The Gold Coast Transformed

From Wilderness to Urban Ecosystem

Tor Hundloe, Bridgette McDougall, Craig Page, Tor Hundloe, Bridgette McDougall, Craig Page

• Publisher: CSIRO PUBLISHING
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781486303298
• eBook ISBN: 9781486303311
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Gold Coast is one of Australia's premier tourism destinations, a modern city cut out of coastal vegetation, including paperbark swamps, mangroves and rainforests of both Indigenous and worldwide significance. The Gold Coast Transformed is a collection of integrated chapters identifying and assessing the environmental impacts of the building of Australia's sixth largest city. From the time of the first European timber getters through to the present, the book traces the impacts of rapid development on the now World Heritage-listed rainforest and surrounding ecosystems.

The city's natural and engineered environments are both fascinating and vulnerable. The construction of massive high-rise apartment blocks, on what were frontal beach dunes, is one of the fundamental mistakes not to be repeated. The book illustrates how and why major environmentally destructive development took place and discusses the impacts of such development on the Gold Coast's beaches, wildlife, and terrestrial and marine environments, such as the destruction of riparian mangrove forest.

The Gold Coast Transformed also shows the possibility of sustaining natural populations and reducing the city's ecological footprint. It will be of interest to ecologists, environmental scientists and managers, town planners, economists, policymakers and the general public.

Chapter 1

Introduction: the structure of the book

T. Hundloe and C. Page

This is the story of a unique city, Australia’s premier tourist city, a city cut out of coastal vegetation, including paperbark swamps, mangroves and rainforests of worldwide significance. The city has a relatively short history as until half a century ago (two human generations) it was but several relatively small villages, each with its own natural and social features. Two generations is a very short time for a city to grow to be the sixth-largest in population in Australia and to have global recognition as the country’s beach playground. The Gold Coast ranks with Honolulu in Hawaii, with Palm Beach in Florida and with the French Riviera in tourist promotions and is a high-priority destination in the minds of beach-lovers worldwide.

Australia will never see another city like the Gold Coast. We have learned so much about the value and the function of natural systems in the past 50 years, particularly from the spectacular mistake of building on frontal sand dunes. Spectacular, because when viewed after a severe storm or cyclone the normal undulating vegetated sand hills are but a 4 m cliff, the beach no more.

Plates 1 and 2 illustrate the extent of foreshore erosion – and threat to property – at two points in time. The first photograph (Plate 1) was taken in 1967 after the cyclones of that year. The photograph in Plate 2 was taken in 2013 after a series of storms, not cyclones, battered the Gold Coast.

Foredunes have a propensity to shift around as nature dictates, unlike a jelly poked by an inquisitive child. The jelly will resettle rather quickly and it won’t look much different when it does. A beach poked, pushed and pulled by cyclonic waves, high and low tides, and fierce off-shore winds will move as the jelly but – and here is the difference – when it reforms many months will have passed and there will be noticeable differences. Beach creeks will have carved completely new routes from the dunes to the ocean, the reconfigured dunes in their now different shape recolonised by ghost crabs and the plant we call pig face. In scientific terms this process is described as dynamic disequilibrium: in lay language, expect change at the interface of the ocean and the land, but be comforted that the landforms and vegetation that exist inland from the foredunes are protected by the buffering withstood by the ever-changing beachfront ecosystem. Only over an extended period of time will a bare sand dune encroach upon vegetated territory, and this is likely to occur very rarely and in only a few locations.

Picture, if you will, the Gold Coast before the first settlers and first holiday-makers came. This is an extremely difficult task unless you are familiar with similar environments that have been protected from development. Without knowledge of such places, where would you look for clues? Certainly not the beachfront, walled and sandbagged in anticipation of the next storm. Certainly not along the estuaries and lower reaches of the city’s rivers, where nature has been forced to give way to residential canal estates dug into river floodplains. And not in the paspalum and kikuyu-grassed farms in the city’s hinterland where once giant cedars, hoop pines, black beans and beech trees reached above the rainforest canopy. Later in the book we will explain where to find the few remaining clues to the city’s past.

Having seen the Gold Coast’s beachfront covered with every type of building from massive high-rise apartments to conventional beach houses, local government officials, town planners and engineers have been forced to treat the symptoms of our environmental ignorance and thoughtless attitude to nature. Given the dramatic changes made to the natural ecosystems, we have no option but to continue seeking ‘solutions’. We use inverted commas because it is not obvious that, having built on sand, a sustainable solution is available, except at the very significant cost of replenishing the sand after every extreme weather event. That has its own environmental problems. The sand has to come from somewhere; another ecosystem is altered and possibly harmed in an attempt to make amends for our own lack of environmental knowledge and short-sightedness.

It is not only what we did at the interface of the shore and the ocean that will not be repeated. Today, if one were to fell a mangrove tree – in fact, even do harm to one – the court-imposed fine is likely to be hundreds of thousands of dollars. The canal estates which were cut into the Nerang River floodplains destroyed many mangrove trees. Again, this occurred in the past 50 years.

If we go back to the initial European thrusts into the Gold Coast area, ∼150 years ago, we discover the ecological damage that was done in the hinterland rainforests. Red cedar trees, some ancient (hundreds of years old, if not older), were to the timber-getters a drawcard pulling all, from emancipated convicts to free-settler timber merchants, to the rainforests as gold pulled miners to Ballarat and Bendigo. Cedar was known as ‘red gold’. Take a red cedar tree out of a national park today and imprisonment awaits.

The timber-getters made bullock tracks which opened up the Gold Coast river valleys to farmers. No longer was there selective logging but wholesale tree clearing, reaching high up the rainforested mountains. Natural grasses were displaced by exotic ones, all the better for exotic animals – dairy cattle that had originated in the Channel Isles and were named after these islands, Guernsey and Jersey.

With the degree of habitat destruction that occurred from the mid 1800s to the present, the Gold Coast’s native fauna took a serious hit. The koala population has been near-decimated on the coastal strip. Two generations ago koalas in their favourite gum trees could be viewed in the back streets of Burleigh Heads. Today, best save your time and energy and visit a theme park to see a handful of koalas in captivity.

The dramatic changes in natural systems are evidenced, first along the foreshore, then the coastal floodplains and finally into the hinterland catchments. From this perspective, the Gold Coast has lost most of its natural attributes. But matters become somewhat confused once we consider the Gold Coast by reference to its formal political boundaries. Today the city is much larger than it once was. This we will illustrate below with maps. And then there is the public perception of what the Gold Coast is. A Melbournite heading to the Gold Coast for a holiday envisages visiting beaches and theme parks, not the new northern, north-western and north-eastern suburbs which are as close to Brisbane as to Surfers Paradise.

Today the city of the Gold Coast as a defined political and administrative area is more than beaches, floodplains turned into canal estates and hinterland ecosystems. In the present era, several South Moreton Bay Islands, including the relatively large South Stradbroke Island, are included in the city’s boundaries. The inclusion of these islands adds a considerable area of protected ecosystems to the city. The smaller islands are national parks and, in the case of South Stradbroke Island, a large area is a conservation park. Furthermore, the inclusion of the hinterland World Heritage area (the Gondwana Rainforests of Springbrook and Numinbah) adds a very considerable area of natural forests to the area of the city. It is important to be mindful of these relatively new city boundaries when considering the data on the proportion of natural land remaining in the city. Because of the expansion of the city, it appears that we have done far less environmental damage than we have actually done. The map in Plate 3 illustrates the change in the official boundaries of the Gold Coast. What we refer to as the ‘old’ Gold Coast – the coastal area traditionally and conventionally thought of as the Gold Coast – is shown.

Plate 3 shows the boundary of the Gold Coast in 2014 plus the areas conventionally thought of as the ‘old’ Gold Coast. This is circled in red, as are the hinterland towns and locations associated with the Gold Coast.

The area most would recognise as the Gold Coast is the coastal strip from Southport to Coolangatta. It has been close to denuded of its original vegetation, which would have been banksia, heath, casuarina, melaleuca, eucalyptus, littoral vine forest, open forest and woodlands. The beach was a typical foredune complex, moving into open forest and woodlands, with small pockets of rainforest. In clearing this land we re-contoured the landform from coastal dunes and meandering creeks and rivers into flat beachfront land for high-rise apartments, millionaires’ mansions and canal estates intermixed with impervious surfaces of tar and cement. The extent of land clearing that has occurred can be seen in Plate 4. The white area represents land that has been cleared of its original vegetation, for urban development in the coastal area and farming in the Jacobs Well area, plus smaller areas in the hinterland.

At this very early stage, it will help if the Gold Coast land uses are identified; for this purpose we present Plate 5. It shows the present land use strategy as endorsed by the Gold Coast City Council. The location of ‘urban residential’ (red) land and ‘residential/tourism-pacific coast’ (purple) land tells a story of building as close to the ocean as possible. The stretch of coastal land between Southport and Coolangatta represents the ‘old’ Gold Coast before expansions north and north-west. The ‘old’ Gold Coast has lost virtually all of its natural vegetation. The areas designated as ‘rural/nature conservation’ (orange), ‘open space/nature conservation’ (green circles) and ‘agricultural’ (green) show the amount of land that is natural, near-natural or partially forested.

In the public perception of the ‘old’ Gold Coast, parts of the hinterland were included and considerable natural and near-natural land was part of the Gold Coast. The narrow river valleys running up the Nerang River and Tallebudgera Creek and Currumbin Creek catchments, where dairy and banana farming occurred, were thought of by farmers (who would visit relatives in the coastal villages) and coastal residents (who had farmers as relatives or friends) as part of the Gold Coast. For example, the Currumbin Creek rockpools were a favourite fresh water swimming area for local residents and holiday visitors, as was the Natural Bridge (Arch) at the top of Numinbah Valley.

The farmers with their holdings in three major catchments (Tallebudgera, Currumbin and Nerang) thought of themselves as part of the Gold Coast. The village settlements on Springbrook and Beechmont were also deemed to be part of the Gold Coast, as were the more distant Lamington Plateau eco-tourism businesses. However, these areas were not officially part of the Gold Coast as virtually all of the land west of the coastal strip was in another jurisdiction, the rural Albert Shire. Today, most of Lamington Plateau is in another shire (the Scenic Rim Shire).

Obviously, the Gold Coast biography is one fashioned by significant environmental impact, increasing over time as more and more tourists came and more and more permanent residents built houses stretching ever westward from the beaches. Much of the impact is irreversible in time-frames humans comprehend. The city’s economic success – and it has been successful – has come at a very high cost. We now realise that the city could have been a tourist mecca without the destruction of the foreshore. Habitat for koalas and other native animals could have been preserved. How pleasing would that have been? Imagine foreign tourists being able to sit in small footpath cafes and view koalas in the gum trees next door! This is not far-fetched. In a similar environment to that of the Gold Coast, on North Stradbroke, we can sip coffee and contemplate the life of a koala, promoted by the sight of one perched in the footpath gum tree.

Evidence of what could have been on the Gold Coast can be found in parts of the Sunshine Coast and North Stradbroke Island, where dwellings and road infrastructure have been deliberately situated way beyond the ever-changing coastal dunes, and much natural vegetation remains. The Sunshine Coast tourists still come and they are far from disappointed with the environmental setting. This is a tale of two cities.

On the Gold Coast, the clearing of land for the construction of residences, shopping complexes, golf courses and industry destroyed the habitat of the natural fauna. It would have been possible to have protected more, although not all, of the coastal koala population by prohibiting residential development in forested corridors stretching from the ocean to the hinterland; a prime example would have been corridors from Burleigh Head National Park westward to Springbrook. Only recently has the Gold Coast City Council commenced to use an environmental levy on rate-payers to purchase bushland which managed to escape the developers’ bulldozers. This land, when rehabilitated, will form corridors and should assist in connecting the few remaining coastal koala populations to the larger inland populations.

There is a high degree of conjecture involved in writing about what might have been. Later in the book we will point to the difficulty of estimating native animal populations in an era when few people cared and records were scanty, if kept at all. Of course, the koalas are not the only animals fighting for survival. However, the koala’s attractiveness to tourists cannot be overlooked. The analysis is dated now, but nevertheless indicative of this animal’s economic importance: in 1997, a study of foreign tourists to Australia ranked koalas as the number one animal they wanted to view, just ahead of kangaroos. It was estimated that the koala-viewing industry generated over $1 billion per annum for the Australian economy (Hundloe and Hamilton 1997). Given increased tourist numbers and inflation, that figure would be much higher today.

In addition to the koala, on the Gold Coast a range of other animals have lost habitat or are otherwise under threat by the large-scale land-use changes and ever-increasing human population numbers. There is the platypus, there are various frogs and birds which were once numerous but are rarely seen today. On the other hand, we will illustrate the resilience of Mother Nature when modified, near-natural habits remain or new ones are created, as in the extensive canal estates. Native animals reappear and establish viable populations.

The Gold Coast is an enigma. Most tourists come to appreciate and experience the natural environment. They come to swim or simply cavort in the surf. If all they sought was a swim, fresh-water pools abound in Australian cities and towns. The beach is special. The salt air is invigorating. While the Surfers Paradise beach is far from the empty wilderness of a Fraser Island beach in mid-winter, its appeal is still to nature. To make a valiant, if unsuccessful, attempt to catch a wave is to become one with nature.

Clearly, the beach is by far the most visited of the many different environments on offer. When extreme weather events destroy the beaches, tourists don’t come in the same numbers until the media ceases to publicise the erosion.

Japanese, and increasingly Chinese, visitors come for many reasons, but ask them why and a common reason is that they would love to see a koala in the wild. The entrepreneurs who have played a major role in fashioning the city of the Gold Coast have compensated in part for the loss of natural attributes by constructing theme parks where koalas can be nursed while the obligatory photos are taken. It is difficult to overlook the irony. Accredited eco-tourism establishments provide an authentic introduction to the area’s natural attributes. There are three in the hinterland. Then there are the native animals that have colonised Gold Coast suburbia, thanks to the planting of native gardens. It is not all negative on today’s Gold Coast. Even the once ecologically dead canals have developed local ecosystems that support a range of marine life, including dangerous bull sharks. Lives have been lost in the canals as a consequence of shark attacks.

The biography of the Gold Coast, in particular the environmental destruction that was performed in its development, only makes sense if we understand what drove the development. History is a key discipline here. So are geography and economics. We have to cover broad territory if we are to fulfil our task of analysing the environmental impacts that went hand-in-glove with the creation of one of the world’s premier tourist cities.

With these few paragraphs setting the scene, the remainder of this introductory chapter sketches the interrelated themes of the chapters that follow. We have brought to the task of compiling this book an extraordinary group of individuals from Bond University, including ecologists, economists, a real-estate valuer, town planners, a chef-cum-environmental scientist and four graduates in sustainability science, the emerging discipline of the 21st century.

The early chapters set the scene for an assessment of the environmental impact of the construction of the city of the Gold Coast. Following that we turn to the environmental impacts associated with the city today. We commence with the overwhelming land-use changes that commenced when the first red cedar tree was felled in the rainforest and, some decades later, the first ‘iconic’ residence was built on the foreshore at Southport. We trace the impacts, as they accumulate through to the present, noting the irreversible losses. The logical progression of our analysis is to the city today and the day-to-day environmental matters we have to deal with in the 21st century, followed by consideration of the future. The principle of sustainability requires us to do that.

We expect that it is not going to be an easy job to draw a line in the sand and announce that we have reached it, that no more interfering with nature will be permitted on the Gold Coast. It is not in the DNA of Australian-style city-building to say ‘enough is enough’ whether that applies to population growth, cutting more housing lots out of near-natural bushland, investing in more industry or expanding the already extremely well catered for entertainment and nightlife opportunities. This is not to argue that the city of the Gold Coast, its residents and tourists, would not appreciate and benefit from some degree of rejuvenation. A long established and still valid principle in the economics of tourism is the Butler Cycle, commencing with take-off, followed by development and consolidation and then a plateau, with the prospect of rejuvenation or decline. It can be postulated that the Gold Coast plateau as a tourist resort city has been reached. What next? This question and its answers form part of our narrative.

The Butler Cycle illustrates significant changes in tourist experiences, the facilities available to them, the growth of local businesses and of residential population. The lack of reliable data on tourist numbers in the early years prevents the construction of a Butler Cycle for the Gold Coast. However, it is possible to graph the relationship between particular events such as ‘discovery’ of the area by a ‘celebrity,’ improved transport, the construction of the first high-rise building and the growth of the city’s residential population (see Fig. 1.1).

In delving into the functioning of the city as it is today, we take up the issue of environmental impact in the city’s ‘operational phase’. We assess the environmental impacts that are ongoing. This is what we mean by the operational phase. Dealing with these continuous impacts is not simply about ‘holding the fort’ so that further environmental impacts are avoided. It is about reversing, where possible, the negative impacts we caused in building the city in the manner we did. In other words, we can do some remedial work if only thought of as little, although the little we do could amount to significant benefits in terms of long-term sustainability. Restoring degraded land for wildlife corridors and replanting rainforests on former farmland are examples. In considering the present we will identify a small number of surprisingly positive impacts from an environmental perspective. All is not bad when the possibility of balancing the pleasure of living in or visiting the Gold Coast can be made consistent with preserving its increasingly valuable natural attributes. However, the challenges will be great if the city’s population is forced to grow (particularly in the coastal region) as is proposed by the Queensland government.

A chapter-by-chapter synopsis

Chapter 2 is a snapshot of the Gold Coast, a lead-in to the detailed discussion in following chapters. As noted above, the Gold Coast is a city carved...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: the structure of the book (T. Hundloe and C. Page)
• 2 The Gold Coast: a snapshot (T. Hundloe)
• 3 The Gold Coast before Cook named Mount Warning (T. Hundloe)
• 4 A brief history of discovery, settlement and development (T. Hundloe and C. Page)
• 5 The impact on the Gold Coast’s terrestrial environments (T. Hundloe)
• 6 The beaches (C. Page and T. Hundloe)
• 7 Marine environments of the Gold Coast: out with the old, in with the new(D. McPhee)
• 8 Wildlife of the Gold Coast wetlands (S. Burgin and D. McPhee)
• 9 Rainbow lorikeets, possums and pythons: the wildlife of the Gold Coast (S. Burgin)
• 10 ‘Getting up close and personal’: wildlife of the Gold Coast theme parks (S. Burgin)
• 11 The legacy of David Fleay, a pioneering Gold Coast conservationist (B. McDougall)
• 12 The Pink Poodle, swimming pavilions and Miami Ice (L. Armitage and S. Burgin)
• 13 Reducing the ecological footprint: the prospect for green energy (S. Telfer and T. Hundloe)
• 14 The Gold Coast business sector: meeting the environmental challenge (M. Waters)
• 15 Planning for the Gold Coast: processes, challenges and opportunities (B. Bajracharya, L. Too, D. O’Hare and I. Khanjanasthiti)
• 16 State of the environment (T. Hundloe)
• 17 In conclusion, something to chew on: native plant foods of the Gold Coast (S. Grigalius and D. McPhee)