- Michael Angelakis and Glenn Cooper at Black Point where they both have houses. Picture: Calum Robertson Source: News Corp Australia
LIFESTYLE
The Battle for Black Point
- PENELOPE DEBELLE
- SA WEEKEND
- MAY 23, 2014 10:00PM
IF THE tide at Black Point was any higher, the sea would be lapping around the living room floors. At peak tide, which often hits over Easter, locals cast off from their verandas and reel in a feed of salmon, or squid. Beer baron Glenn Cooper says his granddaughter, three, has a little fishing line that she flicks out from the front lawn.
Michael Angelakis, the seafood businessman whose family fished in the Greek islands, calls this magnificent stretch of beach his front yard. His days there are governed by the sea’s rhythms; he swims in the morning on the outgoing tide and picks up scallops or razor fish that are exposed in the sand. After lunch and a nap he heads out to fish on the incoming tide, then prepares the day’s catch for the evening meal.
“It really is hunting and gathering,” he says. “At night, you get some perfect weather and you just sit and watch the stars.”
This seaside idyll, which dates back to the early 1900s when Yorke Peninsula farmers put up the first makeshift holiday shanties on the sand dunes, is the envy of many.
Back then, enterprising farmers would squat in the dune scrub during the summer break, fishing off the beach and catching flounder and crabs.
A century later, rocketing property values for such a scarce resource makes the most humble shack worth a million dollars and properties have been changing hands at these prices for at least five years.
It might seem too good to last – and some locals fear it is. This particular piece of South Australian heaven is under attack with two mega-projects – neither yet finalised – threatening to overshadow a peaceful hamlet of around 200 houses: part weekenders, part a permanent community.
“Well, I think the whole of Yorke Peninsula is under attack, not just Black Point,” says economist and investment banker Dr Roger Sexton, who owns land there and whose in-laws have been going to Black Point since the 1950s.
Sexton is particularly upset at the proximity of the proposed Ceres wind farm, a massive project with 197 turbines, each the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. The closest of these monster turbines – all of them higher than anything SA has seen before – will be 1.5km from Black Point.
“We’d see it,” says Sexton. “You would certainly see it up where the houses are, I’m not sure about from the beach.”
Another megaproject is about to take up residence on Black Point’s doorstep; the largest open-pit copper mine in Australia.
Rex Minerals, which is behind the massive open-cut copper, gold and iron mine, is waiting for SA Government final approval. The Hillside Mine is far bigger than anything Yorke Peninsula has seen and Black Point is within five kilometres of the mine site.
There will be dust and disruption with roads being re-routed closer to the coast; a slurry pipe will be built between the mine and Port Ardrossan from where the ore will be shipped. This massive construction and upheaval will be focused near Pine Point in an area that has until now been farmland.
“Hillside extends for approximately six kilometres along prime coastal beaches,” the Yorke Peninsula Land Owners’ Group said in a submission. “These settlements and the tourists they attract will not remain viable following the establishment of an ugly, polluting open-pit mine.”
The battle for Black Point is on.
Maintaining property values isn’t what is concerning the locals, but it is hard to see how the developments won’t affect prices, which have skyrocketed off the back of lifestyle.
“The mine is a bit of an unknown,” said Ray White real estate salesman for Ardrossan, Scott Bockmann. “Probably you would expect Ardrossan real estate would rise, but Black Point being that exclusive beachside location, and being closer, the jury is out on that one.”
The tightly held line of houses on a stretch between Pine Point and Point Julia is envied by many but the truth is that most of the owners have an attachment to the area that has been passed down through families. They are also seasoned fighters who are used to battling to hold on to a piece of paradise that the rest of the world has only slowly woken up to.
“It’s the most magnificent location in the world, it’s got this beautiful protected bay that’s calm because it faces north and the wind goes over the top of you,” says Adrian Sutter, a former North Adelaide footballer whose family has been going to Black Point since 1981. “There’s a big undersea reef, a low-level reef that protects the whole bay. This is the secret of it. It’s protected, and it’s got this beautiful sandy beach that grades down so kids can swim safely.”
Sutter, who was on the first board of the Adelaide Crows, says in the early ’80s the shacks were mainly simple, corrugated iron and timber constructions. The very early days of Black Point were reminiscent of the Wild West. People put up shanties wherever took their fancy in the sand dunes, just above the high-tide line, and some stayed until bureaucracy slowly caught up with them.
By the time Sutter arrived, a degree of order had been introduced, with boundaries recognised between properties. He and his family bought for a laughably low sum a two-bedroomed, rectangular shack with a large front room and kitchen and a bedroom at the end divided by a curtain that turned it into two rooms. (It is now considerably more comfortable. There’s a veranda out front, an attached shed at the back has been turned into an en suite bedroom, the kitchen is modernised, the floor has carpets and there is air conditioning.)
There is no single voice of opposition to the wind farm or to the mine. The Black Point Progress Association, which acts as the community’s lobby group, steers a carefully representative line. Its head, Kate Van Schaik, is a permanent resident who likes to talk down the community’s unique attraction as a tucked-around, north-facing beach on a peninsula whose coastlines run east-west.
“Black Point is the same as a lot of these little coastal hamlets; they are heavily populated at peak times – school holidays and so on – but it’s a lovely retreat place where you get these huge tides, a place to go with a really good book,” she says.
She does not oppose the mine, but wants its impact to be minimised. “There are going to be changes that will have a varying degree of impact on people,” she says. “There’s automatically going to be a change in the topography and the surrounding landscape that will impact on the visual amenity of the neighbouring location.”
In other words, the uninterrupted view of farmland edging the sea is going to change, and not everyone is going to like it.
When Glenn Cooper goes to the local store, he rubs shoulders with the farmers who sell him barley for his beer. He is as pro-development as the next person – as a captain of industry, how could he not be? – but he also loves fishing, and he is worried.
“The issue that is concerning me is the overburden (the waste) that they are going to dig out to make this hole,” says Cooper. “Also, you’ve got to realise this project is the size of Roxby Downs.”
Protest sign on the Yorke Highway near Ardrossan. Picture: Calum Robertson Source: News Corp Australia
It is a massive mine. Its total area is 3000 hectares with a pit almost half a kilometre deep covering almost 400 hectares. Rex Minerals stresses that it will rehabilitate these waste piles – it says ‘dump’ is an unfair word – but the piles will slowly grow over the next decade to heights of up to 140m.
“You’re going to have a hill of waste as high as the State Bank (Westpac building) and you get a lot of wind there and the water is quite shallow,” Cooper says. “We’ve got prevailing south-westerlies here so how is that not going to blow in and form a blanket on the bottom of the sea and ruin the sea grasses (where the fish breed)?”
Rex Minerals’ spokeswoman Erica Dearlove says the visual impact from the beach at Black Point will be insignificant and weather forecasts would be used to prepare operations “such as dampening down haul roads the night before a windy day.”
“Rex intends to be a valued member of the Yorke Peninsula community and we accept that people need reassurance that we will protect their interests,” she said in a statement. “This includes Rex showing it can manage dust effectively.”
When the mine is depleted, in 15 to 25 years, the pit will be left. Rex Minerals argues it is uneconomic to back-fill it.
“I’m not anti-mining,” says Cooper. “It’s shallow water here; there are whiting and snapper, crabs, everything. If they are able to convince me that they can make sure that massive hill won’t blow into the sea, that’s fine. But I’ve yet to be convinced.”
Sexton, a former executive director of the State Bank Group (which managed the asset sale of the State Bank) is annoyed by references to Black Point as millionaire’s row. People got in early and the market’s gone up, just as it has at other locations, he says. He also gets angry over SA’s embrace of wind farms in principle, and the proposed Ceres farm in particular.
He argues that wind farms are net polluters because the carbon cost of building them – a single turbine takes a swimming pool of concrete as its base – exceeds the benefits. They also push up power prices and exist only because they are propped up by subsidies.
“The farmers have got issues with it because (they prevent) aerial spraying and other impacts, and the tourist industry has concerns because these things are the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and there are 197 of them,” he says. “Visually, they are revolting, but they’re not the reason I’m so strongly opposed; it’s the ridiculous impact on the economy of the state.”
Gary Benzan, a financial property broker who, with his family, has rented a shack every Easter for the past 10 years feels the same – that SA should be chasing lower power prices, not higher.
“I’m not so concerned about the visual impact the wind farm will have, it’s probably more a concern to do with the ever-increasing cost of electricity, which is exorbitant in this state,” he says. “Anything that can potentially impact further price rises would be a genuine concern for my family and I think I speak for quite a few South Australians as well.”
Sutter isn’t happy with how the wind farm will look. He worries the approach to Black Point – the feeling of unwinding as you drive to your back door past home-made signs like Guzzler’s Gully – will be jeopardised.
“It’s a magnificent place, you drive in and come to this cliff and look down on the bay and it’s the most pretty bay you will ever see, this white strip of sand and shacks and boats,” he says. “These (turbines) are very close, and three times as big as the others, they’re absolutely huge.”
Black Pointers are used to a fight. Residents spent almost two decades securing their right to be there after the State Government in the 1980s decided all shacks on Crown Land had to be removed. The SA Shack Owners formed and began lobbying and Sutter was the representative for Black Point. They won a partial victory, by extracting an agreement for life tenure, but when shacks elsewhere were granted freehold, the Black Pointers complained.
“We screamed liked banshees because we’d just agreed to a new development close to the back of our existing shacks,” says Sutter. “We said ‘That’s unfair, others are getting what they wanted’.”
As a trade-off, Black Point shack owners were given the option of life tenure on the original spot, or a 40-year transferable lease, at which point – in 2037 – they have to move onto the freehold land behind. Owners like Cooper who have rebuilt have done so on the freehold land they were offered the right to buy. They are 20 to 30m further back and can stay forever. A few have opted for life tenure on the Crown Land, which means the properties can’t be bought or sold but will be surrendered when the last person on the title dies.
In mid-April this year, 17 years after agreement on the leases was reached, shack owners received their long-awaited Crown Lease offers. Those who lost heart and sold out must still be kicking themselves.
“The kids catch squid from the front steps, half a dozen last Easter just standing on the step,” he says. “You can see why it’s unique. There’s nowhere else in SA where you can get this.”
Just about everyone at Black Point fishes. There are local stories, unconfirmed of course, about fishermen making their own grounds by dragging tyres, or in one case a car body, out to sea. The idea is that whiting, flathead and snapper set up home at a personalised fishing spot.
“I’ve become a fisherwoman,” says opera singer Stephanie Acraman who, with her partner Scott, moved from Sydney to Black Point 18 months ago.
“I can be quite hard core, out after dark, in the cold, wrapped up in scarves. We often catch squid off the beach here.”
Acraman, a former New Zealander, says the move to Black Point was the best decision the couple could have made.
“It was getting too crazy to go back to a Sydney apartment when eight months of the year we’re travelling overseas or wherever,” she says.
She has soundproofed a room at the back of her shack and sings her heart out. “It’s fantastic, there’s usually no one around, no neighbours to annoy.”
Acraman feels like a new arrival and doesn’t want to buy into the row about the wind farm or the mine. Still, she is worried.
“My only concern is that I don’t want to look out the window and see a wind farm at Port Julia, which will be in our eye sight, but it’s a very basic approach to it from a selfish point of view,” she says.
Angelakis loves Black Point and uses it as therapy. He has stepped away from full-time work and retreats to the beach to work on his health. He has invested in mines in the past and is the last person to be opposing development and job creation. And yet…
“This is coastal mining, this is the unknown,” he says. “Is it going to justify the disruption and the concerns? It’s a narrow peninsula with gulf waters either side and gulf waters are very rich. Much of our fishing is done there; they are our main commercial and recreational fishing grounds.”
He also, unashamedly, wants the Black Point lifestyle preserved. When he gets in his boat – moored out the front of his house – and sets off on a fishing trip, he says there is nothing like it. “It’s my sanctuary, going off to sea, hunting and gathering,” he says. “I love it. I just drift away with the tides, I get lost with the tides. It’s been a sanctuary for me when times are testing, with issues with health and pressure of work, it’s all of that.”
Another occasional Black Pointer, former Crows player Mark Ricciuto, wants everyone to look to the long term. Riccuito has been renting here for more than a decade.
“You can get to these places in two hours and feel like it’s miles away,” he says. “We need jobs, and we need industry, but not at the expensive of the environment. They need to work hand in hand.”
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