The Sale of 50 Beattie Avenue: Memory vs. Money in Bicheno
25-minute read:
There is a block of land in Bicheno, that most people driving the Tasman Highway would never notice. It sits behind the houses, reached by an access not much wider than a car, the kind of allotment real estate agents, when they are being kind, call an "internal lot," and, when they are not, call "hard to sell." It measures a little under two thousand square metres. There is no playground equipment on it any more, though older residents remember there once was, swings and a see-saw rusting through the decades. There is grass, and the sound, on a summer evening, of a football being kicked, or a dog let off its lead, the particular quiet of a street in a town that swells with visitors for a few bright months and empties, gratefully, into itself for the rest of the year.
Several times, 50 Beattie Avenue has been marked for disposal; each time before this one, the sale has not gone ahead. Sometimes because a vote failed, sometimes because the matter simply lapsed into silence. It is, as this article written, marked for sale again, and this time the case is more fully documented than ever: an independent planning assessment, a formal council resolution, a public notice, eighteen written objections, and, a document rarely placed beside a disposal file, though it ought to be, the town's own recently adopted structure plan, the blueprint for what Bicheno (or Council) intends to become.
What follows tries to hold two things at once: a fair account of what is actually known, on both sides, about this parcel, and a slower question underneath it, about what a small town owes to memory, and what a piece of ground is worth when the worth resists being written on a balance sheet.
None of this is unique to Bicheno. Small coastal councils the length of this coast hold, scattered through their asset registers, parcels like it, leftover reserves, forgotten drainage lots, corners of old subdivisions nobody quite remembers the purpose of. Most sit quietly for generations, mown twice a year, unremarked. It is usually only when a council's finances tighten that anyone asks what such a block might be worth sold rather than kept, and usually only then that a street discovers how much it had come to depend on ground it never owned.
What the land is, and how it came to be Council's
The parcel is formally described as Lot 50 on Sealed Plan 62307, and it derives from a much older grant, ten acres, given out in the nineteenth century, later surrendered and subdivided into the streets that surround it now. It became Council property the way such reserves often do: through a Crown land transfer, registered in late 2010, that placed the title in the Council’s name without, so far as the current title record shows, an attached deed of gift or any recorded statement of purpose. This is not, in itself, unusual. Plenty of residual lots pass to local government this way, unglamorously, as bureaucratic housekeeping rather than considered policy. But it has become, in this case, the seed of everything that followed.
The block is landlocked: a "battle-axe" allotment, no street frontage, access down a narrow handle, hemmed in by the back fences of the houses that enclose it. Its title carries an easement for drainage, sewer and waterway purposes in favour of the Crown. What it does not carry, on the title search in the council's own papers, is any explicit notation reading "Public Open Space." That single missing phrase, present, on some accounts; absent, on the documentary record, is doing an enormous amount of work in this story, and neither this account nor the public record resolves which is correct.
Under Tasmanian local government law, a council wishing to dispose of, exchange or lease public land must first resolve to form that intention, advertise it publicly, and consider whatever submissions the public chooses to make, a process set out in section 178 of the Local Government Act 1993. It is a real process, with real legal consequences if not properly followed. But it is also, compared with what this town has shown itself capable of when it wants to, a comparatively thin one: a notice, a window for submissions, a decision. It bears almost no resemblance to the sustained, many-stranded engagement that produced the town's structure plan barely two years earlier, a disparity that will matter more, by the end of this account, than it might first appear.
A history, remembered by one voice
The story of this land, as it survives in the written record, has an unusual shape. Most of its detail, the year a notation is said to have vanished from the title, the winter a notice went unanswered for months on end, the meeting at which councillors were reportedly misinformed about their own prior decision, comes not from any council minute, but from a single, long, closely argued submission lodged by one resident during this most recent round of consultation: one person's reconstruction, from memory and personal record-keeping, of a decade and more of dealings with their own local government.
This matters, and it is worth saying plainly rather than letting it pass as a footnote, because so much of what follows depends on it. Where this account draws on that history, it is drawing on testimony, vivid, detailed, evidently sincere, but uncorroborated by any official minute, rather than an agreed record. That is not a reason to dismiss it; local memory of this kind is very often the only record a small town keeps of its council's internal traffic, especially where files are thin, and staff turn over. But it is a reason for care, and for saying, wherever this history is retold, that it is remembered rather than established.
As that one representative tells it: sometime in the early-to-mid 2010s, Council voted, by the absolute majority the law requires, to sell the block. At around the same time, on this account, the "Open Space" notation on the title's supporting documentation went missing, with the practical effect that Council began paying land tax on the lot as an ordinary residential allotment. The notation was later restored, and the 2014 sale did not proceed.
A few years after, in or around 2016, Council again resolved an intention to sell, and again, on this witness's account, the documentation before councillors relied on older plan extracts that did not show the open-space status the title carried by then. Objections were lodged. Then, on this account, nothing happened for the better part of a year, no communication, no decision, just the grinding uncertainty of not knowing whether the ground behind your fence is about to become somebody's back garden. When the matter returned to Council in early 2017, the staff recommendation was to sell; the motion did not achieve the required absolute majority; and Council resolved not to.
In late 2023, on the same account, the cycle turned again: a fresh resolution made, the submission says, in the mistaken belief that Council's most recent prior decision had been to sell rather than keep the land. Submissions were received. Then, once more: two years, on this witness's telling, of nothing further communicated to those who had written in.
That silence ended, verifiably this time, in September 2025, when Council formally resolved to form an intention to dispose of, exchange or lease the land, and, in the same resolution, to help fund a shortfall in the construction of a new playground at Lions Park, the town's principal foreshore reserve, from land-asset sale proceeds and open space reserves.
Public notice went out the following April, and was, on that same witness's account, republished after an earlier version contained administrative errors. Submissions closed some weeks later. Eighteen were received. By Council's own account, most objected; none were recorded in support.
It would be unfair to read this chronology as proof of bad faith. But it would be equally wrong not to notice what this history has plainly cost: a community asked, across more than a decade and by one careful witness's count at least three separate occasions, to justify why a modest patch of grass behind their houses should remain in public hands. There is a quieter cost too, the erosion of the distinction between an active proposal and a dormant one. A resident who has watched a sale intention raised and allowed to lapse into silence twice before cannot reasonably be expected to treat a third notice as routine housekeeping. Each round inherits the weight of the ones before it, and increasingly the objections are not only to the sale but to the pattern of how the question keeps being asked.
The case for disposal
Council's case rests on two pillars, worth keeping separate, because they are not the same argument.
The first is financial and immediate: the new Lions Park playground requires a budget, with sale proceeds and the council's open space reserves nominated to fund the shortfall, a small council doing what small councils with thin margins often have to do, converting an asset to cash to finish a project already promised.
The second is a planning argument, set out in an independent assessment commissioned from a planning consultancy and delivered in May 2026. Its conclusion, stated plainly, is that the block does not perform a meaningful public open space function: it has no street frontage and poor visibility, limiting both safety and legibility as a public place; it sits within roughly five hundred metres of Lions Park, a larger, better-serviced reserve already earmarked for improvement; the block holds, in the assessment's judgement, no particular ecological value; and its upkeep represents, in the report's own words, an inefficient allocation of resources. It recommends Council note the finding, consider disposal subject to due diligence and consultation, and direct any proceeds toward higher-value open space nearby, in practice, Lions Park. It states, too, that no title encumbrances preventing disposal were identified.
Taken on its own terms, this is not a frivolous case. A small block with no frontage, overshadowed by a considerably better park five minutes' walk away, presents a genuine question about whether limited ratepayer funds are best spent maintaining it in perpetuity, using a recognised, if inherently limited, method: a desktop review, undertaken, by the report's own admission, without a land valuation, an ecological survey, or a cadastral field study.
The case against
The eighteen submissions received are, taken together, a striking document, not because any single one settles the legal question, but because of what they agree on. By Council's own account, most objected; none supported the sale. And while they arrived in different registers, some terse, some carefully argued, one an extended personal history, certain claims recur often enough, from correspondents who plainly had no reason to coordinate, that they deserve to be treated as more than isolated grievance.
The most frequent claim is that the land is used, actively and regularly, for exactly the informal recreation open space exists to provide: football and cricket, dogs off the lead, visiting relatives drawn to the district's caravan parks using it as a safe place to let children run. Several submitters connect this to a specific circumstance: a nearby shop carpark exiting onto the street the block adjoins, which, they say, has meaningfully increased traffic on what was a quiet lane, making the absence of a nearby traffic-free play space more consequential on the ground than a desktop assessment might register.
A second claim concerns reliance. Multiple adjoining owners say they purchased their properties, some decades ago, one as recently as last year, after being given verbal assurance that the land would remain public open space. One long-standing resident describes paying a substantial premium, decades ago, on the strength of an understanding their outlook to the coast would never be built out, and indicates they would consider legal advice should the land later be developed. Whether such representations would carry legal weight is a question for lawyers. What can fairly be said is that reliance of this kind is precisely the sort of harm formal planning processes are meant to test for, and a desktop assessment has no real mechanism for capturing it.
A third claim, the one most directly contested by Council's own material, concerns the land's legal status. Several submitters state, with apparent confidence, that the block carries, or historically carried, a "Public Open Space" notation on its title or subdivision plan, dating to a subdivision undertaken roughly half a century ago. The independent assessment, by contrast, describes the land as unreserved Crown land transferred "without an identified strategic purpose," finds no encumbrance preventing sale, and treats the statutory process as sufficient. The title search does not show an explicit open-space notation in its schedules, though it does not resolve what may have appeared on the original subdivision plan, which this account could not verify. This remains the single most consequential unresolved question in the matter.
A fourth theme, less legal and more human, runs beneath several submissions: exhaustion. More than one correspondent describes the toll of watching the same land come up for proposed sale roughly once every five years for over a decade, each round requiring a fresh objection, each followed by silence rather than a clear decision. One extended submission recounts, at evident personal cost to the writer, the experience of a since-deceased local advocate, remembered as having been deeply affected by the uncertainty across successive rounds, and proposes that the land, if retained, be given a name in her memory. It is hard to read that submission and conclude the process has been without cost to the people who live around this block.
On memory, and what small ground is for
It is worth pausing here, away from the ledger of claims and counter-claims, because something is at stake in this dispute that neither a title search nor an independent assessment is built to weigh: what a town remembers, and where it remembers it.
Bicheno, like every town on this coast, sits on ground with a far longer memory than any council file. The structure plan discussed below (and previously) opens, as such documents now properly do, with an acknowledgement that the land beneath the township is Paredarerme country, occupied long before any surveyor drew a sealed plan or any Crown grant handed ten acres to a settler whose name now survives only in a title register. That deeper history is not this account's to narrate; but it is worth naming that a dispute over a small parcel like this one is conducted on top of a much older, largely undocumented layer of memory that none of the parties, council, consultant, or objector, can fully claim to speak for. Humility about that is not sentimentality. It is simply accurate.
Set against that long history, the more recent memory this dispute turns on is modest almost to invisibility: swings that stood on a block for some years and then didn't; cricket played most summers for two generations; a route a dog has been walked since before its owner's children were born; a house built, deliberately, to look out over grass rather than a neighbour's roofline. None of this is the kind of memory written into a heritage register. It is smaller than that, and more ordinary, and that ordinariness is exactly why it is easy for institutions to overlook, and easy for a town to lose without quite noticing until it is gone.
It is tempting, looking at a plan of this block, to think its memory belongs only to the handful of houses whose fences happen to touch it, that this is, in the end, a dispute between Council and its immediate neighbours, and the rest of the town is a bystander. That temptation should be resisted, because it gets the geography of memory wrong. This is not, in any legal sense, a private garden that happens to be publicly owned; it is public open space, full stop, held by Council on behalf of every ratepayer in the municipality, and its use has never actually respected the fence line the way the dispute's framing sometimes suggests. The submissions themselves make this plain: visiting relatives staying at the caravan park have used it for a generation, spending their afternoons there and their money at the shops, the hotel, the RSL, on the strength of having somewhere safe to leave the children playing. People who grew up two or three streets away, who have since moved to the other end of town or left Bicheno altogether, carry memories of this ground that have nothing to do with adjoining ownership and everything to do with being nine years old on a school holiday. A public reserve does not require a resident to live against its boundary to belong to that resident's memory of the town. It only requires that they were, once, a child with somewhere to go.
There is a further, quieter irony worth naming here. The independent assessment's own case against retaining this block rests substantially on the fact that it has poor "legibility", that it cannot be seen from the road, that a stranger would not know it was there. That is a real planning weakness, and a fair one to raise. But it also means that whatever affection this ground has earned, it has earned the hard way: not by being visible, promoted, or signposted, but by being found, passed on, street by street and generation by generation, the way local knowledge always has been in small towns, through an uncle who showed you the gap in the fence, or a friend whose backyard led onto it. A place does not have to announce itself to be loved. Sometimes the opposite is true: the places a town keeps closest are exactly the ones it never had to advertise, because everyone who needed to know already did.
And there is the matter of the promise, because that, more than anything, is what several submissions are actually describing, even when the word itself never appears. More than one household says they were told that this land would remain open space, and that they made real decisions on the strength of it: which street to live on, what price to pay, how much weight to put on a view that would only stay a view if the ground in front of it stayed empty. Whether that conversation, if it happened as remembered, amounts to anything a court would recognise as a binding representation is a genuine legal question, and this account does not pretend to answer it. But there is a difference between a legal guarantee and a felt one, and the second kind, once given, does real work in people's lives regardless of whether it would survive legal review. A family does not raise its children, or plan its garden's outlook, around the fine print of a title search; it plans around what it was told, by people it had every reason to trust, standing in for an institution that is supposed to be trustworthy precisely because it belongs to everyone. To sell the land is not, in itself, to break a contract; the record does not establish that one existed. But it may be, for some of the people who have lived beside it for decades believing otherwise, to break something that functioned like one. That, too, is a cost, even if no ledger has a column for it.
There is a reason so many of the objections read less like planning submissions and more like small memoirs. People do not, on the whole, write memoirs about council reserves. They write them about places that have become, without anyone deciding it should happen, part of how a street understands itself, a shared backdrop against which children grow up and neighbours become the kind who know each other's names. A formal park, mapped and ribbon-cut, carries a different kind of memory: civic, deliberate, photographed at its opening. An informal reserve like this one carries the quieter kind, accumulated rather than designed, and for that reason almost impossible to replace once gone, however good the replacement might be. You cannot relocate forty years of a street's shared Tuesday afternoons to a better-resourced reserve half a kilometre away. The land is not fungible with its function, even when a planning assessment, reasonably operating within its own terms, treats it as though it were.
It is worth being specific, too, about what that function actually is, because it is easy to speak of "informal recreation" as though it were a minor thing, a nice-to-have beside the serious business of housing and infrastructure. Anyone who grew up with an unbuilt paddock or vacant block within reach of their own back door knows better. That kind of ground is where children build: cubbies out of fallen branches and whatever fencing offcuts a father would not miss, forts that stood for an afternoon and were remembered for years. It is where they explore, in the small, serious way children explore anything, going a little further each visit, learning the shape of a place by walking every part of it without being told to. It is where they roleplay entire imagined worlds, a cricket test match that runs for a whole summer, a war fought with sticks between two invented armies, the kind of unstructured, self-directed play that a fixed piece of council playground equipment, for all its safety and its good intentions, was never designed to hold, because equipment tells a child what to do with it, and empty ground does not. It is where they make things: mud, cubbies, collections of rocks and feathers sorted by rules only the collector understands. It is where they learn things no curriculum teaches directly: how to negotiate the rules of a game with other children when no adult is refereeing, how far is too far, what a magpie does in spring, how to lose an argument about whose turn it is and still turn up to play again tomorrow. And, yes, it is often where they are hurt: a grazed knee, a fall from a low branch, a bruise from a mistimed catch, the ordinary, low-grade injuries that, uncomfortable as they are for a parent to watch, are part of how a child learns the actual, physical edges of their own body, in a way that no amount of supervised, cushioned play space can quite substitute for.
This is not incidental to the planning question. It is very close to the reason the planning question exists at all. Tasmania's own subdivision framework, echoed in Glamorgan–Spring Bay's own Public Open Space Contribution Policy, requires new developments to either dedicate land for public open space or pay a contribution in lieu of it, precisely because the authors of that policy understood, in the dry language policy requires, what every parent understands instinctively: that children raised without unstructured, walkable, unsupervised-enough ground nearby are missing something that a backyard, however large, cannot fully supply, because a backyard has one set of rules, made by one set of parents, and a shared reserve has none, which is exactly the point. The same objection that criticises Council for a hidden, poorly overlooked block is, without perhaps meaning to, describing the very qualities, undeveloped, unprogrammed, not overlooked by every window on the street, that make a piece of ground like this valuable for that particular kind of play. A better-resourced park with fixed equipment and good sightlines is a genuinely better park by most conventional measures, and safer, and easier to defend in a planning report. It is not automatically a better place for a child to invent something the equipment never suggested.
None of this is an argument that every such block must be kept forever. The case for consolidating open-space investment into fewer, better-resourced parks has real substance, as the independent assessment's reasoning shows, and the safety concerns it raises about poor sightlines and low passive surveillance are genuine ones, not to be waved away by an appeal to nostalgia. But it is an argument that memory of this kind, informal, accumulated, unmapped, and built quite literally out of the childhoods spent on it, deserves to be named as a real cost of disposal, rather than treated as sentiment to be managed around a decision already made on other grounds. A town wanting to know what it truly gives up when it sells a block like this has to ask not only what the block does, in planning terms, but what it has meant, to the fence-line neighbours, yes, but also to the visiting cousin, the child who has since grown up and moved away, and the town's own stated, planned-for, policy-backed understanding of what growing up somewhere ought to include.
What the structure plan says — and does not say
Here the record becomes genuinely interesting, because Bicheno has a second, far more substantial strategic document against which this sale can be tested: the Bicheno Structure Plan, adopted in final form in August 2024, less than a year before Council's resolution to sell. It was prepared by planning consultants engaged by Council, informed by more than four hundred and seventy pieces of community feedback gathered across email notifications, an online survey, drop-in workshops, stakeholder meetings and councillor briefings, and it sets out, in considerable detail, what kind of town Bicheno intends to become.
50 Beattie Avenue does not appear in it. Not once. Not among the seven separate rezoning actions the plan sets out, actions that between them cover considerably more than seven individual parcels, named by street address and title reference, earmarked to help meet a projected shortfall of somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and seventy new dwellings by 2046. Not among the five specific open-space projects the plan considers worth investing in: the triangle park redevelopment, Lions Park improvements, shade and seating near the main street carpark, formalisation of a beach carpark, and toilets at the skate park. Beattie Avenue sits in none of these lists.
This silence can honestly be read two ways. It can be read as quiet corroboration of the independent assessment's central finding: if the town's own recent, well-resourced planning exercise, conducted by planners with every opportunity to flag any parcel they considered strategically significant, did not think this block worth naming, that is some evidence, short of proof, that it is not the kind of asset the town's open-space network depends on. It can just as easily be read as evidence the block was never properly considered at all, that a structure plan mapping broad land-use zones across a study area of roughly a thousand hectares was simply never the instrument that would notice a single seventeen-hundred-square-metre internal lot, however much it matters to the households whose back fences touch it. A structure plan, by its own description, is a strategic document, not an inventory of every reserve; its silence on one small parcel is unremarkable in isolation, and becomes meaningful only when a decision leans, as this one now implicitly does, on the plan's broader authority.
Where the structure plan speaks clearly, and where the tension sharpens, is in what residents told the consultants they valued. Access to walking tracks, national parks and natural areas was the second most commonly cited value among survey respondents, behind only beach access; protection of the natural environment and landscape ranked among the highest things residents believed would shape a positive future. The plan names, as an acknowledged weakness, that open-space linkages are "fragmented and are not accessible to all mobility needs," and lists, as a future opportunity, better connecting existing open space to the urban area and coast. Separately, it names a car-centric town centre with poor pedestrian safety and permeability as a weakness, which sits uncomfortably close to the objectors' claim that this block matters precisely because it offers children a place to play without crossing a highway that, on their account, carries increasing traffic.
None of this proves the sale is wrong. A structure plan's aspirations toward more connected open space do not, by themselves, establish that any one under-visited lot must be kept; broad sentiment and specific site-level judgement are different kinds of evidence. But it is fair to say the disposal sits in some tension with the spirit of a document the town is being prompted to adopt, after considerable consultation, less than two years before the decision to sell.
Two kinds of listening
It is here that the contrast between these two documents becomes most instructive, and where a genuinely fair account has to sit with some discomfort, because the disparity is real, and large.
The structure plan process ran across roughly a year, using five distinct engagement methods: over three hundred project notifications by email, social media posts, an online survey drawing close to three hundred responses, workshop and drop-in sessions attracting well over a hundred attendees, individual stakeholder meetings, and formal councillor briefings, feeding into a draft publicly exhibited before being finalised. It is, by the standards of small rural local government, a genuinely serious effort at hearing from residents before a decision was locked in.
The disposal process, by contrast, followed the statutory minimum the Act requires: a public notice inviting written submissions within a defined window, a notice that, on one resident's account, was initially published with errors requiring it to be reissued, and was not, on the same account, posted to the council's own website or noticeboard. Several adjoining owners say they received no direct written notice, and learned of the proposal only by chance. There was no survey, no workshop. One submission describes the eventual notice as offering little beyond a phone number to call.
It would be wrong to read this as a deliberate double standard: a structure plan and a statutory land disposal are different instruments, and the law does not require the same depth of engagement for both. But it is difficult to set the two processes side by side and not feel the asymmetry. One produced a document that will shape the town's next decade and never once mentions this land. The other proposes to permanently remove this land from public ownership, on the strength of a process considerably thinner than the one that decided where the town's playground upgrades and footpaths should go. If genuine legitimacy is what a council decision ultimately rests on, it is reasonable to ask whether a decision this consequential ought to have been tested against something closer to the structure plan's standard of listening, rather than the statutory floor.
What the land would actually buy
Set the arguments aside for a moment and ask a plainer question: what, in the most literal sense, would this sale actually produce?
On the housing side, not much. The block's constraints, a battle-axe configuration, a single narrow access handle, an area a little under two thousand square metres, mean that even under generous assumptions about future subdivision, it could plausibly support minimum yield. Weighed against the structure plan's own projected need of somewhere between three hundred and three hundred and seventy additional dwellings for Bicheno by 2046, one or two more allotments is a rounding error. Whatever the merits of the sale, "the town needs more housing" is not, on the numbers the town's own planners have produced, a case this parcel can carry.
Nor, strictly, is housing the stated purpose of the sale. The proceeds are earmarked, on the council's own resolution, for a shortfall on a children's playground at Lions Park, another piece of public open space, not housing stock. The eventual fate of the land, once sold, would presumably be residential, because that is what happens to disposed residential-zoned lots in a growing coastal town; but that outcome is a downstream consequence of the sale, not its purpose. There is something almost wry in the actual shape of the transaction: a small, informally cherished piece of open space, converted into cash, to fund the improvement of a different, larger, more visible piece of open space a five-minute walk away. It is not open space being traded for housing. It is one kind of green space being traded for another, with a modest parcel of housing land left over as the change.
That reframing matters, because it changes what is being weighed. This is not, on the evidence, a story of amenity sacrificed for shelter; the numbers do not support that version, however often it gets told that way in disputes like this one. It is closer to one register of value, a specific, remembered green space, worth something to a couple of dozen households in ways a spreadsheet cannot capture, being converted into a different, more legible register: a better playground, in a park the whole town can see from the highway. Both are real. Neither is nothing. But a town deciding between them deserves to know that this is the actual trade on the table, not housing against green space, but one kind of memory against a different kind of shine.
What is actually known, and what is not
It is worth, before closing, being scrupulous about the limits of what any honest account, including this one, can establish.
It is known that the land was transferred to Council in 2010 without a documented statement of purpose. It is not independently established whether the original subdivision plan carried an open-space designation later administratively altered, as one detailed submission alleges; nor is it established that it did not.
It is known that Council has formally resolved to sell, has received an independent assessment supporting that course, and has received eighteen submissions, most of them, on the council's own account, opposed, none in support. It is not known, at the time of writing, what Council finally resolved when the matter returned to it, nor how individual councillors voted.
It is known that the town's structure plan does not mention this land. It is not established whether that silence reflects considered judgement or simple scale.
Anyone writing about this dispute honestly has to leave those gaps standing rather than filling them with whichever version suits a preferred conclusion. That, more than anything, is what more than a decade of thinly documented decision-making has cost this small piece of ground: not just the trust of the people who live around it, but the ability of anyone to say with full confidence what is actually true of it.
On the measure of value
There is a way of talking about land that reduces it, quite legitimately for certain purposes, to a figure: rateable value, likely sale price, the cost of a mowing contract set against the return on capital a sale would release. Council's independent assessment speaks largely in this register, and it is not wrong to do so: a local government has a duty to its ratepayers, and a small council with a strained budget cannot be expected to hold every parcel purely out of sentiment. Measured this way, an internal lot with no frontage, overshadowed by a considerably better park nearby, and capable of yielding at most a lot or two against a town-wide shortfall in the hundreds, is not an unreasonable candidate for disposal.
There is another way of talking about land, and it is the register almost every one of the eighteen submissions reaches for, instinctively: the football kicked across it on a summer evening; the dog let off the lead where there is nowhere else safe to do so; the outlook a couple paid extra for, decades ago, on the strength of a promise it would never be built out; the sense, hard to defend in a planning report and impossible to dismiss in a street, that a piece of ground has been quietly held in common for half a century, and that this counts for something even where no clause on a title says so. This is not a lesser register than the financial one. It is a different currency, and the two do not convert cleanly into each other: no formula tells you how many safe afternoons of cricket are worth, and no site visit, however careful, can fully price what four decades of a street's shared memory amounts to.
The honest difficulty at the centre of this affair is that both currencies are legitimate, and the decision about which should prevail is not really a technical question, however much it has come to be dressed as one. It is a question of value in the older sense of the word: what does this town believe is worth keeping, what is it willing to give up, and, the question that matters most, who gets to decide? A single independent assessment, however professionally conducted, answers that from one register only. A town-wide structure plan, for all its consultation, was never actually asked the question, because nobody thought to put this block in front of it. And a statutory notice period was never built to hold a conversation about memory and reliance; it was built to test legality, not to weigh what a place means.
If there is a conclusion here, it should be offered carefully, because this is the one place where judgement rather than reporting intrudes. It is this: a decision raised and shelved and raised again across more than a decade deserves a process equal to its actual stakes, not necessarily a different outcome, because a fair reading of the record does not compel one conclusion over the other. What it deserves is a process in which the town itself, not a single desktop report, is given the chance to properly determine, together and in the open, what this small block is worth to it. Bicheno has shown, in responding to its structure plan, that it knows how to have that conversation, patiently and at length, when asked. It has not yet, on the evidence available, been asked in quite the same way about the ground at 50 Beattie Avenue. Whatever Council decides, that seems the one thing on which everyone might agree: that the town, and not a spreadsheet, is where the true measure of this small green block will finally have to be taken.
AM -
This account draws on the public papers of the Glamorgan–Spring Bay Council relating to the proposed disposal of 50 Beattie Avenue, Bicheno, including the council's representation summary, combined public submissions, independent open space assessment, and title records, together with the council's adopted Bicheno Structure Plan (August 2024). Names of individual submitters, landowners and council officers have been withheld throughout. Claims drawn from a single submission are identified as such rather than presented as an agreed record. Where the record is incomplete or contested, this has been noted rather than resolved.
Sources & Citations
Primary documents
1. Glamorgan–Spring Bay Council, Ordinary Council Meeting – 28 July 2026, Attachments (council agenda papers), comprising:
Item 7.5.1, "Action Register – June 2026," p. 81 — record of Decision 200/25 (23 September 2025) resolving Council's intention to dispose of the land and linking proceeds to the Lions Park playground funding shortfall.
Item 8.1.1, "Representation Summary," p. 82 — Council's own tally and characterisation of the eighteen submissions received ("most... objected," "no submissions... in support").
Item 8.1.2, "Combined Objections," pp. 85–105 — the eighteen individual written submissions. The great majority of the "history" section of the article (the 2014, 2016, and 2023 episodes, the description of the notice as under-advertised, and the "phone number" detail) is drawn from a single submission within this item, identified in the article only as "one witness" or "one submission." This is not corroborated by any council minute located elsewhere in the source material, and the article flags this in-text at each point it relies on that account.
Item 8.1.3, Phillip Loone (Director, Downtown Planning), Independent Open Space Assessment: Function and Value – 50 Beattie Avenue, Bicheno, prepared for Glamorgan Spring Bay Council, 6 May 2026, p. 106 — the independent planning assessment discussed throughout, including its findings on site configuration, proximity to Lions Park, and its stated scope and limitations (desktop review only).
Items 8.1.4–8.1.5, Folio Plan and Certificate of Title Search, CT 62307/50, pp. 118–119 — the title record referred to in the discussion of the disputed "Public Open Space" notation.
2. Glamorgan Spring Bay Council, Bicheno Structure Plan, Final, prepared by ERA Planning and Environment, August 2024, comprising:
Section 1, "Introduction," p. 6 — project purpose and ten-year planning horizon.
Section 2, "Community Engagement," pp. 10–12 — engagement methods and figures (470+ people, 315 email notifications, 278 survey responses, 180+ workshop attendees, etc.) and survey results (values and priorities rankings).
Section 3, "About Bicheno," p. 13 — acknowledgement of Paredarerme country and general town description.
Section 4, "Planning for the Future," pp. 16–25 — housing and dwelling-demand modelling (306–366 additional dwellings needed by 2046, p. 17).
Section 5, "Strategic Context," pp. 26–29 — strengths/weaknesses/opportunities tables (open space fragmentation, pedestrian safety, car-centric town centre).
Section 6, "The Bicheno Structure Plan," pp. 31–40 — land use directions R1.1–R1.7 (pp. 32–34) and supporting open-space actions S3.1–S3.5 (p. 36), the two lists whose silence on 50 Beattie Avenue the article discusses directly.