Our lost paradise
The Sunshine Coast Environmental Council’s Narelle McCarthy
Passionate animal advocates reflect on the Coast's missing wildlife
by CHRIS TAYLOR
F
or many people arriving on the Sunny Coast from bustling metropolitan areas, the region seems like a quiet beachside paradise. But Valda (Val) Robinson, who arrived from Victoria in 1968, remembers the Coast when it was a pristine habitat to multiple species no longer seen. Wanting to bring up her children in idyllic surroundings close to the beach, what they lacked in material things they more than made up for in nature. Living in a home they built surrounded by pristine rainforest behind Mooloolaba beach, she says they had every kind of animal in their “backyard”. Along with a pet kangaroo they took down to the waterfront to graze on the grass – much to the amazement of tourists – she says the surrounding coastal area was home to large families of koalas, kangaroos, wallabies, possums, turtles, frogs, sea and land snakes, goannas, echidnas, small bird species such as kingfishers and much larger birds such as roaming emus, peacocks and pheasants. And, she says, probably many more animals that the 81-year-old has forgotten. In those days fish were jumping out of the water, Val says.
Val Robinson moved from Victoria with her husband and children to an undeveloped Mooloolaba “paradise” rich in wildlife in 1968
“You could cast a line off the beach at 5pm and take your pick of catch for tea,” she says. Large sharks also patrolled the river mouth of the Spit before the rock wall was built to flatten out the beach. Dingoes and foxes roamed along the newly opened Nicklin Way between
Mooloolaba and Caloundra through what was then wallum swamp land. You had to drive carefully from where the bush started on First Ave as wildlife was common. Val says her kids would also play in the Mooloolah River National Park across from where Kawana Shoppingworld is today. “There was a natural spring that filled a big blue lake with a sandy beach around it,” she says. “It was amazingly beautiful. One day the developer opened it up to the ocean and it was lost.” To her shock, also in the blink of an eye the dense rainforest that surrounded her home disappeared. “Overnight they cut down everything around us. I was one of the first protesters when the bulldozers started clearing the land,” she says. It was a trend she continued to witness over the following decades. “They did all the North Shore Maroochy River area … There was supposed to be green corridors all the way through but they never kept them,” she says.
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