’s current SEQ Regional Plan includes future urban areas for the Stockland’s landholding in the sensitive Halls Creek catchment below Caloundra South, and for land astride the CAMCOS rail corridor between Beerwah and Caloundra South.

But it’s also necessary to consider the urban development and population growth occurring down in the Moreton Bay Regional Council area because these communities utilise Deception Bay and the Passage for recreational fishing, boating and swimming, and these urban developments are in Deception Bay catchments. An industrial estate is planned north of Elimbah, while Hinchliffe’s SEQ Regional Plan includes the West Caboulture future urban area, which is much larger than the combined size of the Stockland’s Caloundra South and Caloundra South Halls Creek landholdings and can therefore produce far greater population pressures on the Passage.

The existing Caboulture urban areas, the numerous bayside urban areas, and the future West Caboulture and Elimbah urban and industrial developments are all in catchments flowing into northern Deception Bay, which in recent years has had a D- to Fail rating under the Healthy Waterways monitoring program.

In the last decade or so these Deception Bay catchments have also seen significant intensive rural industry developments such as strawberry growing and poorly regulated egg and poultry production industries, which are significant users of  groundwater, and agricultural and veterinary chemicals with potential to impact water quality and activate acid sulphate soils.

The poor water quality in Deception Bay affects water quality in the Passage significantly because there is a net northerly tidal movement from the Bay into the Passage. It then takes up to 23 days for water originating in Deception Bay to exit at the Caloundra bar. If the shallow, warm, sunlit, slow moving water in the Passage contains sediment, other nutrients and iron compounds there’s an ideal recipe for algal blooms and outbreaks of the toxic fireweed Lyngbya that has closed down swimming, fishing and boating in Deception Bay and the southern Passage in recent years.

Other indications that the Passage and Deception Bay are under ecological and recreational stress are declines in fish stocks, sea grasses, dugong, turtles and macroinvertebrates.

Through Minister Hinchliffe’s fast-tracking of the Caloundra South Structure Plan and Bellvista 2 processes and the enormous scale of the potential future urban development he built into his SEQ Regional Plan, the Minister has created the greatest urban planning, environment and sustainability issue on the Coast in a decade. Pumicestone Passage has never before faced such an extreme assault on its social, economic and environmental sustainability.

Instead of taking a precautionary approach, the Minister has so far pushed hard for planning approval for Caloundra South without having first required comprehensive sustainability studies to be undertaken and completed that can determine whether the Passage can accommodate the various off-site and cumulative impacts that this and other urban development in its catchment will have.  E.g.  the Minister is not waiting for the outcome of the studies the Queensland Water Commission recently commenced into regional water resources, water quality and hydrology. These studies will produce information pertinent to sustainably managing Pumicestone Passage and the acceptability of the proposed Caloundra South development. The obvious question is: what’s the rush?

SCEC’s campaigner Annie Nolan said that: “The State Government did comprehensive studies of Pumicestone Passage back in 1982 and 1993. By the time of the 1993 study the State and local Councils had already approved urban development producing a population greater than the 75,000 limit for the catchment recommended in the 1982 study. There has been an appalling lack of political will at all levels to limit the off-site and cumulative impacts of urban development and population growth on the Passage. Such negligent disregard for the ecological sustainability of a natural wonder of international and national significance cannot continue. Without contemporary comprehensive studies of the Passage it’s not possible for any level of government to decide the merits of the proposed Caloundra South development, nor any other future development in the Pumicestone Passage and the related northern Deception Bay catchments.

Left to right : Rob King, Jim Pulsford, Deane Haspel, and SCEC campaigner Annie Nolan examining plans for Stockland’s Caloundra South development.

That’s why SCEC organised a familiarisation boat trip for candidates in the recent Federal Election and placed ads in regional newspapers asking for their response to three questions relating to the impacts of Caloundra South on the Passage, whether the Queensland Government should approve that development without Federal environmental studies being completed, and whether they would work to ensure the Queensland Government has all the necessary studies in place prior to giving any approvals. The responses of the candidates are on www.50000people.com.au, but in summary the Greens, the LNP candidates for Longman, Fisher and Fairfax and many independent candidates supported doing studies before approvals are given, but the Labor candidates either did not reply or avoided commitment.

Premier Bligh claims she is listening to what the public is saying. The Sunshine Coast public and its elected regional Council have made it abundantly clear that they oppose rampant population growth and want sustainable development, not development at any cost. The Bligh Government and Minister Hinchliffe in particular must listen to what the public is saying on this issue and reverse the Government’s  present extreme views on developing Caloundra South and ignoring the ecological sustainability of the Passage.

Comprehensive sustainability studies must be done before any decisions are taken by the State Government on Caloundra South, Bellvista 2 and the last stage of Pelican Waters.  Commonwealth E.P.B.C. Act environmental impact assessment requirements should also be met before any State decisions are made – or the Bligh Government faces another Traveston Dam fiasco.”

Nettie Palmer was born and bred in Melbourne and alive to the differences between the Sunshine and the south. She, too, was city reared so conscious in the process of attunement when she moved to Caloundra in 1925 with her husband and children. She like him lived by her pen and wrote much about the region. Here she reflects:

Some people have been telling me that when we first came to Caloundra, two years ago, we meant to stay for six weeks. I have had to ask myself why, considering we can live anywhere within reach of a reliable post office, we have stayed so long. What I am really asking is how anybody could find so much in Caloundra to see no reason for leaving it in two years and more.

Charming! But how?
You remember perhaps that old-fashioned game in which you said, “I love my love with an A, because she is – Amiable; her name is Arabella; and she lives in America. Caloundra I can only begin the same way: I love my place with a C because it is – charming; its name is Caloundra; and it lives on the north coast. But what does that mean, to be charming? Well, there is a tradition that the blacks’ meaning of the name they gave to this place was just “beautiful in every way”. I hope that is true: it surely ought to be. To say that Caloundra is beautiful in every way is to say a great deal, for it ways are so many. It is as if you had an eight-pointed star and said it was beautiful in all its points. Let me try to explain some of Caloundra’s many ways in which she is beautiful.

Caloundra gives great glimpses of beauty even to those who have not much time to spare. On the humdrum day when one task follows another, there are always moments when a single glance can take the breath with beauty. There are, first, the calm bright water of vast Bribie Passage, spreading like a lake in front of the fishing village part of Caloundra. Calm as those waters are, they are never monotonous. Their colours change all day long. There are immense sand-banks near the opening, with a deep channel skirting them. These sand-banks are sometimes hidden, sometimes covered with just a film of water so shallow that it is pale amethyst, sometimes bared and golden, with people fishing from them by line and net. The Passage itself is bordered by well-wooded curves of coast, both along the mainland, where it is broken by creeks, and on Bribie Island, that long slip of land parallel with the coast for thirty miles. When you are on the flat of Caloundra and look southward down the Passage, you would hardly guess that Bribie was an island at all. You accept it simply as one shore of an exquisite lake – a noticeably untouched shore only marked by two lighthouses about seven miles from the Caloundra end. That is Bribie Passage, for an everyday glimpse; you see it always over a stretch of live, clinging grass, very green.

Inland – On the same day, without leaving the Flat, you may let your eye wander inland to the bush and the flower-plain. Not a couple of hundred yards from the Passage there are often enough wattle trees and ti-trees to encourage birds, and I have never heard more and sweeter bush birds than here. Without being a learned ornithologist, I have gradually come to know many of them, as one comes know the look and voice of a loved friend. Shall I name some? The little golden whistler come, with his song, for which the line, “linked sweetness long drawn out” must surely have been written! The yellow robinii with his two different songs is here nowadays he has, you know, his dawn-song, like two notes of a stringed instrument, that made Gould name him “Harp of the Dawn”. Then he has his day song, a sweet little run, ending with his dawn note uttered once, as his sign manual. Then come the grey thrush, called harmonica, but her song, especially on an evening after rain, would take a chapter to describe. Her cousins, the butcher birds, have an exquisite yodel, in spite of their way of life. As for the magpies, they are rare here, but delightful. Beyond this first belt of trees, though, are some open plains, known as the flower plains, and with good reason. Caloundra flowers were winners in this year’s field Naturalist’ exhibition, and on the plains there are flowers of some kind all the year [... ] series of months that are said to be spring. Just now it is the turn of Christmas bell, shining wide apart like little scarlet and yellow lamps. Whenever I think of this inward part of Caloundra I remember the desire of the poet, W.H. Davies, to live in a cottage facing the sea,

And having, on the other hand,
A glowery, green, bird-singing land.

Up hill
But still you have not seen Caloundra! To see it for what I really is, you must climb the hill, that is, the ridge a little inshore leading up to the lighthouse. If I could, I would bandage your eyes until you reached the top and then say, “Look!” when you stood on the road outside the lighthouse-post office. Look south first. You see to the left a wide ocean, running into Moreton Bay, itself a bay so wide as to be bounded only by Moreton Island which shows like a line of phantom mountains on the east. Looking south, you see beyond a narrow opening, Bribie Island, running curved for thirty mile of ocean surf and indented on its inner side for its edging of the great Passage. You see at this end of the Passage the idyllic picture of a small fishing-port with white boats at anchor and small homes on low, grassy cliffs. You see, inland, twenty miles and more away, the incredible forms of those hills known as the Glasshouse Mountain, each rising separately from the tree-covered plain, in form of pyramid and dome and even a broken column. Geologist explain Captain Cook may well have been bewildered when, sailing as he did along the outside of Moreton Island, he caught sight of those domes and called them “The Glasshouses”. I like to think that he perhaps imagined that some giant race lived in this odd continent and made itself lofty pleasure house with domes 1,700 feet high! After all, though, nothing made by the hand of man could be more impressive than those 13 Glasshouses as seen from the Lighthouse Hill at Caloundra.

Holidays
There is not time, though, to tell you what you can see when you face the other point of the compass. I forgot that I was speaking of an ordinary day, with only odd moments to spare. You need some of the special whole day experiments, for knowing Caloundra. The point is that when one lives here one is always on the spot for a holiday; there is no time wasted in getting there when “there” is here if you understand. One can run out for a dip in the Passage and lunch a la billie, or one can take a long summer’s day and stretch it at both ends and then feel that there was not time enough to answer all the delicious invitations of the place. Caloundra itself is immense, with several headlands and varied bays; when I have brought people here and led them about they have said, “Is this still called Caloundra?”

Caloundra South is just one of the many developments that the state government is promoting and fast-tracking to accommodate its agenda of growth.  With a projected population of almost half a million people for the Sunshine Coast by 2031, the state government is demanding another 98,000 dwellings through a combination of greenfield sites and infill of existing developed areas across the Sunshine Coast. With largely committed development, on paper, we have already reached a population of 500,000, and the state could yet demand more.

Caloundra South has been a target for development for some time. The area is about 2,360 hectares of greenfield, or undeveloped land, located south of the established Caloundra urban area, the Caloundra aerodrome and to the west of Pelican Waters.

The proposed development site, Caloundra South

This area was first identified as a potential development area following the outcomes of the Caloundra Downs Informal Land Use Investigation in 2002.  This ‘investigation’ was sponsored by the landowner, which obviously raises the question of bias.

Thirty-one technical studies considered the biophysical aspects of this proposal and a study of the community identified the importance of environment and natural features to the image and character of the Sunshine Coast.  Yet how will this image and character be maintained in an urban centre stretching from Caloundra South to Noosa in the north?

In 2005 the Caloundra City Local Growth Management Strategy (CCLGMS) was developed in accordance with the South East Queensland Regional Plan. The regional plan identified Caloundra South as an investigation area.  Such an area was defined as broad hectare land which is currently undeveloped but is included in the SEQ Regional Plan Urban Footprint and intended for future urban development.
However the Caloundra growth management study was never endorsed by the responsible minister and the state government.  How the population of 50,000, the number of dwellings and the densities for this area were determined is unclear. There is certainly no indication of community input, let alone acceptance of a city the size of the Gladstone on the southern entrance to the Sunshine Coast.

The CCLGMS stated that the Caloundra South and the Palmview greenfield areas could only start after 2018, or before 2018 if public transport and other infrastructure was already in place.  This included that a key component such as the proposed public transport corridor between Beerwah and the Kawana Town Centre be operational within the first two years of the development starting.

Other pre-conditions included:

• the provision of a water recycling system
• the commencement of the first stages of the development of the Caloundra Aerodrome Transit Oriented Community Areas
• commencement of the approved ecological rehabilitation program

Despite these requirements, in June 2008 the state government’s South East Queensland Greenfield Land Supply Review identified Caloundra South and Palmview as two priority development areas to increase the supply and affordability of land in southeast Queensland.

The Sunshine Coast Regional Council was required to make Caloundra South and Palmview “developer ready” within 12 months and in response developed the Caloundra South Position Paper and Structure Plan.

Whilst the Council has incorporated many sustainability initiatives within the confines of the development, there has been no assessment of the impact of 50,000 extra people on the region as a whole.  We do not know the sustainable carrying capacity of the region, let alone the rate at which such growth can be effectively introduced into the region without degrading the natural values, the character and livability of the Sunshine Coast.

No studies have discussed the impacts upon areas such as the fragile Pumicestone Passage. The internationally recognised Ramsar sites, the water quality of the catchment and marine life of the Pumicestone Passage, will be no doubt face negative impacts.

Imagine an extra 50,000 residents using the beaches of the Sunshine Coast coupled with the exponential increase in day trippers as the rest of southeast Queensland creeps towards a population of nearly four million.

Can the very attributes that make the Sunshine Coast so popular be maintained under such population pressure or is the Coast, now more than ever, at risk of being “loved to death”?

Our roads are already showing signs of over crowding. And there is no guarantee that the state government will provide the requisite public transport infrastructure for Caloundra South which will create a greater car dependency and increased traffic load.

The Caloundra South development will have a four-kilometre road frontage on the Bruce Highway. The proposed solution, of building a 200-metre buffer, will do nothing to shield the eye sore of seven-storey buildings.  The new ‘welcome to the Sunshine Coast’ will be one of urbanisation and high rises, and as a result we are surely losing the very attributes that have attracted residents and visitors alike.

Parts of the Caloundra South Structure Plan Area are subject to periodic inundation. Yet the Caloundra South Position Paper has identified that land subject to inundation may be considered where the development meets the flood management plan and ‘overriding benefit’ criteria.

The flood modelling for this development, has actually utilised the 2007 IPCC reports. And as we already know, we may in fact be heading towards severe climate change events, especially in low-lying coastal areas.

It leads to the question: Who will bear the liability for the approval of development on land increasingly at risk?

While the state has foisted this obviously fast-tracked development on the Sunshine Coast community, it is recognised that the Council has endeavoured to include sustainability initiatives.  Surely, there can be no consideration of a development of any size unless such requirements are mandatory.  While we continue to look at each individual development in isolation of the bigger picture, we will be sliding towards a ‘death by a thousand cuts’, leaving nothing but gaping wounds.

Unless the Sunshine Coast and hinterland is considered as a whole, along with its sustainable carrying capacity, we are missing an opportunity for future sustainability.  Sustainable development is not about cramming as many people into as small an area as possible and relying on so called ‘technofixes’.  Rather, it is about identifying the natural and social attributes of the Sunshine Coast that must be protected into the future.   An agenda of growth for growth’s sake will surely result in the irrevocable loss of biodiversity and the very character that makes this area so unique.

***

What has the Sunshine Coast Environment Council got to say on on Caloundra South? Their position paper can be viewed at the SCEC website

Walking back in time. Image: greghardwick.com.au

The Sunshine Coast was home to two gifted writers, Vance and Nettie Palmer, from 1925. In those days when few white people were exploring  the bush, they were out most days, glorying in the earth and sea and sky.

These were the years of their daughters growing, running free among the heath and sheoaks; the time of struggling as poets and freelance writers to find a voice and to write of the land; the time of learning how to get across their political message about how the bush was being whacked, and how a sheoak is not a sheoak unless the child is reared to name and love it.

The Palmers went on to be one of Australia’s most important literary couples in the 1940s and ’50s. Vance was novelist, dramatist, cultural critic and political commentator; Nettie was journalist, literary critic, historian, biographer and essayist. Some of you will know Vance’s  novel The Passage.

Through their early environmental writings, drawing directly on their experiences, we can begin to see another dimension of our landscape, of our society in transition from the pristine environment while cared for only by Aboriginal custodians to the skyscrapers of the present. This early piece by Vance was written for the Daily Mail (3 October, 1925).

There is something in the liquid beauty of the name [Caloundra] that suits the place for the vowels fall on the ear like the musical dripping of water. In coming here, I was personally prepared for beauty, but hardly for such variety in its forms. There are the rocks that run out from the little headland, for instance, a perfect wonderland in themselves. When the tide is out, it is possible to spend endless hours exploring the little pools that have been left behind, some still and clear as dew-drops, others receiving continual little frehets of water and swarming with all kinds of marine life…

Gorgeous anemones, red and green, spread out their flower-like tentacles, cowries are hidden in the fissures: and in the wide, shallow pools the beche-de-mer lies like a harvest of black cucumbers, whose vines have mysteriously vanished. Here is all the life and colour of a coral reef. Peering into the still pools one sees fantastic patterns like those woven on Chinese cloths delicate tracings in black and heliotrope that seem part of a deliberate design. Occasionally under a ledge of rock an octopus finds cover, an image of absolute evil in its startling green and orange, with the white disc-like suckers showing vividly against the colour of its waving tentacles. Looking at it, one suddenly discovers where the Chinese artist got their idea of a dragon from. Indeed Chinese art must have found a good deal of its inspiration in the marine life of places like this. There are the delicate colourings, the grotesque shapes, the sense of an intense, unreal world of beauty and monstrosity.

Rowing over to Bribie across the still water, one enters another world that is just as absorbing in its own way. The boat noses against a tangled beach that is lined with a thin strip of sand, with the water running green, and deep quite close to shore. A paradise for fishermen, especially those of the amateur kind. On lucky days one will find the bream and whiting swarming round the bait as soon as it is thrown into the water. There is no need of the infinite patience and cunning that comes of long years of angling in less populous waters. They say that fishing was once a still easier business at Caloundra, and that continual netting at the mouth of the passage has spoilt the place from the angler’s point of view.

That may be so, but every place has the legend of a golden past, even when the present is brightly-coloured enough.

From the other side of the island comes the boom of the surf, tempting one through the trackless growths of scrub. A tangled, semi-tropical scrub, filled with birds. Even the grey harmonica is here, that sweetest singer of all our birds, that seems to belong to the cool, fern gullies of the South. From one side of the island to the other is barely a hundred yards in places, yet so dense is the scrub, so primitive and secret, that it seems to mark a division between two different worlds. One emerges at last on the blinding white ocean beach, with the sense of having made a journey of exploration.

This end of Bribie that abuts on Caloundra will ultimately become one of the chief playgrounds of Queensland, if not of the whole Commonwealth, and it should be kept as a rigid sanctuary for native birds and animals. There is still plenty of wild life on it. As we push off from the shore, a grey kangaroo stands by the waters edge as motionless as a figure carved in stone, looking at the boat with wondering eyes. Suddenly it is gone, thudding through the dense, brittle scrub and startling the birds. Overhead comes a flight of swans, formed in a phalanx. Their long necks stretched out and their heads turned to the settling sun. Hardly a drip comes from the oars as they lift from the still water. It is all magically beautiful, and ought to be allowed to remain undisturbed for the next hundred years a paradise from which guns are barred, or any other weapon more deadly than a scout knife of a fish-hook.

Can any-one tell us does the Grey Harmonica still inhabit Bribie, or has any-one seen the beche-de-mer?