“…the City of Stirling says ‘f-ck you’. To the ratepayers who protested loud and long at Council meetings, ‘f-ck you’, too.”

Yeah right, I try to quote from the article and the OLO police put up a big red message saying ‘remove the profanities’!

Posters have to modify their language, but article writers get to profanitise freely!

Posters can’t even repeated authors’ dirty words!

Comeon, we can’t have this sort of blatant double standard.

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Scarbs lost its charm many years ago. It was actually pretty nice back in the 70s. But I can’t see how any multistorey development could further ruin it.

You’ve got a great mix of beaches along that strip of coast, from a major hub at Scarborough to smaller spots like Floreat to the south and Trigg to the north. Amazingly enough, there is a long stretch of beautiful very poorly-patronised beach immediately to the south of Scarborough / Brighton and north of Floreat, despite the endless suburbia immediately adjacent to it.

And then you’ve got the nudie beach at Swanbourne just a little further south.

There’s a beach and near-beach environment for everyone’s taste…in such a small strip of coast!

So, as much as I hate high-rise development and urban sprawl, I can’t see any real problem with a “Surfer’s Paradise-style battery of high-rise phalluses” or whatever at Scarbs.

Ah Ludwig, mate, get some nostalgia into yer.

Look, I've never been to the place in question but this article, in the main, could have been written about many of the beach-side places on the NSQ/Qld coast. In Noosa it was a hamburger caravan that stood out, was relegated to a car park and finally banished. At Dicky Beach its a greasy spoon place,down by Potts Point a pie shop.

Dunno who has the rights of it: you or the writer. But I do acknowledge the right to get a bit sentimental - albeit in a jocose, Aussie sort of way.

As development spread spider-fingers along our coast-lines, pushing out the pesky ole mums n'dads and bogans and fat middle aged people with orange-peel thighs to replace them with the bold and the beautiful who look sooo much better in tourist adverts, I reckon we owe it to them to inject a bit of nostalgia.

The beach was once the great leveller in Aussie life. You might live in a fibro dump, or be bottom of the class but shredding the waves on a rosy early morning you could be king/queen of the world. Getting away from a cramped apartment where the neighbours bashed each other every weekend for a quiet toke in the sandhills; or fleeing a hot kitchen to walk the dog in a pearly sunset; strutting your stuff in your new chainstore bikini; or taking the family down to wooden tables to eat fish n'chips off the paper...its a way of life that's disappearing for the average bloke (or chick).

Calamari rings with cold-pressed virgin olive oil salad just doesn't cut it!

Knowing Scarborough Beach as I do, it is a crying shame that yuppieville has to come and take it over. It will become yet one more sanitised beach with no character. I'd now rather drive an extra 20 mins down to Leighton or Port Beach, but even they are being threatened by new unaffordable developments. We have great beaches, but what are we doing with them?

At least the Council (Fremantle) insisted that the new restaurant at Port Beach open a kiosk. For a while there we had to go into the restaurant area just to get a glass of water. Bloody ridiculous.

As a Scarborough resident I sympathise with much but not all of this article. I don’t think it’s high-rise that’ll destroy Scarborough. Ob City has stood for years as the only high-rise on the WA coast, and its tacky pretentiousness kind of complements rather than detracting from the place’s daggy charm. The other high-ish rise in the area – the accommodation block at the Indian Ocean hotel – provides shabby but comfortable accommodation and is a favourite with people down from the goldfields for a beachside break.

On the Scarborough seafront strip are not just the iconic Peters but also 2 other cheap kebab and fish-and-chip joints, a budget Thai restaurant and a family burger restaurant advertising itself with a gloriously tasteless slightly larger- than- life Elvis mannequin. The kids still process on Saturday night and the bikies come and go en masse and the souped up cars parade back and forth and venture the occasional burnout. There’s still much to love about Scarborough.

It is, rather, gentrification and rising property values that are going to kill Scarborough and adjacent suburbs, driving out the summer surfie semi-residents and causing once-cheap brick, weatherboard and fibro cottages on 1/5 acre blocks to be torn down and replaced with 3 cheek-by-jowl “executive townhouses” that sell for close to a million dollars each. The caravan park that provided the only really cheap accommodation in the area has been demolished and is now a sandpit awaiting development.

I suspect the “save our sunsets” group fighting high-rise contains more NIMBYs trying to preserve their “ocean glimpses” and accelerate this gentrification than people like Rolan hoping to preserve Scarborough’s downmarket and eclectic character.

So I don't share Rolan's opposition to high rise, but like him I hope Scarborough keeps its unique character.

“Ah Ludwig, mate, get some nostalgia into yer.”

Nosbloodystalgia??

I’m full of the stuff Romany!

I particularly remember old Cottesloe Beach with much nostalgia, Wanneroo as a little siding amongst market gardens, and Mandurah and a small fishing village. Hell, the whole of the greater Perth area has gone to pot as far as I’m concerned.

I detest the enormous urban sprawl that now extends far up the coast way beyond Wanneroo and that has swallowed up Mandurah.

And I detest people who get all up-in-arms over single developments but never have anything to say about massive and never-ending coastal development and population growth….and the vastly bigger change in character that this is wreaking on the Perth hinterland (or hundreds of other places around the country).

Crikey, yuppieville overtook Scarbs yonks ago. Let the place have all the high-rise ‘air-rooters’ they can possibly fit in there…for just as long as it is limited to there and is a trade-off against further development on the coast.

All the silly nimbies that signed petitions against this sort of development at Scarbs but who never ever have anything to say about the greater issue of coastal development or never-ending human expansion, basically deserve the City of Stirling’s ‘f-ck you’ attitude! Grrrr |: > (

Ludwig

Unfortunately, however much one rails against greed and changing standards I've learned to accept that this metro-fication of our coastline is inevitable and as inexorable as molten lava.

Fortunately however, like molten lava, after being shot out at high velocity all over the Gold & Sunshine coasts in Eastern Australia, it's now proceeding at a more sedate pace and, for a while, those who wish to will be able to keep a couple of steps ahead.

And, actually, nostbloodystalgia can be overrated, too. I actually remember, along with the salt o'the earth type fishing villages and surfing towns, there were/are some shockers as well: the kind where people sat around duelling banjo's on their verandahs.

Just before I left for China a mate and I went on a road trip down the Queensland, NSW/Victorian coast. In proper style - in a 21yr old Econovan with a mattress chucked on the floor and hammocks bundled up between the front seats.

In face of the inevitable corruption of our coastline, I was cheered by way NSW and Victoria have placed vast swathes of natural dune/beach/mangrove as well as incredibly close inland lakes into the iron fist of the Parks Board.

So, even in a 21 year old Ford van those who still like that sort of thing can still spend summer with sand in their jocks, sitting round smouldering puplic barbies with nary a bottle of cold-pressed virgin olive oil in sight.

Pity the Smart State illustrates so cleverly in this issue one of the reasons most Queenslanders felt far too embarrassed to have that slogan printed on their number plates.