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I spent the long weekend with my gorgeous grand-daughter Sonoma to celebrate her turning six months. My daughter has been taking her to swimming lessons which is a joy to see. No flinging her in the deep end but a structured program to build her confidence and get her water safe. She now goes underwater and seems to love it. My son and daughter learned to swim early as we lived in Hawaii and Asia with easy access to pools. And their Dad was a swimming instructor in the Peace Corps in Medan in Indonesia and helped the Indonesian swim team at the Atlanta Olympics.
I am following closely the campaign to help Byron’s Belongil Beach survive. Once again it has been devastated by the recent storm (let’s call it a cyclone) and we are in serious danger of losing the beach completely – for good. I have always wondered why council prohibits residents from shoring up their beachside properties with rocks but allows the council owned caravan park to do so as a temporary measure.
A solid rock wall might not save the beach. Wiser heads tell me that the construction of a rock wall creates a hard surface that does not absorb the force of the waves in the manner that a wide, gradual-sloped beach does. Instead, it rebounds the force back to the ocean. In the process, it takes any sand remaining on the portion of beach between the rock wall and high tide out to sea. The net result is that, after the rock wall has served its purpose for a couple of large storms, there will no longer be a "beach" along Belongil Beach, only rock walls standing. So the whole town will lose a public beach and the town will flood. Would Lismore, Grafton or Murwillumbah councils allow their levee walls to erode or would they shore them up for the benefit of the community they are elected to serve?
Cheers
Di’s latest book The Islands, published by Pan Macmillan, is now on sale.
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