Friends of Stradbroke Island

Local ranger Michael Nothling holding a Broad-shelled River Turtle Chelodina expansa at Bumeira (Brown Lake). This turtle is rarely seen as it mostly lives lying concealed at the bottom of the lakes. Only spotted when the females come out on land to nest over. Foxes on North Stradbroke Island are still thriving with an estimated population of between 1 and 2000. Recent wildfires only increased the opportunities for these sly and opportunistic predators to attack and eat small native animals left vulnerable with essential vegetation cover incinerated. The eradication program should have been geared up immediately to give native animals the best chance of survival but reaching an agreement of island landholders to a start-up of an island wide action program has been slow. The Redland City Council has, as FOSI members are aware, employed a controller doing good work for some years, but only on council land. The Queensland National Parks Service and QYAC joined this program and ena...

Deadman's Beach at its worst. Early this year, with the wild weather, dramatic erosion occurred once again at Amity and Point Lookout. In January a large chunk of the Amity foreshore fell into the Rainbow Channel, causing a worrying time for residents, while at Point Lookout all beaches were left denuded of sand and with a number of the fringing casuarinas undermined and collapsed. Erosion does seem to be gaining in intensity and needs to be taken seriously by the powers that be. Amity has a long history of drastic erosion with the settlement now 100 metres or so inland from where it was first established. On this occasion it was halted by the dumping of about 300 tonnes of rock along the shores. But there are varying views on the long–term prospects and possible remedies and concern about Council consideration of a “planned strategic retreat” strategy. The Redland City Council is currently developing a Shoreline Erosion Management Plan for Amity. 
There is no such plan for the...

In the last year the global economic crisis together with new scientific predictions of the rapid escalation of global warming are factors that have radically altered most people’s world view. I am sure most FOSI members consider the island much more in a global context than we did only a year ago. The implications for North Stradbroke Island, already suffering environmental harm from inappropriate development, sand mining and water extraction, and very nearly an oil spill, become ever more unpredictable. Sea level rises, extreme weather events, mining companies ever more fixated on the bottom line and searching for profitable activities, and developers with the same problem, a larger population in Redlands drawing on the aquifer – all these are potential impacts on our poor island. FOSI’s activities over 2008 included involvement in two legal cases. One involved CRL’s attempts to quarry huge volumes of sand from the island (around 500,000 tonnes per annum) for the construction i...