With bright yellow petals, the Byron Orchid is only as big as the tip of your small fingernail, longtime local, Veda Turner, says.
It’s said to have been spotted in the Arakwal National Park, and surrounding areas, along Byron’s coastline, between the lighthouse and Suffolk Park.
Mr Turner has seen it, once, he told The Echo.
‘I know a spot where it was, but I’ve never seen it there subsequently,’ he says, ‘I think they’ve been successful in collecting seed, down in Sydney, they were able to actually propagate the Byron Bay Diuris’.
Information from the NSW Environment and Heritage department confirms there have only been 20 of the endangered orchid plants recorded, all at ‘a single location only, at Byron Bay’.
It isn’t just the delightful sunny orchid that is rare and sensitive for the region, though. Mr Turner says the entire coastline represents dwarf graminoid clay heath.
‘It’s very specific to that area,’ Turner says, describing a ‘very shrubby community of plants’.
Unique biodiversity
The history and majestic beauty of the rugged coastline are on display for all to see from the Paterson Hilltop.
The wetlands are ‘full of Wallum Froglets’, he says.
‘It’s so small, that you can’t actually sneak up on it, it’s gone well before’.
‘But you can record the sounds and it sounds like bells. Little bells.’
But there was a time when the view was under threat of a fifteen lot residential estate. It was small enough in scope, but big enough to impact the wetlands below, Turner says.
The wetland is very sensitive, Mr Turner says, with the reeds and other vegetation growing on ‘acid runoff or acidified water’.
‘As soon as someone starts developing, and growing their roses, and having dogs in the yard and so on, it all goes alkaline pretty quickly,’ he says.
Now 20 years on since the community victory, the long and passionate battle saw local environmentalists, like Turner and Byron Shire Council, pitted against the wealthy property developer.
In the end, the state government of the day made a move not seen in the Shire in recent years: it saved the site from development by buying it from the private owner and donating it to the Arakwal National Park.
Recalling the events, Turner says the development proposal was ‘led by a gentleman who had very good connections to the business and government community’.
‘He had a company, which was a sort of employment agency for directors and CEOs and so on. He was well resourced.
‘But he had a daughter, who went travelling after high school, and came back from her travels firmly in the green camp.
‘This was all in the newspapers at the time when she came back, and she certainly pressured her dad that this was something that didn’t need to happen.’
The developer’s daughter’s objections came after years of community backlash that came to a climax in May 2003.
‘The Land and Environment Court had approved it, but with, like, 15 conditions, and the developer had not been able to meet all of those conditions,’ Turner says.
Militant locals
‘We were very militant, keeping an eye out for any sign of earthmoving equipment.
‘We had a few people who were out in their cars with the ancient mobile phones, watching the roundabouts and the intersections.
‘Then we got a phone call: there’s an excavator down in the bottom of Paterson Street.
‘We actually rang BayFM, and thanks to that call, which resulted in that going out over the airwaves at seven o’clock in the morning, by eight o’clock, we had hundreds of people there, blockading Pacific Vista Drive.
‘Sure enough, the excavator had turned up and we blocked the street.
‘Of course, the police arrived and there was just, you know, three or four police from the local station.
‘Well, in the end, there were police from Tweed Heads, from Grafton, from Casino, they brought everybody in, because there was around 1,000 people actually blockading that area.
‘They just kept taking people away if they got in the way, but in the end, they got right up to the top to the turning circle and it was looking like half an hour, they’d be digging away on the heath.
‘And that’s when Richard Staples, who was one of our early Greens councillors, took the opportunity to climb up onto the rig on the back of the trailer.
‘There was a Council by-law that said councillors are able to set up their office anywhere in the Shire.
‘He was setting up his office and the only person who would be permitted to demand that he come down would be the owner of the property or the owner of that vehicle, who was in Brisbane.
Court injunction
‘In the meantime, then Mayor, Jan Barham, was on the phone to Council solicitors, and was successful in taking out an injunction, because she believed, and was later proved correct, that they hadn’t complied with all the conditions of consent, so then it went to the court.’
Turner says it wasn’t long after the court case that the government offered to buy the land and the developer eventually agreed.
The rest is history and the view from Paterson Hill remains untouched… but good luck spotting the elusive Byron Bay Diuris Orchid or tinkling Wallum Froglet.
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