Festival needs revitalising
Last weekend’s Whale Festival was loved by many who attended. However, might I suggest some ideas for next year, the 21st birthday of this potentially wonderful event?
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Let’s have a real whale dominated parade for a start. Let’s put our collective thinking caps on and come up with an event which not only makes us all proud here on the Far South Coast, but ensures that the event will continue for years to come, because right now the event needs revitalising.
Allow local kids, theatrical groups, musicians and floats with a whale flavour to lead the parade with those beautifully restored vehicles and other floats to follow.
Start the three-day event with fireworks on Friday night rather than Saturday and combine this with quality buskers on the wharf, perhaps even a floating candle ceremony in memory of all the whales killed in the past and for those who continue to be killed by nations who don’t think as we do. On the Saturday, the musicians could moved to various locations around town.
Would it be possible also to have a sound cavern where the sounds of whales communicating could be experienced?
And let’s have a real entertaining drawcard. Would it be worth considering not the winners of the X-Factor or one of those shows, but whoever comes second or third?
Have more boats on the water, enabling people who rarely or never get the chance to go out in a boat to do so. Offer helicopter rides from the wharf for sightseeing, whale-spotting or just sheer exhilaration.
On Sunday, start with a giant breakfast with an indigenous component, perhaps even with Aboriginal foods to show how the first Australians survived so well for tens of thousands of years.
This year’s festival was good. Let’s do next year’s even better!
Geoffrey Maher, Merimbula
Boydtown land ‘abuse’
The foreshore between Nullica inlet and the Seahorse Inn first built by Ben Boyd has long been remarkable for its ribbon of flora including coastal banksias that divides the sandy ocean edge from more open forest.
Viewed from the sea or across the bay this part of the coast has a natural beauty that gives reason to holiday or as locals know, to relax, walk, swim or fish the beach.
This has taken a deadly blow in recent months. The massive and nearly total recent clearing of a significant parcel of land adjoining the inn and the removal of lower storey vegetation has brought a huge loss of habitat for wildlife and reduced the biodiversity of the area to that of a suburban lawn.
Even considering the excesses of past tourist or residential developments, this clearing has been devastating. There are no residual zones dedicated to retaining pockets or corridors of bush diversity.
There is now no effective buffer between ocean and cleared land and when one considers that the land stretching back and across the highway where sand mining has commenced is only a few metres above current sea-level, the problems of managing a site that is now exposed and vulnerable without its natural vegetation protection are indeed considerable.
Bega Valley Shire Council and our current environmental protection laws seem to have had no influence on this land use or should I say abuse. Coastal precincts should be managed better than this.
Elsewhere old colonial and exploitative approaches are being rethought and tourism is changing. Think about ecotourism and the momentum behind community engagement to protect natural assets such as Panboola Wetland and the Bundian Way.
Our tenure on earth is brief - we are at best short-term custodians. We need to ensure that landowners can’t undertake the sort of clearing processes we have witnessed at Boydtown. This is a timely reminder that our government cannot always be trusted to do the right thing, that we need to be more skeptical, and participate more actively in the processes themselves.