Bartlett's Blog

A week ago I indicated I would write more detail about my visit to Mission Beach and the main issue I explored during the few hours I was there.

Like many areas on the Queensland coast, Mission Beach has beautiful beachfront, lots of sunshine, green mountains just a little way inland and tropical islands visible offshore. Also like many parts of Queensland’s coast, housing and resort developments are posing a significant threat to the environment (not to mention driving up housing costs for the existing residents). So what makes Mission Beach special?

The Mission Beach area is surrounded by rainforest that is part of the Wet Tropics world heritage area and adjoins the world heritage area of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. It is not alone in Northern Queensland in having these merits either.

However, the forest and vegetation is one of the few remaining viable areas of cassowary habitat. Cassowaries can sometimes be seen wandering around the inhabited areas. The cassowary is an iconic species (with a cool colour scheme). It is also seriously endangered. To grab some quotes from this site:
The overall density is one adult per approximately two km2 of forested land at Mission Beach. The outlook for the Cassowary is pretty grim: approximately only 40 adults, 28 sub adults, and 31 chicks are roaming the forests of Mission Beach. There are only 17 breeding females. If the Cassowary is already endangered, how much time is left before extinction?
It is estimated that approximately only 900 cassowaries remain in the Wet Tropics – fewer than the panda in China and the tiger in India.

This is about more than just protecting one area because its bit of wildlife is more charismatic than everywhere else’s. The area is also very important for its incredible biodiversity (which the cassowary plays a crucial role in maintaining). It has the highest diversity (per unit area) of different habitat types in the Wet Tropics, which itself has the highest degree of biodiversity in the country.

The local conservation group – the Community for Cassowary and Coastal Conservation (C4 for short) – maintains a cassowary obituary which details 17 deaths since the beginning of 2003, mostly from being hit by car and trucks, but also dog attacks. More mortalities have probably occurred that have not been recorded. I just received an email saying that in the week since my visit, two more cassowaries have been hit by cars. Both are still alive at the moment, but whether they will recover is not yet certain. The total cassowary population for the area is calculated to currently be just 42. The population is teetering towards extinction, and without strong action the birds will be gone within a decade and the biodiversity of the world heritage area irreparably and severely damaged.

C4 has done a wonderful job in establishing an environment centre in Mission Beach and keeping it staffed with enough volunteers to have it open each day for visitors. It provides a lot of information on the local ecosystems and the threats being posed to them. Brenda Harvey, a local of 45 years standing, showed me around the locality, along with Niall MacMillan, a relatively recent arrival.

There are a large number of housing estates dotted around Mission Beach, most of them with mainly vacant blocks. There are literally hundreds of For Sale signs. Despite this, many more applications have been made to the two local Councils for further developments. This means further clearing of cassowary habitat, and equally damagingly, more traffic and dogs and cats which are responsible for a steady trickle of cassowary fatalities.

Niall took us to his place. His wife Amanda provided us with a beautiful vegan lunch to go with gorgeous views of the coast, the ocean and the offshore islands. As Amanda acknowledged, it would be understandable for some people to feel that these concerns are just from people who’ve moved into the place in the last few years and now want to keep everybody else out.

Certainly, there was no suggestion at any stage of our conversations that there should be no further housing in the area. However, it is very hard not to agree with their frustration and extreme concern at so many developments continually occurring when there is already such a huge number of unsold and empty blocks of land and no apparent overarching assessment of the overall impact of continually slicing away at remaining forests, further filling in wetlands and encouraging greater amounts of traffic on the 80 km/hour roads leading into the area.

Federal environment laws that passed in 1999 (after major improvements were made by the Democrats) provide much better opportunity to protect world heritage values than was previously the case, but the difficulty here is that each individual development proposal is being assessed separately. While this does mean some reductions in the vegetation which is cleared, which is obviously a good thing, the cumulative impact is not being considered (two examples are here and here). State environmental and planning laws also have this problem. The Environmental Defenders Office of North Qld is appealing against the lack of conditions imposed by the local Council on one of the approved developments, but even if this is successful it is likely only to mean leaving a bit more vegetation as a wildlife corridor – again better than nothing but not good enough.

In addition, whilst it won’t have much impact on the cassowary (other than through encouraging greater population), there is also a sizeable marina proposed for Boat Bay off Clump Point, at the north end of Mission Beach. I find it hard to believe the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority would permit something like this to be built, but laws are made to be bent, circumvented and ignored, as well as broken, so one can never be sure.

Many people have noted the custom that has developed of having “Big” things dotted on highways around Australia. The Big Pineapple near Nambour on the Sunshine Coast has been around for decades, as has the Big Banana at Coffs harbour in NSW. Northern Queensland certainly has a few examples, including a Big Crab in Cardwell, a Big Gumboot in Tully and a Big Captain Cook in Cairns (as an aside, I was told just yesterday that Captain Cook was actually only a Lieutenant when he “discovered” Australia in 1770 and didn’t become a Captain until later – if this is true I demand a retraction and full apology from Mrs McBride my Grade 1 teacher for injecting this erroneous “fact” in my head in 1970)

Mission Beach has a Big Cassowary standing in all its concrete majesty out the front of the local shopping village. It would be a sad irony indeed if this ends up being the only cassowary left in the area in a few years time.

(click here to help save some rainforest http://www.therainforestsite.com/)