Photo: Dunoon and District Gazette
Bexhill Quarry Parklands, Dunoon and District Gazette
It’s worth reflecting on what-just-was: wave after wave of pandemania. Snap lockdowns and travel restrictions were for some, a form of forced minimalism.
Adapting to online instead of in-face surfaced neanderthal instincts for many – the threat of actual or imagined catastrophe triggering the reptilian mind and instinctive survivalism. Shopping fights over toilet paper, price fights over real estate and yes – the heated debate over vax facts all have strong emotional drivers.
Photo: Dunoon and District Gazette
The antidote of course is to find our social focus again, re-acquaint ourselves with community activities, get out of forced hibernation and meet the real world. Take a picnic at the Rocky Creek Dam Reserve, go for a dip at the Whian Whian falls.
Also ranked up there with hidden Hinterland beauty spots is the spring fed waterhole of the old Bexhill Quarry. On any sun-drenched weekend (even in lockdown), people crowd out the banks and swim beneath 30m high cathedral like cliffs in cobalt blue waters of the lagoon.
The now Insta-famous abandoned quarry is being loved to death – trails of trash, the smell of bush toilets and the odd burnt car crime scene. A committed group of residents, recognising the popularity and potential of the four-acre site, has drafted a visionary masterplan. The plan requires the former Bexhill Brickworks site to be released from Crown hands and turned into a public recreation reserve. Beginning with a weed and native flora survey, a collated social history of the site and an impeccably drafted landscape architect plan, the proposal has received in-principle support from Lismore City Council.
The Bexhill Quarry Parklands committee is seeking input and enthusiasm from anyone interested in this forward-thinking project. A complete makeover is envisioned – making it a public reserve and tying it in with the Northern Rivers Rail Trail corridor.
Public reserves and recreational amenity are the antidote to the various degrees of pandemania that families in particular need to recover from. Bexhill Quarry Parklands is just the visionary project that our local region needs.
To find out more about the proposed Bexhill Quarry Parklands you can email bexhillquarry@gmail.com or visit:
https://www.facebook.com/bexhillquarryparklands
https://www.instagram.com/bexhillquarryparklands/
This article appeared in the Dunoon and District Gazette, December 2021-January 2022.
