Introduction
Governments, at all levels, identify desirable outcomes and create formal plans to pursue them. The expenditure of public money is always involved, and that’s the context in which this analysis has been written. It is not a success story. It suggests that public money was wasted, and a successful outcome thwarted, despite the best intentions, to achieve the best outcomes, of all who were involved.
A Shoreline Erosion Management Plan (SEMP) is a coastal engineering exercise that typically addresses a retreating shoreline where evidence of significant ongoing erosion spans decades or even centuries. Coochiemudlo’s SEMP was triggered by an intense storm that crash-landed on the island’s eastern shore, Norfolk Beach, in January 2013. Redland City Council responded by engaging coastal engineers to produce the preliminary report that convinced Council, in 2015, to embark on a full management plan.
But another six years would pass before the Coochiemudlo Shoreline Erosion Management Plan was tabled at a Council meeting, in February 2021.
Six figure sums had already been spent on coastal engineering studies and storm-related beach maintenance costing $220,000. The SEMP ran to more than 160 pages, and recommended even more extensive, and expensive, measures to forestall erosion of Coochiemudlo’s shoreline, especially along Norfolk Beach.
Council officers highly commended it, and the assembled councillors voted unanimously to adopt its costly recommendations. The timeline and analysis that follows sets out the reasons why I believe the whole SEMP process should have been abandoned long before it came to that Council meeting in 2021.
Part 1 – In the beginning
2013
On Sunday, January 27th 2013, storm waves atop a swollen high tide swept sand away from the top of Norfolk Beach on Coochiemudlo Island. The storm transformed the beach’s appearance, stripping the dunes, undermining trees, and collapsing a section of the Norfolk track, including its fences.
Within weeks, an earth-moving contractor had begun scraping up much of the lost sand from the low tide zone and hauling it back up to the high water mark.
Coochiemudlo Island Coastcare then organised its volunteers into a taskforce that revegetated the restored dunes with native coastal plants.
Their determination and hard work created a lot of goodwill and community satisfaction at having ‘saved the beach’ by Doing Something. That the shoreline had absorbed the impact of such storms for millennia, without human intervention, went unspoken. The sense of purpose among some residents, and their enthusiasm to keep Doing Something, soon gathered momentum.
Just three months after the storm, Coastcare declared that Norfolk Beach “needs a Shoreline Erosion Management Plan.” Redland City Council had apparently “earmarked the beach” for a SEMP, and a fast tracked study was proposed. Why Coastcare was the mouthpiece for Council’s intentions, and seemed to have somehow been chosen to “prepare our community for the process”, was not explained.
What Council actually did, some months later, was commission an erosion scoping study of Norfolk Beach by coastal engineers BMT – a global maritime consultancy. It was tasked with identifying the extent and causes of the beach’s erosion, foreshadowing a SEMP to enable Council to manage it. There would be no fast-track. The initial study would take nearly two years.
The beach was already recovering as 2013 came to a close. But on December 18, at the last Council meeting of the year, Coastcare presented an urgent plea for $20,000 to save trees along the shoreline south of the melaleuca wetlands. An elderly eucalypt, leaning precariously out over the beach, was
adjudged to be ‘iconic’. There was no clear explanation as to how the money would be spent, nor expert confirmation that any trees needed saving. The councillors approved the money anyway.
2014
In February, primed by the $20,000, construction began on a sandbag seawall along 60 metres of the beach at the southern end of the wetlands . Council had not sought the mandatory State Government approval. The unauthorised seawall would end up costing over three times the initial $20,000.
The August 20th Council meeting noted “the establishment of SEMP Reference Groups to provide local knowledge and input into the preparation of local shoreline erosion options.”
2015
In August 2015, the coastal engineers’ Norfolk Beach Shoreline Erosion Study was released, the foundation document for this major undertaking.
The foreseeable loss of residential buildings and public infrastructure to severe, long-term erosion is the usual justification for the high cost of developing a SEMP, and implementing its defences against erosion. Norfolk Beach, with no housing within a hundred metres, and only a council toilet block back about thirty, was hardly a disaster waiting to happen. And, eighteen months on, the beach was recovering noticeably from the storm.
But the 2015 Erosion Study had struck a far more serious problem. BMT’s coastal engineers, after a two year search, had failed to find any defensible evidence of significant long-term erosion. Bereft of such evidence, all they could offer were clues and suggestions.
Even the suggestions of historic beach recession (erosion) were compromised because the engineers did not compare the oldest aerial photo, from 1955, with a current one from 2015. That would have required “acquisition of original photographs and accurate geo-referencing.”
The necessary images are easily accessed online. Working with a cartographer, I’ve reproduced the 1955 photo scaled to accurately match its modern equivalent from 2025. The 1955 high water mark (in blue) has been deduced from the vegetation/sand boundary, geo-referenced, and then super-imposed over the 2025 satellite image (ruler in metres). Here’s what has changed over the last 70 years.
These comparisons argue, far more strongly than ‘suggestions’ to the contrary, that the high water mark along 90% of Norfolk Beach has not retreated significantly in 70 years. The other 10%, at the beach’s northern tip, lost about 20 metres between the 1970’s and early 2000, when it appears to have slowed.
Without credible evidence of long-term erosion, let alone any threat to houses or public assets, Council forged ahead with preparing a Shoreline Erosion Management Plan for Coochiemudlo’s beaches. So began five years of costly research, ill-advised beach works, and community disquiet. It would end as it began, with no defensible proof of long-term erosion – five years of a solution looking for a problem.
Part 2 – The absence of proof
When the coastal engineers released the 2015 Norfolk Beach Study, Redland City Council was already developing a SEMP for Amity Point, on Minjerribah. Unlike Norfolk Beach, the justification for a SEMP at Amity ticked every box. The township had lost 100 metres of its waterfront since the 1880’s, the erosion had not abated, and for houses close to the shore, rock walls were the last resort against the ravages of the Rainbow Channel.
Amity’s catastrophic past, and ongoing exposure to threatening seas, can make Council’s decision to green light a second SEMP for Norfolk Beach, after a single storm, seem almost ridiculous. That Norfolk Beach was soon recovering, with some modest assistance, only adds to that impression.
Little wonder the 2015 Norfolk Beach Study was ambivalent about its “suggestions” Norfolk Beach was facing an erosion threat even faintly comparable with Amity Point. It was an even bigger ask with nothing older than a 1955 aerial photograph, and so little oral or recorded history of any relevance.
Not only was the Coochiemudlo SEMP crippled by a lack of historic data, environmental science apparently played no significant role in the engineers’ research. To spend eight years producing a plan to manage a natural shoreline, without reference to the relationship between the beach environment and its flora and fauna led, in my view, to the first bad decision in the SEMP’s journey – almost before it began.
The construction of Norfolk Beach’s 60 metre sandbag seawall, in early 2014, was arguably misguided and ill-informed. It was built to protect a tree that had no urgent need of protection. Council officers were apparently oblivious to the well-documented dangers in imposing hard structures on dynamic beaches. Seawalls can concentrate the impact of wave energy and deflect it onto more vulnerable, adjacent locations. That’s what happened south of the Norfolk Beach seawall, and is happening still.
The roots of the leaning gum tree, near the James Street walkdown, were certainly laid bare by the January 2013 storm. And the pink bloodwood, about 30 metres to its south, was also undermined.
Scenes like these seemed to engender a sense of catastrophe in some residents, heightened by their fading recollection of what the beach looked like for many years before the 2013 storm struck.
The leaning gum’s lateral roots were exposed long before the storm – high and dry, seaward of the vegetation edge. The pink bloodwood’s roots (circled) were often exposed too, in varying degrees. The community had no safety concerns with any of this, as this image shows, and enjoyed the dappled shade under the old tree. This favourite spot was lost when it disappeared under the sandbag seawall.
Council’s $20,000 handout, in December 2013, was about giving the tree urgent “priority protection”. But, by then the tree didn’t need it. In this image from November 2013 the leaning gum looks much as it did back in 2006, and, like the pink bloodwood, had survived everything thrown at it for many decades.
But construction of the unauthorised wall went ahead anyway.
Three years of unremarkable weather followed. But in late March 2017, Cyclone Debbie drenched South-East Queensland and created a storm surge that generated a coastal trapped-wave in Moreton Bay. Four days of protracted high winds peaked on the night of March 30 at 93kph, when the tide was well over two metres, atop the storm surge. The beach south of the seawall changed almost overnight.
That this area suffered such a dramatic setback, while the rest of the beach was largely unscathed, argues strongly for the seawall being principally responsible for the sudden, severe erosion immediately to its south. That likelihood was reflected in the BMT engineers’ repeated recommendations to remove it.
It also explains why the subsequent attempts to replenish the sand cover over the roots of the pink bloodwood and beyond, were doomed. These are described below. The seawall upset the natural equilibrium of the southern beach. Its destructive effect persists to the present day.
Part 3 – Bobcats on the beach
2017
On October 26 the first meeting of Coochiemudlo’s SEMP Community Reference Group was held at the Community Hall. It was composed of 19 members – the Chair (Division 4 Councillor, Lance Hewlett), Council officers, representatives from other local organisations, unaligned local residents, and two independent marine experts.
2018
On April 23 an earthmoving machine appeared on Norfolk Beach. It began scraping up sand from the shallow inter-tidal area and depositing it around trees and over vegetation along the high water mark. A large pink bloodwood tree (first pair below) was targeted.
Almost immediately, high tides began cliffing the dumped sand heaps. As they collapsed, the sand was carried away, leaving the inter-tidal area impoverished. Coastcare volunteers did their best to plant in the heaped sand, but by October almost all of it had been washed away.
On July 18, three months after the beach scraping, the BMT engineers attended their first Community Reference Group meeting. They had just commenced a further study that would occupy another 18 months. The April 23 beach scraping was not mentioned at the meeting. No potential cause of the worsening erosion that triggered it, or reason for the operation’s failure, has ever been published.
2019
On July 19, the scenario was repeated. A front-end loader hauled sand, recovered from the island’s barge ramp, onto Norfolk Beach. It was then piled it up along the high water mark. Once again, exposed trees, like the pink bloodwood, had sand dumped around their roots.
Councillor Lance Hewlett, posted a glowing Facebook tribute to these “remediation works”. But he then implied the thousands of dollars had primarily been spent to cosmetically enhance the shoreline’s appearance. This was in readiness for an historic re-enactment on the beach in a few days time.
It was not the first intimation that for some participants in the reference group the SEMP was primarily an aesthetic intervention to freeze the appearance of Norfolk Beach in an idealised vision of what it should look like. Phrases like ‘tending the dunes’ and ‘grooming ’ them, suggested the truckloads of sand were a kind of beach Botox. For others, the sand dumps were an ugly distortion of the beach’s natural character.
Six weeks later, the “great work” had all but disappeared. The roots of the pink bloodwood ( below, far left) were again exposed by median tides, waves and wind, just as they’d been in April the previous year.
On August 1, the Community Reference Group was told that the Queensland Government had raised compliance concerns about Council’s sandbag seawall, constructed immediately north of the photo above, in early 2014. Council had never sought the mandatory development approval. And there was still no evidence of any threat to property or infrastructure, the usual justification for a “hard structure” that suppresses the beach’s natural character. Council would now seek a retrospective Development Application. This would not be advertised. No community input would be invited.
Part 4 – Politics: “Who Gets What, When, How”
This was the milestone year in which the Coochiemudlo Island Shoreline Erosion Management Plan was finalised. The first draft of the SEMP, including its full rationale and operational recommendations, was released on May 21.
On June 16 it came before the Community Reference Group . The draft’s highest priority was maintenance tasks, such as removing trees and formalising access paths . Costly, non-essential works, like beach scraping or nourishment after storms, were given the lowest priority. Retaining the sandbag seawall was, conspicuously, placed last.
Beach nourishment, spreading imported sand, can stall, but not defeat, persistent erosion. On healthy beaches, it may speed up natural recovery from short-term recession, as it did after the 2013 storm.
But when the Community Reference Group saw these SEMP priorities, the meeting was riven by sharp disagreements. Those still convinced Norfolk Beach was in the grip of long-term erosion were angered that beach nourishment could only occur after a storm had struck, and made it worse.
The engineers, without adequate proof of persistent historic erosion, could only recommend short-term responses, of non-essential status. The fractious reference group meeting ended (as minuted) with this exchange between the lead coastal engineer and a member of the Coastcare executive.
In the weeks that followed, the dashed expectations of Coastcare, and, presumably, other reference group members, were somehow revived. On August 26, a revision of the SEMP appeared, with the engineers now embracing a far more ambitious and costly schedule of beach works. They had been apprised of “recent unaddressed storm erosion on Norfolk Beach. ” While the beach would still recover “given sufficient time” that was no longer the preferred option because “concerns have been raised by community members that if no action is taken erosion will be exacerbated by future storms ”.
There was no indication that the engineers shared these concerns, and their original priority list implies they didn’t. These eleventh hour changes called for large amounts of sand to be imported to energise Norfolk Beach’s recovery. The former top priority, removing fallen trees along the beach, had vanished never to be seen again. In its place was a prescription for enough beach sand to fill an Olympic swimming pool.
And there’d be no waiting for a storm to trigger it. Immediate nourishment by 2,400 cubic metres of imported sand would occur in front of the wetlands, and south of the sandbag wall for another 190 metres. Covering the “unaddressed storm erosion” with 4,000 tonnes of sand was estimated to cost $170,000. And it had to happen soon, before the summer storm season. It didn’t.
2021
At Council’s February 17 meeting these SEMP recommendations were unanimously adopted. The Council officers’ report explained the SEMP was primarily driven by “a strong desire to preserve the current shoreline alignment and to preserve the amenity of the sandy beach”. This strong desire had come from “the community through the reference group” .
It almost sounded as if Council was powerless to resist. As well, $350,000 would now be spent, once every 5 years, to accelerate Norfolk Beach’s natural recovery and buffer it against “subsequent erosion”.
This was on top of the $170,000 “to address community concerns about existing conditions” – in total, well over half a million dollars.
Part 5 – Too little too late
2023
Two and a half years later, the beach works tackling the urgent “unaddressed storm erosion” finally commenced… sort of. The BMT engineers had speculated that sand dredged from the Bay could be pumped onto the beach for about $30/m3. Allowing $70/m3, for contingency, had produced the
$170,000 estimate for the proscribed 2,400m3.
But when Council officers set about sourcing suitable sand, they found that COVID-driven market forces had wildly affected the cost. Even upping the spend to $250,000 would procure and transport no more than 430m3, from the only suitable supplier, a sand mine 90 kilometres up the north coast. Council copped the extra $80,000 and went ahead.
In late June a convoy of trucks set out on the three hour round trip between the sand mine and the Victoria Point jetty. Their 430m3 payload was less than 20% of the amount specified in the SEMP, and each cubic metre, by the time it was dumped on Norfolk Beach, had cost not $70 but $580.
Once the sand arrived on Norfolk Beach, Coastcare seemed to be in charge of its dispersal along the wetlands beach front, north of the ephemeral creek. They reworked some of the sand piles into a semblance of what they referred to as a “new dune” and set about vegetating it with 2,500 plants.
Some sand was never deployed, and remained in the heaps in which it was unloaded from the barge.
But, there’d be no repeat of Coastcare’s conspicuous success restoring beach vegetation after the 2013 storm. Within days, the ‘new dune’ was considerably depleted, and many plants lost. A succession of nightly tides that were high, but not abnormally so, peaked in early July at about 2.8 metres.
Today, thirteen years after the Coochiemudlo SEMP process began, evidence of its only tangible outcome, the beach nourishment three years ago, has all but disappeared. The piles left on the beach as the barge unloaded are long gone too. There was initial optimism that the imported sand might have been pushed around by the tide, but not lost to the beach.
However, measurements of the high water mark since 2021, using fence posts as datums, show neither consistent seaward nor landward movement, nor changes in median sand depth around the posts that line the beach front. If the sand is still in play, where is it?
Those who are dispirited by how the beach looks in 2026, may continue to blame long-term erosion for the fallen trees and constant changes that characterise a dynamic shoreline. But the fact remains that the high water mark , clearly visible in the photo above, has hardly shifted from the best estimate of its location in the aerial photograph from 1955. That’s 70 years of stability. The comparison with Amity Point could hardly be more stark.
Postcript
The Coochiemudlo Shoreline Erosion Management Plan was tabled in 2021, at Redland City Council’s February meeting. A Council officer, explaining the wholesale, last minute changes to the Plan, told councillors “… the community through the Reference Group had expressed a strong desire to preserve the current shoreline alignment and preserve the amenity of the sandy beach”.
He did not say at what point the Reference Group united behind this ‘strong desire’. It is not recorded in the minutes of the eleven Community Reference Group meetings. Nor, to the best of my knowledge, did anyone genuinely representing “the community” – the rest of us on Coochiemudlo – ever become aware of the sudden SEMP changes, let alone express “a strong desire” to support them. I suspect the Community Reference Group failed to represent the range of informed opinions island residents expressed in social media and elsewhere.
That Councillor Hewlett chaired the Community Reference Group, and championed views that coincided with those of Coastcare, may have skewed Council’s perceptions towards operational choices that did not reflect a majority community view.
That those choices contradicted the preferred, long-term recommendations of the expert consultants is perhaps even more regrettable. And, it seems, well over half a million dollars of ratepayers’ money was invested for no significant return. No one is to blame, but the flaws in the process should be recognised, in the hope that may prevent their re-occurrence.
Peter Wear
Coochiemudlo
Peter Wear worked for decades as a journalist and TV current affairs producer. He has lived on Coochiemudlo Island for 20 years.
Except where stated otherwise, Peter Wear took the Coochiemudlo Island photos in this story.
