Friday, 24 December, 2021
Thinking of selling? You know who to call
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Sounds of the season
Jolly sweet street party
Colourful farewell to the year
32-page liftout Property Guide
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INSIDE
PR OP ER TY
Celebrate with the family Christmas brings families together in a myriad of ways. For the past 22 years Lee Marsden of Noosaville has celebrated by lighting up her house with Christmas lights and inviting the community in.“My mother, my father and sister died around Christmas. I celebrate their lives at Christmas by lighting up,” she said. Lee’s display began with one string of fairy lights, one string of icicles and a reindeer and has expanded each year, now taking her two months to adorn her Pickering Court home. To give back to hospices for the care
they gave to her family members who each lost their battle with cancer, Lee raises money from donations, with funds in recent years going to Katie Rose Cottage Hospice. Lee said this year the numbers of visitors to Christmas lights had diminished, something she attributes to Covid concerns. But the look of joy on the faces of the children who visit make her efforts worthwhile. To view local Christmas lights visit the Sunshine Coast Christmas Lights Guide on Facebook.
Lee Marsden greets visitors to her house filled with Christmas Lights.
Picture: ROB MACCOLL
Lake’s long haul By Phil Jarratt
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With the proposed Lake Doonella Foreshore Plan on hold pending a funding allocation in Council’s 2022-23 budget, lakeside residents are gearing up for a long battle over access issues. It is now almost five months since Noosa Council closed the foreshore track between Shields Street and Doonella Street in response to a feud between two neighbourhood factions that threatened to erupt into violence and intimidation. While both sides have calmed down considerably to allow Council to broker solutions, the animosity remains not far from
the surface, and both sides have been feverishly preparing their cases and lobbying the powerbrokers. But this is no petty neighbourhood dispute. The mishandling of the Doonella Foreshore goes back decades and generations, and cuts to the very heart of the complex and often vexed issue of land tenure and public access to public waterways. While it may seem on the surface to be a fight for public access across lakefront land that a handful of owners believe is part of their property, it is actually a test of the will of government to hold true to its stated policy of public access in the face of a nightmarish mess of what Council’s Acting Envi-
ronment Services Manager, Shaun Walsh, has described as “complex tenure arrangements” leading to “lack of clarity about the extent of private property and whether it extends to the high-water mark”. Put simply – or as simply as you can in these muddy waters – it’s all about whether something called an ambulatory boundary can legally prevent foreshore access to a few hundred metres of land that is currently the only impediment to a complete foreshore access track around Lake Doonella, as flagged in Council’s 2020 Noosa Cycling and Walking Strategy. The Queensland Government defines an
ambulatory boundary as “where a body of water (e.g. sea or river) defines the boundary of land. An ambulatory boundary shifts with the ordinary movement of the sea or river through gradual change.” The Doonella dispute sees Council caught in the middle between the group of landowners who claim an ambulatory boundary that gives them absolute high water lake frontage, and a much larger group of residents who want to start a bushcare group and establish a public walkway along the existing Unitywater sewer alignment extending along this part of the foreshore. Continued page 4