Lytton Road Fairy vows to fight on as corridor widening progresses

DRESSED in her trademark witches hat and high-vis vest the Road Fairy is a familiar site protesting the widening of Lytton Road. Bernadette le Goullon says she’s not about to give up on the fight.

"The Road Fairy" Bernadette le Goullon campaigns at Mowbray Park as roadworks to widen Lytton Rd move into the park. Picture: Brian Bennion

SHE’S been in picket lines, protests, sit-ins, waived placards from Lytton Rd to Parliament House in Brisbane and Canberra, ran for the state seat of Bulimba and stood on the pavement as her neighbourhood disappeared house by house.

“The Road Fairy” Bernadette le Goullon has seen the picket lines thin out as residents moved out of their resumed homes at Lytton Rd, East Brisbane, construction fencing went up and the first of the 40 homes were carved up and hauled off on the back of trucks.

But she’s still out there protesting Brisbane City Council’s Wynnum Rd Corridor Upgrade.

She will have to live with another two lanes of traffic passing by her Lytton Rd home, but she won’t see the project move into Norman Park.

“Everybody had got to the stage where they had given up and I just kept going because I felt that I didn’t want to be defeated by the Council,” she said.

“I also felt we had an important message, which was even if you can’t stop it, you still should be saying something about it because we didn’t want the people in Norman Park to suffer the way the people here in East Brisbane had suffered.”

With a background in theatre, Ms le Goullon came up with the idea of wearing a costume to protest in a non-threatening way.

“It was a bit of a joke when I started because we were told we had to make sacrifices for the 57,000 cars that went past every day,” she said.

“As soon as we saw the witches hats put out, we thought, what is going to be destroyed now. So I thought I’ll be this witch that is there and whenever they see the witch, something gets destroyed. That was the joke.”

"The Road Fairy" Bernadette le Goullon campaigns against the widening of Lytton Rd at Mowbray Park. Picture: Brian Bennion

“The nature reserve (in Mowbray Park) is the one thing we’ve saved, but anything you ask for, you say save this heritage house and you come back the next day and they’ve destroyed it.

“People have said don’t go and protest in front of those 80-year-old trees because every time I even go and sit in front of something they destroy it.

“There was a very aggressive approach, particularly when they were moving houses. I wanted to create a way of protesting that was not threatening to the people doing the project and so that I could talk to people on the site and to help the people through this terrible process.”

She’s now protesting against the resumption of parts of the heritage-listed Mowbray Park.

“People are still trying to make sense of it,” she said.

“They thought they would be here for the rest of their lives. They thought they were going to get the five lane solution and they got whacked with this very destructive six lane solution which has been ill-conceived because you can’t solve the bottleneck, you just move it on further.”