an arduous battle to keep his clubhouse standing<\/a>.<\/p>\n![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/716fc92508e4adeafa90b6b1c5157e97\")
<\/p>\n
Glenn Arnold and Nationals MP Melina Bath stand on the sandbag wall at the lifesaving club’s clubhouse. (ABC Gippsland: Danielle Kutchel)<\/p>\n
“The damage was continuing, it wasn’t abating at all,” Mr Arnold said.<\/p>\n
After a long wait for funding, new sandbags are being added to Mr Arnold’s beloved beach in a bid to save it.<\/p>\n
“I find it a bit sad that we’re at this point,” he said.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/57d561ccc5050e0b590f3a986bacac20\")
<\/p>\n
Sandbags at Inverloch.\u00a0 (ABC Gippsland: Danielle Kutchel)<\/p>\n
For communities that revolve around the beach, coastal erosion is an emotive issue.<\/p>\n
“They’re scared,” Ms Balcombe said.<\/p>\n
“And then when they get scared, they get angry.”<\/p>\n
What’s behind erosion?<\/p>\n
Coastal erosion is not a new issue, but climate change means there has been drastic changes to the coastline in recent decades.<\/p>\n
Angus Gordon OAM is a coastal engineer.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/804e07388ad0bebf682e0486ad6a7b26\")
<\/p>\n
Angus Gordon has studied coastal erosion for decades.\u00a0 (ABC Central Coast: Keira Proust)<\/p>\n
He said people often assumed sea level rise was behind coastal erosion, but that was not the key factor.<\/p>\n
“It’s actually a shift in latitude of the weather systems.”<\/p>\n
In other words, storms and pressure systems now occur in different parts of the world than they used to.<\/p>\n
The ocean has responded to that with something called “wave energy flux”, the changing direction of waves.<\/p>\n
“The weather systems generate the winds, the winds generate the waves, and so when they change, the coastline just tries to respond to it,” Mr Gordon said.<\/p>\n
For Mr Gordon, building permanent structures in an inherently changing environment is at the crux of the issue.<\/p>\n
“We have been allowing what I would say is an incompatible form of development by making it a fixed development in a flexible environment.”<\/p>\n
Whose responsibility is coastal erosion?<\/p>\n
The question of who is in charge of fixing coastal erosion is tied to a more existential coastal dilemma: who owns the beach?<\/p>\n
To answer that, we can look to Ancient Rome.<\/p>\n
Loading…<\/p>\n
Mr Gordon said our modern right to wander on the beach harked back to Roman emperor Justinian’s public trust doctrine from the sixth century.<\/p>\n
It determined that things like air and rainfall were free.<\/p>\n
“Strangely enough \u2026 he also, in that doctrine, included free access to foreshores,” Mr Gordon said.<\/p>\n
That 1,500-year-old rule came to underpin modern laws, and is part of why Australia boasts so many spectacular public beaches.<\/p>\n
But according to Mr Gordon, modern developments complicated matters.<\/p>\n
“In reality, there’s a lot of beach that is in fact in private ownership,” he said.<\/p>\n
Who pays?<\/p>\n
Techniques to stop erosion include building seawalls and pylons to protect the shoreline.<\/p>\n
Another method is to protect the natural barrier of sand dunes by sandbagging and maintaining native vegetation.<\/p>\n
There is also sand nourishment, where extra sand is added to the beach.<\/p>\n
But all this costs money, and funding can be slow-moving and hard to come by.<\/p>\n
In Inverloch, a federal grant of $3.3 million has been put towards the problem, with other money from the state government and local council.<\/p>\n
The Bass Coast Council has been vocal about the fact that it cannot afford to keep forking out for sand nourishment.<\/p>\n
“It always comes back to money,” Glenn Arnold said.<\/p>\n
It is a similar story in Linda Balcombe’s shire.<\/p>\n
![\"A](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/bf336dddeb85f4720fb981b660546d8c\")
<\/p>\n
In Lancelin, the ocean is rapidly encroaching on the town.\u00a0 (Supplied: Kaeto Hoffman\/DroneSphereAU)<\/p>\n
She said the council was looking into the possibility of sharing the cost with private landowners.<\/p>\n
“We would like to be able to protect everyone, but we can not, financially.”<\/p>\n
Looking to the long term<\/p>\n
Even if there were infinite money for sandbags and sea walls, Angus Gordon said the current solutions would not stop erosion forever.<\/p>\n
“When we start to put non-adaptive structures \u2026 in the natural environment of the coastline, you’ll only win for a short time \u2014 eventually you’ll lose.”<\/p>\n
The Gingin Shire is implementing new rules, so any development flagged as vulnerable to erosion or inundation in the next 100 years is subject to certain conditions.<\/p>\n
“It would have to \u2026 be able to be moved if water reaches a certain point,” Ms Balcombe said.<\/p>\n
At-risk properties must also have the danger noted on their titles.<\/p>\n
“So going forward, we’re making the right decisions.”<\/p>\n
Mr Gordon said a better public understanding of coastal erosion could help people grapple with the issue.<\/p>\n
“When they get that understanding \u2026 people realise they need to be adaptive and that the beaches will change and they will lose some beaches.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Most Australians live by the beach. But the coastline we have built our lives around is disappearing before…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":460780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4740,210350,12883,15702,145714,50,92157,106199,210349,210351,1538,40378],"class_list":{"0":"post-460779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-australia","9":"tag-australia-wide","10":"tag-beach","11":"tag-coast","12":"tag-coastal-erosion","13":"tag-news","14":"tag-nourishment","15":"tag-sand","16":"tag-sand-bags","17":"tag-sandbagging","18":"tag-sea","19":"tag-seawall"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115753900947370294","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/460780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}