‘It's pretty scary': Sunshine Coast residents fear storm surges as Bribie Island buffer erodes away

The Guardian

06-05-2025

Jen Kettleton-Butler is on 'a postage stamp of island' trying to rescue an echidna she calls Eddie.
Wind roars in her microphone and the camera she holds pans from a public toilet that is disappearing beneath waves to a thin strip of coastal forest that, too, is being reclaimed by the ocean.
'This is weeks, if months, you know, at the most, before this is gone,' she tells her social media followers.
It is the first Saturday in May and Kettleton-Butler is standing on an uninhabited strip of Bribie Island a few dozen metres wide that has been dissected to the north and south by two successive breakthroughs – one by the wind and waves associated with ex-tropical Cyclone Seth in 2022 and the other by Alfred in March.
With the tide fast coming in, Kettleton-Butler calls off the search for Eddie, hoping he can be found at a later date. She hopes too that the 'weather settles down a little bit' over winter and 'stops pounding' the island while 'we actually get our ducks in a row and get some sort of coastal engineering solution in place to put back our barrier island'.
Behind the disappearing forest is a narrow passage of calm water upon whose far shore sits the houses of Caloundra, framed by the distinctive volcanic peaks of the Glass House Mountains. Kettleton-Butler points to the settlement on the mainland.
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'We need to put back our barrier island,' she says. 'We need to re-establish our bar back at its traditional position. Because those are the conditions and the assumptions around which we built our home on the edge of the water there'.
Just what does happen to this disappearing strip of northern Bribie Island is now subject to review by the Liberal National state government.
And the LNP Caloundra MP, Kendall Morton, says Kettleton-Butler is far from the only one of her constituents clamouring for action.
Morton says she knocked 10,000 doors on the Sunshine Coast in her bid to win the seat and take government from Labor. This was in the top three issues, she says.
'For a long time – like decades – we've watched Bribie Island slowly erode away, particularly on the northern tip,' she says.
'It's pretty scary.'
The real 'risk and danger' posed, she says, is not to the residents of Bribie, who live on the wider, southern end of the island. Instead it is those on the foreshore of the mainland. In the absence of the Bribie buffer and without the dune system on the surf coast, they would suddenly be exposed to storm surge and inundation. skip past newsletter promotion
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Morton says the previous government long ignored the erosion under the assumption this was 'mother nature' at work. But the new MP says the review will consider the impacts of human intervention, from dredging and wake from the offshore shipping channel to widespread coastal development.
'We've gone from a beachside town 40 years ago to a population of 100,000-plus people,' she says.
Bribie Island resident, retired engineer and environmental volunteer John Oxenford agrees human intervention has fuelled the erosion – but he points to the 2007 opening of the beach to four-wheel drives as 'opening a real Pandora's box'.
The pressure of tens of thousands of vehicles and associated foot traffic since had prevented the natural regrowth of dunes during the winter period, and further exposed them to erosion during the summer months, he says.
'Year over year over year, we've seen rapidly escalating volume of traffic on the ocean beach,' he says. 'The end result of that is erosion.'
As well as what is causing the erosion, the government review will look at what can be done – with Morton pointing to the sand groin and sand pump system used on the Gold Coast.
In the meantime, however, the state environment department will not be sending out any rescue parties for Eddie the echidna.
'The department is not aware of any evidence of increased impacts on the survival or welfare of wildlife inhabiting the northern tip of Bribie Island that would warrant any form of intervention,' a spokesperson says.
'These animal populations are adapted to a highly dynamic coastal environment with rapid and unpredictable changes.'