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Urban development threatens bayside land Hands off our coast GEOFFREY GOODE Geelong is much closer to Port Phillip Bay than Melbourne is. Geelong's urban core has a much more human scale still, and it is right on the Port Phillip coast. So is the extensive treed public open space of Geelong's Eastern Park. That fine park benefits by being on high contoured land. Visitors there gain, in peaceful surroundings, an impressive view of the western-most part of Port Phillip, and of its sheltered, indented shoreline. By contrast Melbourne offers a flat coastline almost entirely built over. It is to the Bay's benefit that Melbourne's high-rise centre is four kilometres away, and is not on high land. Geelong is blessed by high grade coastal bird habitat in saltmarsh areas eastwards from places as close as Limeburners Bay and Newcomb. The Australian Government has given that coastal land international status under the Ramsar Convention, but constant vigilance by Geelong people and our major Member Organization, the Geelong Environment Council Inc, is still an important part of ensuring its long term safety. That Convention was recently a factor in saving the Point Lillias peninsula from being used for a huge chemical storage facility that Melbourne interests wanted to relocate. People in Geelong know that some of Corio Bay's most neglected shoreline is the stretch between Rippleside Park and Geelong Grammar. The southern part is marred by ugly landfill and rock dumped for sundry boating facilities. The northern part is the legacy of an attitude to port development that took scant account of environmental considerations. As various interest groups are promoting an ever-increasing population for Geelong, it is important that planners work to restore damaged areas, and to protect its coastal areas, and the views of them and from them. These areas are vulnerable to being covered with developments that could just as well go on non-coastal land. Any such areas lost as coastal public open space will become impossibly expensive to recover. Aerial photographs of the coast of western Port Phillip (www.vicnet.net.au/~phillip) taken by Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc. have supported worthwhile plans by the Victorian Government and Alcoa to restore and protect the coastal vegetation and bird nesting habitat at Point Henry harmed by haphazard driving there. They have highlighted needs to tackle unauthorized or inappropriate structures on public foreshores at Werribee, Avalon, Leopold and Curlewis. They have also made very clear the badly eroded state of cliffs on the Bellarine Peninsula backed closely by long-cleared agricultural land. Those cliffs keep eroding, and harbour many invasive weeds. Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc. strongly opposes proposals by motoring and estate agent interests for a road bridge or tunnel across Corio Bay. It is easy to see that a bridge would be detrimental to users of the land and waters surrounding it, but a tunnel, though seemingly more harmless, would have the same intensively urbanizing effect on the whole of the Bellarine Peninsula as a bridge. An issue the Conservation Council has identified as being unrecognized by our public authorities is the lack of a clear policy to retain as open rural space, in the public interest, the very few large parcels of coastal open space that still remain around Port Phillip. The Bay should not be reduced to just an urban lagoon, fringed by parcels of land that are becoming ever more closely subdivided and intensively developed so that none of the Bay's earlier ambience remains. The Bellarine Peninsula coast is being fragmented rapidly. Highly appealing coastal landscapes, such as that at Spray
Farm, Portarlington, are at serious risk of being lost to development
of mundane
rows
of housing almost at the water's edge.
Geoffrey Goode is president of the Port Phillip Conservation Council Inc.
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