AUSTRALIANS like surfing? There are some who like surfin', with the n'poss. I like surfing with 'ing' as it is my thing with the 'ing' and not with a shark fin.

It was last Saturdee with a double "e' and I sat, bored out the back of my home watching, looking and waiting, just surfing, and I got so bored I turned my Apple off, took my feet off the desk for on screen I saw the heading "Top coastal experts have 'significant reservations' about Belongil rock wall", so I decided to get out of my reserve and go surfin' at Belongil. I had a need to belong as for a long time I had a long longing to be at that beach called Belongil down near Byron.

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I, being poetic, say that a rolling stone gathers no moss, so I moseyed out to my car, put the board on the rack, hopped in and took off thinking of the NRMA motto "It pays to belong" as I had longed for too long to get my head around this hard rock problem at Belongil, Byron Bay. No need for counseling me. Byron Council in an offbeat stoic moment of sand and grit had voted to build a rock wall at Belongil to stop coastal erosion. Were they swimming against the tide of public opinion?

In a freestyle wave of my hand I put the CD on, flicked the heater switch and put the accelerator down and as I drove I thought of the proposed rock wall at Belongil and all those stones. Mick Jagger in his sound reasoning belted out:

"It's only 'n rock, but I like it. I said I know it's only rock 'n roll but I like it, like it, yes, I do. Oh, well, I like it, I like it. I like it." The thought of those stones on the beach, and I didn't like it. I didn't like it. I turned the CD off in a quick jagged flick and turned on the radio:

"Waterloo, Waterloo, where will you meet your Waterloooo." Stonewall Jackson was crooning from 1959 when 'Waterloo' was Billboard's number 1 hit for five weeks and it went gold. I drove on towards the Pacific, as on this rock problem I was trying to roll it out as I was not about to go to water. I didn't like it, and I came off the expressway and onto Ewingsdale Road and that was when I met my Waterloo. The Traffic came to a standstill. It seems Byron has too many tourists who drive cars. There needs to be a train or some other vehicle of transportation. Stop, start, stop, start traffic, then finally rolling a left into Kendall Street and we were now at Belongil Beach, the place where spending money is a necessity for Byron Council as they are planning to spend $976,000 to erect a 105-metre long rock wall called an "interim" rock wall that will replace the geobags on Council-managed property at Manfred Street. Talk about Manfred, man that amount of money if it was up and over the million surely parking meters in the car park could have been considered by the Byron mayor. Three Belongil landholders will contribute $100,000 each to the wall, a shoe in.

It has been mooted that this "interim" rock wall could be used as a glowing example for protecting other beaches in Byron Shire. I climbed down the escarpment of about 5 metres from the dusty dirt-floored car park with graffiti on concrete blocks in Border Street, down to the gold-coloured substance that is called sand. I gritted my teeth, yes, the sand was down there, down near the water. No loo either. There was blue sky, a fresh breeze and flat surf and I stepped down some sandbag steps, around some rocks and more sandbag steps onto the flat sand. Flat in that there was not much rise in the sand elevation from the ocean, so when the tide came in you could see that the water nearly reached the rocks and it seemed it had reached it in storms at some time as that would be why the sand was so flat where the water had come in and hit the rocks and bounced back from the hard surface, the momentum carried the sand back out to sea.

But to me, being a tourist, that was not the problem confronting tourists.

The whole rock escarpment was covered in Bitou Bush, masses of green leaves with bright yellow flowers. I asked different people what the abundance of weed on the rock wall was and only one person out of about 10 could tell me. That rocks, it sure does. It would rock any Jane or Julian. I looked out to sea and there in the distance was Julian Rocks the two lovers in prehistoric lava rock all cold and stone-faced to a solution of Belongil's problem.

Bitou bush (Chrysanthemoides monilifera) is an introduced plant in NSW from South Africa, the country where Mick Fanning just saw a huge shark fin in the water and he fanned right out of there. The weed Bitou bush was planted widely on the NSW coast between 1946 and 1968 to reduce dune erosion. The north coast is heavily infested but it was meant to grow on the sand dunes and not on rock walls. The plant is listed as noxious by the NSW government as it takes over all native plants and destroys the habitat of native animals. The question remains of how much extra money besides the money spent on the rock wall would be spent on the eradication of the Bitou bush at Belongil Beach?

In 2000, the Australian government, the Howard government, declared nationally that the Bitou bush was a weed of national significance. This nation is between a rock and a hard place in what we are doing to the coast.
Meanwhile the NSW Coastal Panel says they have "significant reservations" about the Belongil rock wall project. The Coastal Panel provides advice to councils and to government. The plans for the Belongil rock wall project are to put on public exhibition for public comment but the Byron Preservation Association already is making public comment. The Byron Preservation Association objects to a program of planned retreat against an advancing ocean.

To me, nature provides plenty of examples of a planned retreat and attack against the ocean. It is symbolized in the natural layout of a normal beach, two rock headlands jut out into the ocean and the waves smash relentlessly against it churning up the sand and depleting the headland of any sand where the weekend rock fisherman if washed off rocks, then he is in very deep water, while the sandy beach reaches inland maybe up to 500 metres and that is the land retreating to a sandy beach. Belongil Beach is maybe up to a kilometre further west of the rocky and turbulent waves of Cape Byron. The famous Byron Lighthouse warns of rocks for shipping. Ah Belongil, having seen it, I made a ripping retreat home, for to solve the problem of beach erosion there, maybe it is more than just another brick in the wall.