Unfortunately, it often seems to be rubbish collection day on a day with extreme winds. 

I am fed up with seeing rubbish all over our community, and having to pick it up, because people put their bins out for collection even when extreme winds are forecast. 

Every time there are strong winds, numerous  rubbish and recycling bins get tipped over by the wind and the rubbish gets strewn everywhere. 

I am asking people to be sensible, and if strong winds are forecast, then don’t put your bins out. It won’t hurt you to keep the rubbish for another week. 

This is far preferable to having it blowing all over the streets and bushland. 

And then, of course, it eventually ends up in our oceans.

Please, everybody, check the forecast before you put your bins out.  

It has been a few weeks since the West Culburra Concept Plan (WCCP) was making local headlines.  Meanwhile, spoken and written submissions continue to make for interesting reading (inspiration from the quote “Reading can seriously damage your ignorance”). 

I was particularly drawn to Professor John Toon’s words. He is the proponent for the WCCP. I recalled having heard him speak some years back on matters Culburra Beach.

This time I read his words and it’s taken a while to condense a response. There were some gems in his 12-minute verbal struggle to encapsulate how the proposed concept plan was just what Culburra Beach needed to fill in what it so clearly lacks “ … being a community that I might say, has stagnated”.

It was hard to choose, but “Those water elements really don’t form much of the sense of the place itself ” really caught my attention. 

Apparently, some friends of his actually have a holiday house here to while away their mortgages but “I don’t come with them”, he declared. Many years back, Family Halloran drew many lines on paper as a grand vision for their Shoalhaven land purchases.

The lines twirled and swirled around dreams and plans involving a capital city, a university, a canal to join inerrant waterways, railway lines and such;  in Culburra Beach streets were named circuit, triangle, parade, place, grove, avenue whilst other names like The Mall and The Bowery sounded like a stops on a coastal monopoly board.

Stop Press 2018: “there is no … esplanade anywhere or anything like that”.

OK, here’s another vision on paper, to adjust the bits we missed out on way back then. Culburra Beach may well see future growth in ways that complement its written and unwritten history and natural assets.

However, Mr Toon you state that you are “simply observing that access to the water is not very easy in Culburra” in this place that you don’t really come to. 

Sure we don’t have a water view cafe or restaurant but a picnic blanket and basket at Tilbury Cove or Crookie works a treat.

So we are missing a built esplanade but thread your way around the multiplicity of tracks in Burradise; feel the sand between your toes, don a PFD and paddle Crookie.

Drop a line at the wharf, hold your hat when the nor’easter blows and marvel at the kite surfer skimming the shore, traverse the Wollumboola berm at sunset, spy a whale from Penguins Head, contemplate Cullunghutti. 

Harken to some Burradise music, locate some arts and crafts, cheer on one of our teams, visit the school, have morning tea in the community garden and take in some fragrant cafe smells. Stay a while and catch a vision of Culburra Beach. The sandy esplanades of Culburra and Warrain beaches are waiting.