Planning issues in Australia's party capital channel those of the Napa
by PHILIP WHITE
Listening to ABC Adelaide Breakfast, it often seems on a Monday morning that the southern suburbs I live near are the new party capital of Australia. The excitement those announcers show infamous south coast parties they missed is feverish. It's like listening to a Hudson full of Exclusive Brethren panting about the sin they heard about and dream of ... loud music, strippers and cars on fire? Good Lord! Near a beach in a wine region? Devil worship!
That mob came from all over Australia to meet the rellies there at the beach. Sank a few beers and a red round the barby and hit the hay. They awoke just in time. All got out empty handed to stand on the road and watch the flames eat their kinfolks' house and a Commodore then jump the fence and open up the roof next door, revealing a flourishing dope crop.
The cops showed that joint all the attention, believe me. The neighbourhood looked after the homeless: gave them beds, clothes and gifts. Drinks. Poor people. Good people. It was their Christmas.
When public architecture is a systematic aggravated assault on the landscape, as it is along most of this lovely battered coast, and the civic planning means everybody builds an extra house on their back lawn so there's two or three times too many of you and not a blade of grass, you got trouble.
Plenty of ratepayers, sure, and folks to work in Woolies/Coles/Bunnings/BWS/IGL and the Colonel Sadness fat joints and whatever and join the Shoppies Union. But that's not enough to have a proper healthy community. Of course you'll get kids throwing rocks at cars on the freeway. There's nothing else to do. There are no other jobs, and all authority and government treats you with disdain and suspicion anyway.
Move east through vineyard country, and over my agricultural side, where the Willunga Embayment crosses the fault line and hits the Willunga Escarpment, I see a new wave of Malibu pretenders putting their chrome and glass monstrosities there on the hills' face.
From that perch, far from the beach, they can look over the vignoble and the troubled housing along its coast, right out across the Gulf St Vincent, the patron saint of vignerons and vinegar makers.
I visited friends in the village the other afternoon and was astonished as the sun sank to see the reflections in all that mirror glass which has been carefully mounted along the range so everybody can see what you've achieved. How much money you can spend on bedazzlement.
Once the Sun's fizzed out in the Bight its reflections in their windows are replaced by electric light pollution.
All that big glass needs lots of lights or people can't see it. And then there's the bloody Cube glowering all night over the town, lit up like a deconstructing prison on the northern horizon. The nightscape of poor old McLaren Vale is quickly following the mentality of the Malibuans and the Tortillans, in spite of all those years we spent trying to save the region's distinctive and unique agricultural nature. We never imagined this country night skyline filling with lights.
When Leon Bignell MP, the re-elected Member for Mawson was working on the Barossa and McLaren Vale Character Preservation Acts (whew!), he visited California's Napa Valley to learn about their clever and far-sighted Agricultural Preserve law of 1968.
The folks there were really helpful; their law was duly noted. It heavily influenced ours. But I wonder how different our acts would be if the Minister went there to research them now? The Napa's at war with itself over its version of our hills face; our Escarpment. As the Napa Valley floor has no room left for vineyard expansion, many conservationist residents want to put a stop to agricultural incursion into those oak woodlands and the headlands of the watercourses.
They say it's time to stop agricultural sprawl up their hillsides, especially after last year's fires ate so much of the savannah forest that previously covered a third of the county. They don't want more vineyard creep. They support Measure C, an item to be voted on in California's June 5th poll.
The Editorial Board of the local paper, the Napa Valley Register, includes the publisher, the editor, and five members of the public. They've called Measure C "A legitimate cry of frustration by many county residents who fear that their leaders are not acting to protect their way of life and their environment.
"Just as we did not wait for the start of urban sprawl before enacting the Ag Preserve in 1968, so too we should not wait until there is a tree-clearing gold rush in our back country, or until our aquifers begin to fail, before protecting the national treasure that is Napa County," they wrote. But they then recommend citizens reject the measure as it was "premature to take such a draconian and risky step ... drafted without any of the usual steps that a major piece of legislation undergoes: hearings, public input, and expert vetting, from both outside specialists and staff that would be responsible for interpreting and enforcing the law."
Reflecting our Character Preservation Acts, even a minor tweak to Measure C "would require a whole new ballot initiative in some future election," they concluded, and like pro-development critics of our legislations call it "the right idea in the wrong vehicle."
One major complaint suggests the wording of the measure would see more housing and extravagant "lifestyle" tourism attractions installed in the hills face forest for all below to see. They say the obsession with stopping vineyard creep will open the door for villa rash.
The polarised rivalry is much the same as anywhere else that tries to get itself sorted for a better future: a collection of significant residents took a formidable full page ad supporting Measure C; David Pearson, chairman of the 550 strong Napa Valley Vintners, released a calm statement defending woodlands and water but insisting "we must do this in a way that promotes sustainable growth ... Measure C will lead to sustained regulatory battles and result in unintended consequences that will not serve the goal of protecting our water and trees ... [it] is not the right vehicle for this."
I'd suggest the new Minister for Planning should visit the Napa to learn this stuff all at once, but I'm scared he'd come back with a plan to plant lovely shiny new houses in the forests all those amazing volunteers planted on Willunga Escarpment over the last 25 years. Those hills had been cleared.
In the evenings, when the sunset lights up their windows, the new heroes of the hills' face could all head down the cool Malibu/Zema/Tortilla Flats coast to maintain the region's image as the party capital of Australia. You know: drink Shiraz. Never pay the stripper. Burn something. ABC Adelaide Breakfast will promote it.
Help photo by Ross McMurtrie, next door neighbour to the giant Hut Block resort planned by Dr Richard Hamilton in his adjoining vineyard on McMurtrie Road. One vegetation issue still to face: if global warming continues, and forces vignerons to seek cooler slopes at higher altitudes, will the community tolerate the removal of some trees, whether they're original wild bush, or the results of the last decades of reforestation?
Will McLaren Vale end up swapping some shitty vineyard country on the flat for the best geologies of the Escarpment face? Like remove some upland trees to plant vines and return the Wok below the Aldinga airport to swamp and scrub? ... We should be thinking about these possibilities now ... photo Philip White
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