Protecting the extraordinary beauty of beach scrub
Beach scrub, the
“supermarket of the bush”
Cool, bare earth underfoot beneath a canopy of lush, green foliage leaving filtered sunlight and no shadows. Colourful tropical fruit is attended by birds, buzzing insects and swarming green ants accompanied by a soft background noise of the sea lapping at the shore, and not very far away.
Such a strikingly beautiful scene might be found in an equatorial rainforest fringing the ocean, but it is an experience available to North Queenslanders living on, or near, the coast.
This is beach scrub, the strip of bushland separating sandy beaches from the mainland proper which, at first glance, might seem unremarkable.
Growing in small communities on old sand dunes along the coast, beach scrub is the focus of an on-going effort to protect and preserve those communities and the habitat they provide for myriad insects, birds and small animals.
Dubbed the “supermarket of the bush”, a healthy beach scrub community will typically include a range of traditional food plants including trees like the Burdekin plum, red coondoo, beach tuckeroo, beach cherry, wild prune and small-leafed fig.
It supports a range of wildlife including various monitors and lizards like the frill-necked lizard pictured which was spotted during an inspection of beach scrub near Rollingstone recently.
Beach scrubs protect coastlines from extreme weather impacts such as cyclones and storm surges.
With virtually no ground cover because the closed canopy overhead restricts the amount of sunlight available to lower-storey plants, conditions underneath the trees are ideal.
Through its National Landcare Program, the Australian Government funded a two-year project to protect beach scrub along the coast of the Lower Burdekin catchment.
The project – Protecting Beach Scrub Communities – conducted by Natural Resource Management company NQ Dry Tropics concluded in June 2018.
It was succeeded by a five-year project funded through the second wave of the National Landcare Program targeting 18 beach scrub communities from Crystal Creek north of Townsville to Bowen in the south.
Protection of beach scrub in the NQ Dry Tropics NRM region continues with the Climate-Ready Coastlines in the Lower Burdekin project running from July 2025 to June 2028.
