Yes they've done it again.

The shire that is. We've had Maurice Avenue beautified. Amongst other plants they've gone for Kangaroo Paws and what looks suspiciously like Cootamundra Wattles. Lovely plants in West Australia and New South Wales but as out of place here as their grotesque break wall proposal.

And like the whole ocean access project EGSC has shown scant regard for local preferences and input and have chosen not to support existing local businesses.

If they have planted Cootamundra wattles then they are going against their own advice contained in a booklet entitled Common Weeds of Gippsland which listed the Cootamundra Wattle as an invasive environmental weed. Certainly local weed pullers have been removing examples from the bushland surrounding Mallacoota for years.

Given the shire's pro-business promotion of the boat ramp, perhaps the most damming aspect of this sorry tale is their apparent unwillingness to source these plants through local business. In recent years, Kevin Chase has been doing a great job of finding suitable commercially available plants and Maryanne Crocker has been successfully propagating from local plant material. Did the shire approach either of these locals to quote for the work?

It is enough to make a grown man cry!

Yesterday Prue and I joined a goodly number of people who turned up at Bastion Point for the big photo shoot to promote and consolidate opposition to the big money / single user solution to the issue of multiple use of that area. The shoot coincided with high tide and being just after the new moon and with a big sea running it was quite a high high tide that squeezed us all together like penguins and left the unwary with wet shoes! It was not a day to go barefoot although a few hardy souls ventured out into the water in the name of peaceful protest.

My eye was also caught by a bit of action happening further along Big Beach, not only were the waves pouring through the entrance but the combination of high tide and big seas was forcing water over much of the low sand bar between the entrance and the vegetated dunes further along Big Beach. So much so that it looked like the end of the vegetated dunes was being undercut and eroded.

It has always struck me that the Mallacoota Bottom Lake might be very readily affected by global warming. Much is made of the surface area of our lake system (Bigger than Sydney Harbour etc., etc.) however little mention is made of its lack of depth. I make no claim to be a marine hydrologist but commonsense tells me that this suggests that quite modest increases in sea level could result in a significant increase in the volume of tidal water moving through the entrance and possibly, an accompanied increase in the scouring effect created by this increased flow.

When is comes to global warming, the scientific community agrees on very little, one of the few constants is the likelihood of more frequent and more powerful storms which here translates to bigger seas which in turn could translate to further erosion of dune systems. I have visited this topic before (see here) however in the context of Bastion Point, the ocean itself, rather than ocean access, might be the biggest threat to our local abalone industry. Bigger seas mean fewer diving days, the time might come when the divers will have to use larger platforms to cope with the these conditions, platforms that are too large to be launched from a trailer.