I’ll take the holiday thanks.

We live in South Fremantle, just a couple of streets back from South Beach. We live in a dead-end street. It is quiet. We can easily walk to the beach. Paradise? Yes, almost. As usual, in every perfect world there is something evil creeping underground waiting to strike :-(

There’s a old factory at the end of the street. It borders onto South Beach. That old factory is build on the site of a lead smelter that closed in the 1920s. Developers are now about to pull down the factory and prepare the land for construction of a whole lot of houses. Problem: the ground is unstable. The developer plans to dig out 5m of soil and filter it, taking out the big bits, and put it back, then add 0.5m of new topsoil.

The big problem there is the filtering. My understanding is that they are going to pick up the dirt and filter it with something. They are going to do it in the open, with prevailing winds blowing the dust into my house, garden and all our lungs.

Best practice for the developer would be to build something to contain the dust over the whole site but they aren’t going to do that.

Most likely we’ll have to move away from our home for a few months to escape exposure from the dust. To turn that big downer into something positive, we are thinking about a 3 month work break/sabbatical/exploration in Europe and Asia, maybe Vietnam, Japan, Italy, UK … plus a few more. We will see.

There’s a bunch of community action going on which we are supporting, including a Supreme Court action against the government to get the approval for the remediation plan set aside, and a really result by Adele Carles who ran against the sitting ALP member in the state election. At this stage of counting she has over 6% of the vote.

More on the whole issue at savesouthbeach.com.