DEAR News Of The Area,
TO the humans planning an Ocean Pool at Oxley Beach, we are the ones you don’t see when you snap your beach selfies.
The blue groper who sleeps in the rocky crevices.
The sea urchins wedged between basalt.
The wobbegong and grey nurse sharks who call these gutters home.
The crabs, the limpets, the weedfish, the octopus who dwell in the rockpools at low tide.
This reef is not empty!
It’s our home, our neighborhood.
You want to pour concrete into our walls.
Blast our boulders for a flat floor.
Fence off the tides so you can swim laps without waves.
You call it an “ocean pool”.
We call it eviction.
When you dynamite the rock shelf, you collapse our nurseries.
When you dredge the sand, you bury the worms and pippies the shorebirds eat.
When you chlorinate or stagnate the water, you burn our gills and drive away the baitfish that bring the bigger fish you claim to love.
Oxley Beach works because it breathes.
Water surges in, then drains out.
Kelp sways. Life cycles through.
A pool turns a living system into a bathtub.
Sterile. Still. Dead.
We’re not against you swimming.
The whole ocean is here.
It’s been open 24/7 for four billion years.
No membership required.
If you build your pool, you’ll get flat water.
You’ll lose the reef that makes this place Oxley Beach and unique to Port Macquarie.
You’ll lose us.
And once concrete sets, we don’t come back.
So we’re asking: Leave the rocks as they are.
Swim in the ocean we all share.
Respectfully,
Robyn RAWSON.
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