“A Creek, a Cover Story, and a Very Expensive View”
Too close for comfort
Spend five minutes on Serenity Beach and you’ll see the issue. A brown creek cuts across the sand before it reaches the ocean. Locals say it’s not just stormwater anymore - there are ongoing concerns about runoff, erosion, and even sewage effluent - which is a well known and publicised part of the system. People have been raising it for months. They’ve talked about health risks to many journalists - with lots of media as a result, also about damage to the dunes - with much criticism re council response - calling it little more than temporary fixes - band-aids on something much bigger. Neglecting fact that a local water authority is in charge of what’s in the water.
And then there’s the beachfront house, sitting unmoveably close to the trajectory of this brown creek.
It sits just back from the dunes as a trophy property - glass, steel, and the kind of place that only makes sense at $20 million-plus. In this story, it happens to be owned by the brother of local Councillor. That’s where things start to feel… uncomfortable.
Because instead of a clear push to fix the source of the problem—upstream infrastructure, proper stormwater management, sewage re use elsewhere, something long-term - what started appearing on the beach looked a lot like a temporary intervention.
Sandbags. Placed just so. Not to solve the creek, but to nudge it. Encourage it to run a little differently. A little less visibly. A little less… inconvenient for a trophy house sales campaign 250m away.
The creek didn’t disappear, but for a short time it looked smaller. Less obvious. Less like something a buyer might stop and ask about during an inspection. And the prospective buyers were asking. “How close is that creek?”
One helpful answer floating around: “Oh, it’s kilometres away… two or three, I think.”
In reality, it’s a short walk - around a couple of hundred metres when it runs north along the beach. Close enough that you don’t need a map. Just eyes to see it on aerial shots in agent’s sales brochure and online.
For a brief window, the beach looked exactly how a listing needs it to look, the temporary fix of sandbags seemed to be working:
Clean. Unbroken. Easy to photograph.
Then Right on cue, the property hit the market, once again after being pulled last year, too many questions back then.
“Absolute beachfront. Uninterrupted natural beauty.”
Then it rained. And like it always does, the creek pushed back - slipping past the sandbags, carving its way across the beach, carrying the same questions with it. About what’s flowing through it. About why it hasn’t been properly fixed. And about whether managing how things look has taken priority over dealing with what’s actually there and why Council listened to what can be considered biased private gain influence.
At the next council meeting, the language was familiar - complex systems, ongoing reviews, long-term plans.
But down on the beach, it’s simpler than that. You can move sand and place some sandbags against mother nature but eventually, the water decides where it goes.