THERE’S only one thing that’s worse than being talked about and that’s not being talked about.
And in the case of Inverloch’s beach erosion problems, it continually gets talked about whenever coastal erosion and the impacts of storm surge, sea level rise and climate change get an airing.
Last Thursday, January 23, it received prominence when ABC Melbourne’s Raf Epstein interviewed coastal geomorphologist from the University of Melbourne, Professor David Kennedy, co-lead of the Victorian Coastal Monitoring Program.
His comments were followed up in and extensive article in Saturday’s The Age newspaper by Bianca Hall entitled ‘Managed retreat: Should Australians withdraw from our beloved coastlines’.
Asked to highlight the coastal erosion hotspots in Victoria, Professor Kenndey ignored the much-publicised problems at McCrae on the Mornington Peninsula and nominated Port Fairy and Inverloch.
Inverloch’s problems we are familiar with. Port Fairy’s not so much but they’ve been through a similar community engagement process to our Cape-to-Cape Resilience Project.
As well as the storm surge and climate change issues, the problems for Port Fairy are complicated by the historic location of two former rubbish tips in sand dunes along East Beach, one managed by DEECA, the second owned by Moyne Shire Council.
There has been a long-running issue of hard rubbish, and worse, contaminated materials escaping into the beach and marine environment.
The community’s preference is to remove the waste from the dunes, acknowledging the significant costs and potential short-term environmental impacts.
The existence of a rock wall associated erosion problems is another issue for Port Fairy.
They are looking at many of the responses discussed at Inverloch, apart from retreat, including dune restoration and stabilisation, and a variety of so-called hard engineering options including timber pile fences, rock or geotube berm barriers, groynes, breakwaters and rock walls.
While Professor Kennedy said the problems at Inverloch largely emanated from natural causes, he was pretty direct in the ABC interview about the future of the Inverloch Surf Lifesaving Club.
He doubled down in The Age about residential retreat.
“For Inverloch, however, it's one of the spots where we can't actually point the finger on a particular planning decision, apart from the fact that the surf club is built too close to the coast. It’s a lot more about natural processes moving things around,” said Professor Kennedy of the impact on the beach and sand dunes.
“Is the surf club in the wrong place at Inverloch?” asked Raf Epstein.
“Yes, when you look where the rest of the houses are, they're all back behind Surf Parade, whereas the surf club is right, well, it's now right at the dunes. It was a bit further back originally, but you always build your surf clubs close to the beach anyway, because they're there to save lives.”
“Are we making things worse with planning decisions?” asked Raf.
“In a lot of cases, we are. I mean, we've got climate change, sea levels rising, storms are changing the dynamics of that, but a lot of the erosion problems we see are hangovers from poor development decisions going back 150 years, which were done with good intentions. But even today, we're still building in the current hazard zone at a great rate of knots,” said Professor Kennedy.
Local councils, he said, had inherited the tough job of trying to deal with it.
“Of course, when the hazard zones go out, everyone immediately zooms down to their property. I think the councils are then stuck in a hard place,” he said, noting they had to bear the brunt of decisions to retreat from these areas.
Speaking to The Age, Professor said Australians love affair with beachfront developments had to change.
“We’re going to have to look at managed retreat,” he said.
“We can’t keep building in the current hazard zone, let alone the future one. And we’re building more and more stuff in the current hazard zone.”
Property research group CoreLogic estimates that $25 billion worth of Australian residential coastal property, upwards of 12,694 houses and 9441 units are in the firing line but that number could be higher.
Coastal erosion, they say, will have tangible effects on property valuations, home loan viability and insurance premiums.
The Age quotes other experts who say coastal communities have two options, retreat or adapt.
“When you adapt to it, you build [sea] walls, and that kind of creates a systemic problem and an ongoing one: it stops the house falling in the ocean but creates problems everywhere else,” said Bond University PhD student Mark Ellis, who co-authored the paper on the impact on coastal communities with associate professor of urban planning Dr Bhishna Bajracharya.
Inverloch homeowners, in the hazard zone, have rejected the retreat option, recently forming the Inverloch Foreshore Action Group to fight for their rights.
But the surf lifesaving club, potentially one storm surge away from disaster, has no back-up plan either.
“Where would we go? What would we do with our stuff?” asked President of the Inverloch Surf Lifesaving Club, Glenn Arnold.
“We don’t have a position on retreat. It’s a last resort,” he said.
“There are an enormous number of options for us before we get to that which need to be acted on,” he said.
These not only include the $3.3 million worth of dune and beach renourishment works funded by the Australian Government's Coastal and Estuarine Risk Mitigation Program in 2022 but also the kind of ‘hard engineering’ options considered in both the Cape-to-Cape research and as part of the response at Port Fairy.
But he acknowledged that the club needed a back-up plan in the event there was another storm surge impacting the foundations of the clubhouse.
“We have a meeting on Monday with the community groups which have a seat at the table with DEECA; the ITA (Inverloch Tourism Association), surf club, South Gippsland Conservation Society and representatives of IFAG, where those issues will be discussed.”
Glenn Morris, President of the ITA said the community had the surf club’s back.
“The call for immediate funding to protect the surf club has been widely supported within the community, including the Inverloch Tourism Association,” said Mr Morris.
Editor’s note: Whether it’s replacement or extension of the geo-textile bags currently protecting the clubhouse, or other options for groynes, breakwaters and rock walls to provide on-going protection, a decision needs to be made now, not when the next storm surge hits and there’s a mad scramble to save the facility. If government has instead accepted that the clubhouse will be lost, they should say so and make alternative arrangements in consultation with the Bass Coast Shire Council and the local community.
