4 Corners "SeaChange" 21/06/2006

"Seachange"
Reporter: Chris Masters
Producer: Deborah Cornwall

Broadcast: 21/08/2006
Cares and crowds are forgotten. Sand crunches between your toes, there’s salt on your skin and sun on your back. Here is where blue ocean meets virgin bush, and a golden stretch of beach is all yours for camping, swimming and quiet reflection.
Australia’s vast coastline once offered plenty of these cheap and carefree idylls. Now they are scarce; secrets held tight. Wealthy city people are buying up the beachfront. Developers build resorts for foreign tourists.
So footloose Australians – surfers, families or growing legions of caravan-hauling grey nomads - reach deeper into remote areas in search of a cheap beach holiday. They try to leave nothing but footprints, but the weight of their numbers strains fragile ecosystems.
Now, in Western Australia, alarmed authorities are drawing a line in the sand. The battleground is the Coral Coast, 1200 kilometres north of Perth, a marine jewel that lures dugong, turtles, manta rays, whale sharks – and tourists in the tens of thousands.
The WA Government claims it must stop this prize being loved to death. It is controversially resuming leases, proposing wider World Heritage protection and imposing rules that not only limit developments but may also signal the extinction of free-range tourism.
Many visitors – especially sun-chasing retirees who like to set up beach camps for months at a time – resent the Government joining them on holiday. "What are they trying to do – put us all back in retirement villages?" asks one man. "We must be able to camp on the beach… it’s just the way we are. We’re beach people," say another couple.
"Everyone thinks it’s not them, it’s everyone else… that’s the problem," laments the state minister. "It’s just the numbers - the sheer numbers of people."
"Beautiful one day, Queensland the next," is the slogan used by conservationists who warn of rampant Gold Coast-style development unless the Government takes resolute action.

See full broadcast on ABC website http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/seachange/8953454

Видео 4 Corners "SeaChange" 21/06/2006 канала deborah_cornwall