ANOTHER holiday weekend and more drownings on our beaches. Signage was updated across Bass Shire after the summer of 2023-24, but how many of our international visitors see or actually read them, especially when the vision of the beach they are approaching is much more interesting? Additionally, I know that the ‘life jacket’ sign at Kilcunda has been damaged and is unreadable.
As has been mentioned in some of the media, the incidence of near-miss drownings is vastly under-reported as the actions of local swimmers and surfers often helping out swimmers who find themselves in danger is an ongoing fact at our beaches.
This has been going on forever. My own family members and friends have been ‘saving’ people in the surf at Kilcunda – a beach which, in my childhood, never even had surfers in the water – for decades, and now I find myself watching beachgoers, and especially their children, in the water. Most really have no idea how dangerous our beaches at Kilcunda are regardless of how benign they look.
There is a cost to the locals of all this. A young man drowned early last year at Kilcunda Surf Beach and I did not know him but it cast a shadow for days over what should have been high summer fun times. Then there was a successful rescue at the same beach soon after with three people rescued by a man who was subsequently airlifted to hospital. Now any helicopters flying overhead bring a deep sense of dread.
Perhaps multi-lingual messages with beach-safe information on arrival into the country – on the plane, in buses, at hire car offices… the list is potentially endless – need to be displayed prominently to inform (the mostly) newcomers that our beaches are magnificent but they can be just as deadly as our diverse wildlife can be.
Louise Hillier, Kilcunda
