Public submissions recently closed for Ballina Council’s proposed changes to Sharpes Beach. Prominent among these was a call for better accessibility options for people with disabilities, which is an issue right across the Northern Rivers. The Echo spoke to East Ballina resident Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith to find out more.
‘I’ve lived in Ballina now for 19 years since we came back from Canberra, and there isn’t a single beach in Ballina that is accessible to someone in a wheelchair,’ said Dr Lloyd-Smith.
‘The accessibility of beaches is now an accepted thing in most countries of the world. When we travel, even developing countries would have access to a beach, but Australia has very little, although it’s improving in our capital cities.’
What about beach wheelchairs?
‘So there’s a website called Accessible Beaches, and you can go and look at which beaches are accessible,’ she explained. ‘Many times they’ll say it’s accessible because we have a beach wheelchair.
‘Beach wheelchairs are fantastic things and fantastic things for children. But if you’re an adult, you need someone to push you, and they are not easy to push with an adult sitting in them.
‘For myself, I would have to employ two of my support workers to come and push me. That makes it a very expensive process.’
Dr Lloyd-Smith needs a wheelchair because of childhood polio. She says Ballina Council has two beach wheelchairs which can be booked for free in advance, ‘and we certainly appreciate that. But it’s just one aspect of beach access. My right under the 2014 NSW Disability Inclusion Act is to spontaneously access beaches.
‘I have a right to go places where you go or anyone else goes. It’s time for Ballina and all the councils of the north coast to start doing something about that.’
Mat access?
Theoretically, there’s a removable mat somewhere in Ballina Shire to allow wheelchair access to beaches, but no one seems able to locate it.
Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith has spent quite a long time trying to track it down. ‘Council doesn’t know where it is, the Surf Lifesaving Association doesn’t know where it is, and even if they could find it, currently none of the ways you could get onto the beach would fulfil legalities.
‘For example, Lighthouse Beach, it has a concrete ramp, which then hits soft sand at the bottom, there’s no way that the concrete ramp is safe for a wheelchair. And even if you got it to the bottom of that ramp, you couldn’t get it through that soft sand.’
The submission which she and other concerned locals have made to Ballina Council shows examples of combinations of hard ramps and mats which have been used successfully in other places. ‘The mat is something that the surf lifesavers can pick up and put away if there’s a high storm or anything, but the solid section remains,’ she explains.
‘There is no reason that couldn’t happen at Sharpes Beach as part of this proposal to upgrade the toilets and the viewing platform and the parking area.’
Dr Lloyd-Smith says she approached Ballina Council last year. ‘Council made the public comment period over the Christmas holidays, which I don’t think is particularly appropriate. But anyway, I heard about it on the radio and they mentioned disability access.
‘I thought wow, so I rang up council and said, “I’ve looked at the proposal and I can’t see where the disability access is.” And so they said “oh no, no, not access to the beach, access to the toilets and access to the viewing platform.”
‘I said, “So what, I could sit on the viewing platform and peer down?” You know, bad luck. It was implied that the funding wasn’t for that sort of process, but I’ve had a number of discussions with council, and it turns out it they could have hit the button that said, “we want money for access”, but they chose not to.’
She says that considering the massive developments alongside and behind Sharpes Beach, ‘if any upgrade should have included disability access, this is the one. If they did it now, it would save money, and it would be consistent with a thing called the Disability Inclusion Plan, which they’ve got to do every four years. It would fulfil their requirements under the Act, and it would be a socially inclusive thing to do.’
Substantial minority
‘Most people don’t understand that 17 to 20 per cent of the Australian population has a disability,’ she explained. ‘Of those, about 80 per cent have physical disabilities. Many of those people, they want to go to the beach. If you’re a fisherman, you also want to go to the beach.
‘So there’s this group called Fishability with all these fishermen who would like to go to the beach. So it’s not just ordinary disabled people in a wheelchair, it’s fishermen, it’s aged people, it’s people with cerebral palsy, it’s people with children and prams.
‘This is something that should be considered just the natural thing you do with any development, as required by the Act.’
You’ve traveled a lot overseas, what’s the world’s best practice? Which countries are getting this right?
‘Certainly, the Mediterranean, and then people say to me, “but that’s flat water, so it’s not not the same.” And I grant that it isn’t the same, but the US has numerous beaches with disability access. If you go to the Pacific Islands, many of those beaches have some form of disability access.
‘As I said, it’s usually a combination, there’s a beach wheelchair, but there’s also matting, and there’s also a ramp. So it’s a bit of a combination, but there were very few places I went when I was traveling where I could not at least access the beach – very few places except Australia.’
Signatories to the joint submission on improving access for mobility impaired users to Sharpes Beach included Dr Matt Landon, Director of Future Fisheries Veterinary Service, Dr Ulla Gerich-McGregor, a consultant physician in rehabilitation medicine, and three occupational therapists.
Not a new issue
For Dr Mariann Lloyd-Smith, this is not a new issue, or a new conversation with Ballina Council. ‘It’s certainly not something that’s just come up. We’ve talked with council over the years, and I’ve raised this issue with individual councillors, but I suppose it was difficult because it was COVID and then it was flooding.
‘As a disabled person, going to the beach can seem like a frivolous sort of thing that we want, when there’s people out there who haven’t even got a wheelchair, so you can feel a little reluctant to say anything sometimes, but I felt for some young people I saw recently going to the beach.
‘They were physically disabled, and they had people helping them, carrying them. And I thought, my God, wouldn’t they love the ability to access this beach with dignity?’
Submissions on Sharpes Beach have now closed, and Ballina Council is yet to respond, but this issue will certainly be one to watch into the future.
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