taking on the big developers…

My family (on my mother’s side) have been farming our land since they arrived as settlers on the ‘Abeona". We have farmed it for four generations. The land is high rainfall (for Southern Australia), fantastic soil where it is not too rocky and is on some of the most magnificent, wild, untamed coastline you will see anywhere in the world. People from all over the world come to see it. It has featured in Australian Survivor, many movies and was some of the very last bits of the world to be mapped – by Capt Matthew Flinders (and Baudin). It is unspoilt, pristine and full of endangered species and rare flora. There are whales you could swim with for over 6 months of the year (but nobody does as they have babies to protect) and world competition class surf beaches. There is some of the best fishing in the world, miles and miles of sand dunes, miles and miles of beaches with nobody there…. cliffs, pounding waves… rock pools, caves, millions of years old geological formations, I could go on forever there is so much and I love it all dearly… there is a connection that many people talk about having with this piece of Australia… and I am very lucky to have some family ownership of some of it….

It is about 25 kms South of Port Lincoln and there is nothing much there that is civilised… no shops.. limited access to electricity.. no piped water.. just some farms and a few houses set back from the coast to get out of the wind.. oh and a wind farm… a small caravan park with some shacks and a tourist drive on private property around the cliffy bits and my mother’s property is open to tourists for unpowered camping and day picnicing….

There is another family of generations who have also been farming there, probably as long as ours has, and they have been neighbours for several hundred years… there are so many stories…..far more interesting than tv …

Anyway… the story begins… one person sold their bit of family land to a developer… an unscrupulous developer… with an entire lifetime behind him of buying up farmland, getting the zoning changed from ‘farmland’ to ‘residential’, subdividing it into small blocks and selling them individually…

And, of course, that is what this guy is wanting to do with this farm that happens to be right next door to my brother’s farm, and one farm away from my mother’s land… and, of course, it has the most magnificent views of the ocean. He wants to subdivide to allow for (get this) 300 houses on 600 acres…

You can imagine the outrage… not only from the neighbouring land owners.. but from all of those many people who come to the area to surf, camp, whale watch, see how a real farm is run, have a day out away from it all, watch the crashing waves, bird watch, etc. etc.

My brave and clever sister-in-law organised a petition and a meeting, spoke to the media, on all the outraged peoples behalf… I have helped a bit and went to the meeting, but she and my mum have done all the work. I am so proud of them….

Not sure how we will all go…. but we a certainly going to fight a huge fight here… there has been far too much coastline already ruined in Australia by developers… hands off this bit, mate!!

Wish us luck!