Last year on Swellnet, Steve Shearer wrote an article that detailed the infrastructure provided to Australia’s fishing and boating communities. Aside from breakwalls, boat ramps, channel dredging, and fish aggregating devices, there are also 153 artificial reefs around the Australian coastline. As a community, they’re surprisingly well catered for.

At the time the article was written there was zero infrastructure designed solely for surfers. Sure, the Tweed and Nerang River sand bypasses both create great waves, but TOS and the Superbank are incidental to the outcome - surfers weren’t even consulted. 

Meanwhile, Palm Beach Artificial Reef had a design element that catered to surfers but the reason for its existence is coastal protection, not surf amenity.

Since the article was written Australia received its first artificial reef dedicated solely to surfing.

In June, Middleton Reef at Albany was unveiled. Albany has form on the board when it comes to catering for board sports. It has four skate parks, including the Snake Run which is the second oldest skate park in the world having been built in 1976. It’s so old it’s even been heritage listed.

Prior to the construction of the reef, Middleton Beach was an infrequent surf spot, more known for length of closeout than length of ride. The closest ‘real’ surf spot was twenty minutes drive away.

Since it was unveiled, Middleton Reef has been a boon for Albany surfers, including younger kids who can’t drive to other surf spots.

The point here is not so much the reef or its design but that Albany has been a forward-thinking community who've made things happen for surfers (and skaters).

Albany's Middleton Reef creates waves where none existed before, and, like other offshore reefs, it's expected to also create a shallow sand spit - a salient - on the beach side of the reef.

Now, on the other side of the continent, a small group of surfers are appealing to their community to show equally expansive thinking.

Paul Staddon, Freddie Spence, and Ben Horvath call themselves C Care Cronulla. They’re three surfers who’ve rallied around a common cause - what to do about Cronulla’s disappearing sandbanks.

The sand at Cronulla has, of course, been disappearing for a century. It’s been trucked away and used as materials: concrete, mortar, and bricks, to build modern Sydney. 

Before European settlement the Cronulla sand dunes measured 1,000 acres and up to 60 metres high. Formed near the entrance to three rivers: the Cook, Georges, and Hacking, the sand assembled over millenia, also providing an ostensibly bottomless supply of sand to the Cronulla beachbreaks. The interplay of wind and waves moved it back and forth between the surf zone and the dune system.

It’s past tense now. The towering dunes are gone, and with them the secondary sand systems such as sandbanks.

That short history lesson is for the benefit of readers as older Cronulla surfers are all too aware of the sand loss. 

“We’re not trying to undo history,” says Paul, the group’s spokesperson, “that’s an impossible thing. We’re not even going to debate the merit of whether it was right or wrong - that’s not what this is about.”

What the history does provide, however, is some context to what C Care is up against, and what can be done to remedy it.

Unlike, say, the north coast of NSW, where a sand transport system provides a near-unlimited supply of sand, Cronulla is an embayment. It’s a closed system. When you take from it, it’s not replenished. Or to be more accurate, it is replenished but at a glacial rate as the sand coming down the Hacking River is the only new sand supply coming into Bate Bay.

Before and after: At left is the Cronulla sand dunes as viewed from South Cronulla in the 1970s, when even after forty years of sand mining they towered over Bate Bay, while at right is how the 'dunes' appear now - not just levelled but heading deep into negative territory so all that's left are saline lakes (Photos Greg Button)

For Paul, the motivation for the movement came when seeing Cronulla through the eyes of his younger son.

“That whole Cronulla stretch we used to surf, from The Alley north to the Wall, Elouera, Wanda, John Davies, all the way up to Greenhills and beyond,” says Paul, “has now been reduced to just two banks…at best.”

“I look at it sometimes and it’s barely a surf beach.”

“I’m aware how that’s going to sound,” says Paul self-awarely “but I had a period away from surfing, just with a shoulder injury, but when I came back the change was incredible.”

“The whole beachfront had changed,” explains Paul. “The Wall's more exposed, so it's actually more like a refractive device than an absorption device.”

Constructed in 1985, the Wall is a concrete seawall built on a low bluff between North Cronulla and Elouera, built to protect the property above from being undermined. The Wall itself is now being undermined as its foundation become exposed to the ocean (Photo Paul Staddon - C Care)

Yet other surfers didn't share his outrage, says Paul. “There wasn’t a resistance so much as an apathy. Their first response was, ‘Oh, you're wasting your time,’ or, ‘I don't really care, mate, as long as my rates don’t go up.’”

There’s a mode of thinking, not entirely incorrect, that the sand conditions are cyclical, moving at a rate beyond the seasons. To that end, it’s worth noting that in 2023 Australia’s East Coast was transitioning towards El Nino with most beaches experiencing an enormous build up of sand.

In a Swellnet article detailing excess sand, Wollongong resident Steen Barnes said, “Last year we could barely run Nippers during high tides, now we could set up the 100 metre sprint across the beach, and we’d still have room to spare.”

Meanwhile, 75kms north of Wollongong, the North Cronulla lifeguard tower was moved before it fell into the ocean and 5,000 tonnes of rock armouring was placed on the beach to protect infrastructure from erosion.

Cronulla’s sand deficit ran counter to the broader pattern.

North Cronulla as viewed from the Alley, where the 'dunes' are now rock armoured meaning the entire beach from the Alley to the south end of Elouera has a hard surface. What little sand there is slopes steeply to the tide line where it continues towards deep water - the steep beach profile mirrored below the waterline (Photo Paul Staddon - C Care Cronulla)

In the face of it all, Paul Staddon had enough. “Personally, I just couldn't take it.”

Like the grain of sand that irritates the oyster, Paul’s irritation has grown into something more. He began reaching out to other people operating in the field, such as Troy Bottegal from Western Australia. You may have heard Troy’s name associated with the Airwave project at Bunbury, yet he’s since moved on from using an air-filled bladder as substructure to rock - similar to Middleton Reef.

There are also many engineering firms entering the field. It’s not just Cronulla, but around the world the built environment has encroached on dune systems and the end result is sand erosion, so engineering solutions are increasingly being sought. Whether they be artificial reefs akin to Palm Beach, rock groynes to hold beach sand, the construction of deeper water bomboras to allow inshore sand salients to grow, or simply some form of sand nourishment.

On the latter, the group is aware of boaters who use Port Hacking complaining about sand build up in the various channels. They can see an opportunity for the boating and surfing community to come together on this issue - channels get dredged, sand gets dumped onto the Bate Bay sandbanks.

“We don’t know exactly what the solution should be,” says Paul. “That doesn’t mean we’re being negative for its own sake. There are people smarter than us out there already working in this field. We’re just trying to bring attention to the problem.”

“Once that’s acknowledged,” continues Paul, “we can come up with some scientifically-backed cures.”

With that goal in mind, the group has already got the support of both the local Liberal MP and the Labor candidate - a hands-across-the-table gesture that shows C Care is both apolitical and are casting light on a deeper problem.

Paul’s also using his spare time to background the local mayor and the Sutherland Shire Councillors - many of whom surf or are beachgoers - hoping to broaden the support for a problem that's not going away.

If the issue is at least acknowledged then maybe they’ll begin looking at solutions the way, say, Albany Council did.

"I don't think it's unreasonable to make some noise and draw attention to what's obviously a problem," says Paul. "Surfers have a long history of rattling the cage when it mattered."

Which seems an utterly reasonable response to an issue that's been building for a hundred years. A beach without sand can't be surfed, and left to erode it'll soon be no beach at all.

//STU NETTLE

PS: Simon Kennedy has an online petition gauging community interest. Click to visit.