After Noosa Council last month signed off on the development of the Blue Care aged care development on a popular Glossy Black Cockatoo bushland area with stage one of the project set to wipe out half the cockatoo feed trees on site, Desiree Gralton sat down with long term Glossy Black Cockatoo advocate Bob Carey. Here is her interview which appeared recently in Open Noosa.
As I sat through the Lendlease / Blue Care information session last week, I kept thinking about the juxtaposition of this whole project, with Bob Carey front and centre in my mind.
Here we have a man who has spent decades of his life fighting to protect the remaining habitat of the Glossy Black Cockatoos in our region.
I will never forget the tears in Bob’s eyes at a Mondays with NICA presentation in 2018 where he showed us on a map all the little pockets he tried to preserve over the years.
Slowly but surely we are chomping our way through the remaining bushland, cutting down trees and fooling ourselves that we can recreate nature where we want her to be. Where it fits better with our plans, with the lines we’ve drawn on a map. Pictures on paper and our screens that are more important than the reality of what is there. The countless plants and creatures that live there.
We say, that’s ok, birds can fly. We see them everywhere. They’re out at Maleny, they can go over there!
But in Maleny and in Mooloolaba and in every other little town there is another Bob fighting another battle until one day there is nowhere left for them to go.
And because Bob now knows these birds as if they are part of his family. I see him at the drinking spots in the afternoons, where he passes on his knowledge to everyone who is willing to listen. And there are many! This inter-generational passing on of knowledge is precious to see and I’ve been fortunate, along with my children, to learn so much from Bob.
But Bob is getting older. Bob and his wife would probably be in the market to move into a facility just like this. So the question is, would this development suit Bob’s needs?
I asked Bob about this conundrum a few days ago while we were watching three families of Glossies coming down for their evening drink. It’s fascinating to watch their daily ritual as they make their way down to the waterline for their daily drink.
I told him that I received a lovely message from one of his grandchildren about the difficulty in this situation as they have been looking at aged care options for Bob’s wife and she believed we needed one nearby, but not at the cost of cutting feed trees that he fought so hard to preserve.
It really is a conflicting situation to be in and one that is causing much angst in the community because there are so many vulnerable people who do need these facilities.
Bob said it was becoming abundantly clear to him that this was just the imposition of yet another profitable retirement estate, which can be anywhere but this precious remnant Wallum habitat. There are other council areas that are degraded already, that would easily suit this.
“If Blue Care / Lendlease can do what they are proposing to do – which is transferring habitat from one site to another – they would be pioneers and world leaders because it has never been done before. There has been successful flora revegetation in places but fauna recreation for this particular species is just bogus.”
“I would also like to see a more long term involvement with the school in creating career paths rather than just giving away trees – I can’t see the birds landing on those trees in 7 years time, and where would they go in the meantime? In the natural habitat, trees of different ages stand in groups and new ones come up as the old ones fall over and die – having thousands of new trees all the same age could create other problems further down the track.”
Bob believes a high care facility can be built on the already cleared Ben Lexcen frontage with an extra level above the shops and over the parking area, which can provide protected parking underneath for cars and service vehicles.
“Splitting the development now was a clever strategy by Blue Care to play on the aged care need sentiment and then throwing an extra residential village in on the side. There are already plenty of upscale retirement villages across Noosa and it is ultimately not the kind of place local residents end up moving to.”
When the Blue Care presenter started talking about the Sapphire, Ruby and Diamond rooms “setting a new standard” I knew this was not the sort of place down-to-earth Bob would like to go to. In fact, it would be over his dead body. And that, to me, means it fails the pub test.
