1963 Mosquito Coast

Sun Herald

Sunday March 23, 2008

Stephen Lacey

Canal estates brought a little bit of Florida down under.

This was a landmark year for the US civil rights movement. On August 28, Martin Luther King jnr delivered his stirring "I have a dream" speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.

Three months later, any dreams American President JFK might have had came to an abrupt end when he was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Back in Australia, the panel show, Beauty And The Beast, premiered on the Seven Network.

It was a good year for those Sydneysiders who had dreams of owning a waterfront property but couldn't afford the harbour. That's because 1963 saw the first parcels of canal estate land go on sale in Sylvania Waters.

Other canal estates were to follow along the NSW coast, from Yamba's Crystal Waters to Forster Keys.

The idea behind a canal estate is that by dredging some areas and filling others to create fingers of land, a developer turns what was once an inhospitable wetland into a housing estate.

Canal estates became popular in the US back in the early 1900s, when Abbot Kinney established 16 miles of canals at Venice Beach, California. Kinney imported 24 gondoliers from Italy, then invited potential land buyers to take a ride around his watery subdivision.

Florida was to become synonymous with canal estates, especially during the 1920s, at Fort Lauderdale, when William Morang and Charles Rhodes introduced the dredge and fill technique known as finger-islanding.

Canal estates were at their zenith in Australia in the 1960s, when developer Bruce Small, of Malvern Star fame, acquired 40 hectares of low-lying swamp and dairy land across the Nerang River from Surfers Paradise. Eventually he purchased and reclaimed more than 202 hectares, calling it Paradise City (he was nothing, if not original), which included the Isle of Capri.

Here in NSW, the canal estate subdivision of St Huberts Island, on the Central Coast, was developed by Hooker Rex in the early 1970s, much to the chagrin of the local progress association.

The fact is, environmentalists generally hate canal estates, believing their development leads to the destruction of mangroves and salt marches and issues with water quality. Which is why they have been banned in NSW since 1997.

© 2008 Sun Herald

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