The beach communities at Little Garie, Era and Burning Palms in Australia’s oldest national park are heritage listed. Their licences expire in March 2027, and the government is yet to decide what happens after that.
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.During the Great Depression, shanty towns and beach shack communities sprang up all along the NSW coast as poor people tried to eke out a living hunting rabbits and catching fish.
The three communities operate under a licence from National Parks and Wildlife Service, which is due to expire in March 2027. While the building was spared, the family still had to leave. McKenzie recalls packing up the shack, and sharing their furniture and other household contents with the other shack owners.
The licence for Little Garie, Era and Burning Palms signed in 2006 is the one that will expire in just under three years. There are also about 55 cabins at Bulgo, near Otford, which are managed separately.The shack owners are unsure what the government has in mind, only that so far they have not been invited to participate in its design, and there is some concern that NPWS will “do its own thing” and present it as a fait accompli.
The fact that everything had to be carried several kilometres along a bush track meant the “make do” ethos of the early days continued. In the 1940s and earlier, some homes were built from stone brought in by horse and cart from a nearby quarry. Now families carried in lightweight materials like fibro and aluminium, used materials that washed up from a shipwreck, and saved their empty beer bottles to build retaining walls.
“We used to come on a Friday night, you’d have a torch each and your backpack, and you’d come down the track, and the smells would be completely different,” Holloway says. “You’d get here and hear the roar of the ocean and couldn’t wait to wake up early in the morning and go for a surf, so it just became a way of life after that.”
The National Parks Association of NSW would usually object to anyone having exclusive use of accommodation assets in a national park, but executive officer Gary Dunnett says the organisation is comfortable with the current licensing arrangements for the coastal shacks given they are listed on the NSW state heritage register for their cultural significance.
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