Line in the sand: neighbours at war over Collaroy seawall
A concrete mega-wall to protect private homes from erosion has sparked a neighbourhood war. So who really owns our beaches?
When Bob Orth welcomes you into his home his pride is apparent at the entrance – and even more understandable as he leads you through his living area and straight to the back door. “It’s something special, isn’t it,” he says, still chuffed 12 years after moving in at what he sees through his rear windows each day.
With its sleek white sofa and carefully positioned telescope, his lounge room is modern and striking. But the greatest attraction of living here, on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, is the ocean. “On a good day, when the sky is blue and the surf is rocking, it’s just beautiful,” he says as he heads outside and settles into an upholstered terrace chair, lulled by the sound of the pounding sea just metres away. “It’s my Australian dream that I can live on the beach and walk out and go for a surf or sit out the front. It’s pretty bloody good.”
If Sydney’s turbocharged property market is a circus, Orth has a ringside seat. He lives not just at Collaroy Beach but on it, his apartment opening out to a lush garden that abuts the sand. The only thing between him and the ocean is the glass fencing at the end of his lawn.
But it’s what’s below that barrier – a 130m-long mega-wall almost entirely funded by Orth and his neighbours – that has made his property a lightning rod for beach lovers. Depending on who you ask, this $3.2 million wall built by residents as protection from storms is a saviour or a sore, an engineering marvel or an environmental menace, while the shifting sands on which it has been constructed have either been protected or trashed.
About the only thing on which everyone seems to agree is that this bold new seawall is a test case for what might soon unfold along vulnerable sections of the Australian coastline. Along with a fundamental question: who owns our beaches?
Bob Orth’s love for his new home might have been instant but it was not blind. “It was pretty common knowledge that this area cops it from the swell,” the retiree says on a quiet weekday morning as the surf breaks just beyond his sea-facing deck. “At the end of our street there’s a sign that says: ‘This area is an erosion zone’.”
Twenty-two kilometres from central Sydney, Collaroy’s coastline, although partly protected by a headland, has been pummelled for longer than anyone can remember. Storms just over a century ago destroyed the surf lifesaving clubhouse and in the 1940s several homes were washed away during winds that blew “with all the urgency and muscularity of a river… the clamour of the huge surf on the headlands was deafening”, according to the writer Ruth Park, whose seaside home was inundated by “a huge green wave. The next moment the room was dark, the window blew in, and in poured a cascade of seawater. The waves broke on the roof, two, three, four, then with a hideous sucking sound withdrew”.
While many of the old shacks have been replaced by sturdier masonry homes that are more difficult and costly to replace, Collaroy’s storm count has continued. A seafront apartment block was undermined in 1967, the beach was badly eroded in 1974, and there were more serious storms in 1995 and 2007. But it was not until 2016, when a king tide combined with an east-coast low, that Collaroy’s seafront was seared into the nation’s consciousness. After days of storms, 10 properties were left teetering on the edge of the badly eroded beach, about 50m of land was lost, and in perhaps the most enduring image a once built-in swimming pool was swept onto the sand.
“It was frightening but also awesome in a way to see,” Orth recalls of the waves of up to eight metres that thrashed the shore and in some cases flooded his neighbours’ gardens. As he watched on, initially he was reassured by his property’s history; while some other blocks fronted sand dunes, for 49 years a vertical concrete wall had protected his apartment building from squalls like this. But after a broken stormwater pipe created a sinkhole on the lawn just beyond his back door, the block was evacuated and the old seawall collapsed. Orth lost his lawn, but his unit was not flooded.
Huge tracts of seafront were trashed in those few wild days. For the suburb’s front-row residents, it was a turning point. More than 1000 people had rallied in 2002 against plans for a 1.1km seawall, but for those living on the frontline of rising oceans and more frequent extreme and erosive weather events it now seemed essential. With a mass government buyout of at-risk properties considered extremely unlikely – median house prices in Collaroy are a mighty $3.6 million – it also seemed the only solution.
Over the next five years, Orth was among a small group of owners spending more than 1000 hours strategising how to best protect their homes. They formed a residents’ association, secured the co-operation of all the owners of their apartment building and nine adjoining blocks, and obtained council approval to build a wall spanning their combined 10 lots that would be sturdy enough to protect them for a lifetime. Although it would be seven metres high including footings (critics point out that this makes it almost twice as high as the Berlin Wall), owners were assured that on average only 2.5m would be visible above the sand.
It was an expensive solution: each group of residents had to pay more than $300,000 (with 20 per cent of construction costs able to be claimed back from state and local governments upon completion), forcing some to access their superannuation or organise second mortgages. Later this year, once the last of the boulders and heavy equipment have been removed from the sand and the blocked access roads reopened, the project – the first of several privately built walls planned for Collaroy – will be complete.
“We can now look out and say we have got a wall that is protecting us as well as we can expect it to, and in our conscience we know we have not built something we should be ashamed of,” says Orth. “But people are making us feel ashamed.” As another resident puts it: “Why do I have to feel guilty for protecting my home from coastal rising? No one is making the people of Lismore feel guilty for protecting their home from floods.”
Take two of Sydney’s great passions, the beach and real estate, throw in serious environmental concerns and Collaroy’s seawall was bound to attract controversy. “It’s repulsive in every sense,” says Brendan Donohoe, who sees the wall – up to 4m of which he says continues to be exposed – as “a big finger up to the rest of us”. Having lived in the neighbourhood for 40 years, Donohoe heads the local branch of the Surfrider Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to protecting beaches. “There’s absolutely nothing accommodating about that wall,” he says, “for a beach user, for a wave, for anyone but the people living behind it.”
“We have had a problem with how we live with beaches for a long time,” says coastal engineer Angus Gordon, former chair of the NSW Coastal Panel, whose independent experts used to advise the state government on coastal issues. He is concerned that Collaroy’s beach now seems notably narrower than it was before the wall was built. “I don’t blame the [owners] – their houses are under threat. But this has increased the value of their property and taken away from public beach access.”
Objections to the wall fall into three groups: aesthetics (“to be honest, it looks a bit overbearing and bulky,” concedes Orth), environmental impact and type of construction. Because it is vertical and made of concrete, waves are deflected straight back off it instead of being partially absorbed by the sand, so the beach erodes more rapidly and more severely, says Professor Andrew Short, a coastal geomorphologist at the University of Sydney who lived in the Northern Beaches in the 1970s. “Basically,” says Short, who surveyed Collaroy’s shore monthly for 30 years, “it will limit the amount of time you have a beach.”
Northern Beaches Council insists the wall will improve beach access by eliminating hundreds of square metres of rocks, which will in turn reduce localised erosion. “Removing this hazard, which has been impacting the beach for more than 40 years, widens the beach and allows the community safer access,” it says. But in this hotly contested space these claims, too, are disputed. “Before the wall, what you had was a wide beach that ran right back to where there was a rock revetment [angled wall],” says Gordon. “You’ve only got to look at photographs to see that.”
Collaroy’s conundrum is hardly unique. In NSW it is one of 15 coastal erosion hotspots where more than five properties are deemed to be at risk from storms. But the risks are not confined to one state. A report released by the property database CoreLogic in March warns that coastal erosion and storm surges are jeopardising $25 billion of residential property nationally. With 34 houses and 74 apartments in danger, Collaroy ranks ninth, well below Paradise Point on the Gold Coast, Cronulla and Manly elsewhere in Sydney and even Port Melbourne.
New coastal developments are now generally required to be built further than 100m from the beach, but Geoscience Australia estimates that nationally close to 39,000 buildings are located closer to the shore and are at risk from accelerated erosion due to rising sea levels and climate change.
Not all at-risk beaches are in constant jeopardy. The Gold Coast is assisted by ongoing remediation programs; half a million cubic metres of sand is pumped in from NSW each year. Others face ongoing issues despite the efforts of some residents to counter them. At Byron Bay, where property owners have been battling to protect their waterfront homes for years, the NSW Land and Environment Court has banned a group from expanding the failing seawall at Belongil because it will block public beach access. And at erosion-prone Wamberal Beach on the NSW Central Coast, where several waterfront properties partially collapsed in 2020, residents are still wrestling with possible solutions. A high seawall is one option, but Andrew Short says it would need to be a towering 8m – the equivalent of a three-storey building and even more prominent than the almost-completed wall at Collaroy. It’s a precedent that has some people increasingly worried. “Anyone who has property at risk at a beachfront, if this [Collaroy] becomes the answer, any of those beaches is likely to have these giant walls there into the future,” Donohoe says of the seawall built in his neighbourhood.
“We are seeing some pretty big cultural shifts,” says Angus Gordon. “We actually have a long cultural history of taking a blasé view of hazards, and as a community we need to spend literally billions of dollars because of those mistakes. It’s also costly in the sense that the community is losing its beach. We have traditionally been a beach-loving culture – it has always been assumed that the beach belonged to all of us. At Collaroy, it now belongs to the property owners.”
Parts of the beach are already so narrow that it can be hard to walk along the shoreline and stay dry, and not just at high tide. Yet Orth insists the alternative – an angled revetment wall made of piled rocks that absorb the energy of incoming water – would have extended further and left even less beach. “People are saying, ‘They’ve taken a lot of land.’ All of this land and five metres out to the beach is our private land,” he says as he looks down on the narrowing strip of sand still open to those members of the public able to skirt the ongoing construction. “And we don’t [enforce] that… We’ve got [private] property out there which is open to everyone to use.” He adds: “It’s 1000 metres square extra beach we have given to the public because it’s private land.”
One of the biggest issues concerning the private seawall development is: who owns the sand on which it’s anchored? Short insists the beach is public. “The simple answer is we don’t know,” says Gordon, who has written a paper on the topic. “All the evidence says that a lot of it is unclear… it’s an ungodly mess.”
Environmentalist and legal scholar Dr John Corkill, an expert on coastal law, says that in most parts of Australia public access to the beach extends from the average high water mark to the ocean. “That wet part of the beach is publicly owned and has been for four centuries.” But if the high water mark changes, because of, say, rising oceans, the boundary of a privately owned property that abuts it can change too.
So communities that build seawalls to protect their properties will need to be clear where their private land ends. “The problem,” says the ANU’s Professor Don Rothwell, an expert in the law of the sea, “is that there is very little accuracy in terms of measuring the mean high tide and there is no process where the state government and local governments in any way are seeking to adjust what the mean high tide limits might be as a result of climate change.” In the near future, long-held private boundaries may well be eroded by elevated high water marks. “This is going to be an ongoing issue,” says Rothwell. “And for councils in metropolitan areas where the properties themselves are exceptionally valuable, this is going to be more and more a question.”
For those who object to it, there is something hostile about Collaroy’s multi-million-dollar sea wall. Brendan Donohoe says the beach has been “permanently disabled. They broke its back. It can never work again as a beach… They’ve put plaster right down the middle of the spine. It can’t bend. It can’t breathe. It can’t gain sand and lose sand.”
“What they have done at Collaroy is to put private property above public beaches,” says an incensed Andrew Short, who is also concerned about the lack of a coherent national plan for dealing with endangered coastal homes. “We’re a wealthy country and we pride ourselves on doing the right thing, but here we have these hotspots and we are leaving them to poor local government and these local groups for and against it. We have all this community angst because no one in government will say, ‘Let’s do something sensible about this’.”
Short believes the solution is a government buyback of at-risk homes, a view that’s supported by Donohoe. (As recently as 15 years ago, the then Warringah council spent millions of dollars buying back several properties at Collaroy but the scheme was deemed unsustainable in the face of rising property prices.) The next best options, Short believes, are to pump in more sand or build a rock revetment wall. Gordon favours a rock wall built much closer to properties, buried under nourished sand and topped with vegetation.
Those who live behind the protective bulk of the new seawall say it is also a first line of defence for the community that lives further back from the beach. If frontline residents did not build a wall now, says Orth, eventually someone further back would have to. “Some have called this a brutal engineering solution. I say it’s a solution that’s passed close examination by five coastal engineers, two of NSW’s best specialist research labs and a Danish company that’s an expert in the field.” He hopes the heat surrounding the wall’s construction will dissipate once it is completed. “We are at the emotional stage. It’s a new structure. But I think it will show high performance.” And no, he does not have plans to live elsewhere. “People have said, ‘Why did you build there? Why did you buy there?’… We are saying we are not unusual in that we have built in a place where we got approval – and it’s beautiful. Australia is a risky place to live.”
Those with an even more intimate knowledge of the nation’s shores, however, are no longer so sure about that allure. Having spent years examining all of Australia’s 12,000-odd beaches, Andrew Short is in no rush to live by the sea again. “It’s a nice place when it’s a nice day, sunny and calm. But when the wind’s blowing…”
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