You can have a wide, sweeping, world-attracting Byron beach or you can have a pool on a broken, undermined beach, but you can’t have both.
Already the rocky outcrop on Main Beach is tearing ‘The Bay ‘apart, particularly on the northern end from First Sun to Kendall Street and Belongil.
Now Byron Shire Council (BSC) is supporting the idea of not only strengthening the beach-killing seawall at Main Beach, but implanting an aquatic centre over the existing Byron pool.
Further development of these man-made impediments at the heart of ‘The Bay’ will only increase erosion to the north, especially given Council’s neglect of the fiercely-eroded dunes on that side.
Meanwhile residents are laying more illegal rock walls on the beach at Belongil, despite a court ruling some time back that forbade residents using rocks to protect their properties from storm damage. They go ahead anyway and Council turns a blind eye.
In fact, Council turns a blind eye to anything happening north of the Main Beach carpark.
Consequently, by choosing to compound damaging past mistakes, Council seems hell bent on destroying the bay, leaving us, eventually, with only half a bay, half a beach.
Personally, I’d prefer our old ‘Bay’ back, with a wide sandy beach stretching from The Pass to Belongil and beyond. We’ve always had ingress and storm erosion periodically and yes, one day, no matter what we do, the sea will envelop the township. But that scenario should be hundreds, thousands of years away, not in our lifetime.
Council is also well aware that there are tried and tested ways of regenerating and reforming our original sandy bay, while still protecting town infrastructure (buried rock walls for one). The reason they are not willing to consider realignment and hybrid coastal protection, is that they fear litigation from the Belongil end.
It’s so crazy, because if done properly even the Belongil residents’ fears would dissolve.
So, a complete bay, or half a beach under the cape? I know what I’d like to see – some responsible action from Council and a restored, realigned beach. Oh, and an aquatic centre well away from our receding beachfront.
Don’t listen to ‘oh, we’ll lose the town’ or ‘the waves won’t be as good without the groynes’. That’s all poppycock and all the coastal engineers I’ve spoken to over the years agree.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
