Lavenders Bridge - A New Megaproject for Bellingen?

The Lavender bridge is a small wooden bridge over the idyllic Bellinger river connecting the north and south of Bellingen town.

It is the only leisure spot in town for locals and visitors to swim, fish and adore the scenic views of the escarpement, the Ngaali ( Old Man Dreaming or McGraths Hump) as stated in a letter to the editor:
 

"I did not see a long, high-level concrete bridge built for cars and trucks to speed through all this and dominate it. You can see those anywhere, everywhere. But one of those is what the Council’s consultants are recommending, in order to further consolidate the sovereignty of cars and trucks."

 

Here is the new "Concept Options Appraisal Report for Lavenders Bridge, Bellingen (pdf)

At first glance it does not appear to be a pedestrian and bicycle bridge that seamlessly integrates active and (emergency) transport networks across the river.

In "Urbanisation, megaprojects and dispossession in Asia, Sara Bardhan reviews 'The Political Economy of Megaprojects in Asia: State Power, Land Control, Financial Flows, and Dispossession. Hyun Bang Shin and Dong-Wan Gimm (Editors). Routledge. 2025.' (open edition)

I cite a few deliberations on megaprojects from the LSE Review of Books:
 

"It argues that megaprojects are deeply political formations that reorganise territory, governance, and social life in the service of capital accumulation and state legitimacy."

"...State power is restructured, legitimised, and consolidated to institutionalise megaprojects as “spaces of exception.” "
 

"Megaprojects are not merely infrastructural solutions to urban problems, but powerful political technologies that reshape territory, governance, and citizenship itself." 
 

"Megaprojects reshape urban landscapes while simultaneously reconfiguring relations between the state, private capital, and local communities."

"...Sustainable,” and “world-class” urbanism often conceals speculative urbanisation, dispossession, environmental degradation, and undemocratic governance."
 

"Megaprojects embody a hybrid political-economic formation in which strong states continue to direct urban development while simultaneously facilitating private accumulation, deregulation, and financial speculation."

"Public lands and commons are transformed into commodities to attract private investment and generate speculative value." 
 

"Megaprojects overwhelmingly benefit political elites, developers, financial institutions, and urban middle classes, while vulnerable populations bear the costs of displacement and environmental degradation."


"The social consequences of these processes are severe. The volume identifies three recurring forms of injustice associated with megaprojects: nondemocratic planning processes that exclude civil society, displacement and rising rents that marginalise low-income communities, and emerging forms of resistance against dispossession." 

"Megaprojects overwhelmingly benefit political elites, developers, financial institutions, and urban middle classes, while vulnerable populations bear the costs of displacement and environmental degradation. The language of modernisation and sustainability often masks deeply unequal distributions of risk and reward."

"Megaprojects become symbols of global city ambitions and state legitimacy." 

"Megaprojects restructure the built environment as a “secondary circuit” for capital investment, particularly in contexts where real estate and infrastructure become central sites for profit generation."

Image: Visions of the new Lavenders bridge over the Bellinger river, AI enhanced

Local Authors at the Alternatives Bookshop, Bellingen

As part of The Bellingen Readers & Writers Festival, 2026, The Alternatives Bookshop was showcasing five local authors. The room was packed and the writers were interviewed.

The author and publisher Ross Macleay introduced Neil Horne's dotAtelier writings and images as a book. All new books are available in your local, independent bookshop.

 Alternatives Bookshop, 2026

Dotatelier textile at the bookshop:  The fossil fuel fires to come

 

Australia's cultural fabric in the 21st century

"A nation of rich cowards’: Australia needs its dreamers but the arts are underfunded, undervalued and despised."

"We need a society that values its visionaries, those who go against the grain to create new dreams that reveal other ways of being."

"We stand in the 21st century, one of the wealthiest societies in human history, yet diminished and lost: a nation of rich cowards without even the courage to acknowledge our origins and far less the possibility of a better future than the nightmare daily growing around us."

"To be an artist in a society contemptuous of the very idea of art is an act of courage."

 - Ben Quilty, The Guardian

Habitat for coastal wetland birds

New South Wales coastal highways from the Mid North Coast to the Northern Rivers have giant traffic roundabouts. Most have a lot of masked lapwings and some white-faced herons huddled in the middle looking lost. Some are hanging out in the road drains that used to be small creeks. 

Image: Highway roundabouts for birds, Promted by Bellingen Area and ChatGPT 

Do we want to live under a cloud of drones?

Drone can now deliver hot coffee and fast food from shopping centres to the suburbs. An ‘instant now culture’ makes it possible that the highly processed soggy food is directly delivered to your couch. Immediate access to everything, every commodity on-demand can be gratified by drone delivery. Soon tens of thousands of unmanned aerial vehicles will fill the sky over Australia.

The humming noise of the flying machines will hardy be noticed among the cacophony of noise and vibrations from vehicles, mowers, slashers and chainsaws. One is already well accustomed to ubiquitous fossil fuel generated noise pollution.

New information and communication technologies are not perceived as spying machines posing a significant privacy issue.

Should a neighbour object to the disruptive and irritating noise, security risks and privacy invasion then the first line of defence is always the Australian mantra:

“No-one has ever complained about it” and

“Have you spoken to your council?” 

Thereafter one encounters an array of Kafkaesque institutional labyrinths where no instance/ agency is responsible for anything. For complainants it is “a morass of laws and buck-passing.” (source)

The decisions to populate the sky with more machines have already been made. The precautionary principle is foreign lingo while the airspace over cities and suburbia is already humming with drones. The slow creep of the ‘outdoor lab’ is gradually and almost imperceptibly becoming a monster interchange in the sky with all the associated impacts.

”The Department of Infrastructure, which has taken control of drone regulation, wants to see expansion in the sector. A political discussion about the desirability of drone delivery services has yet to take place.” (source)

95% of Earth's land surface displays some form of human impact, much of it is human infrastructure. The ocean habitats and many rivers have been turned into shipping and boating highways. Now it is time for the 'highway in the skies’. A full-service logistics will fill the blue sky with heavy aerial traffic.

“The companies involved in drone delivery pilots want the sky for themselves.." The vision is to architect highway infrastructure across our skyscape.” (source)
 

Time to fast track a sky-highway for business. There is no time to waste for the assessment of emerging technologies.

 A disenfranchised public can only look up to the congested, automated and privatised sky highway. "The regulation is moving in a way that effectively gets rid of opportunities for people to have a political say.” (source)

Defaunation of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems seems of no concern to humanity. Wildlife that call the sky and the atmosphere their home are classified as ‘obstacles’ to human progress.

Drones are seen as a panacea for data collection on wildlife such as koalas. They can buzz through their canopy 24/7. Human crowds can also be controlled in real-time. (source) Ultra-high-resolution overhead surveillance of citizens is already in operation. (source)

As a means of destruction unmanned aerial vehicles are widely used for asymmetric warfare in hit-and-run ambushes in the battlefield of the numerous war zones. In the Ukraine combat zones birds now incorporate nests from fiber optic cable from FPV kamikaze drones.

The sky's the limit.

 

Image: Curated by Bellingen Area Blog, J. M. W. Turner and ChatGPT

Drone deliveries aren't attracting many complaints but experts say that's not a sign of public endorsement. ABC

Do we want to live under a cloud of drones? The Conversation

Explosive Growth of Secondary Roads from Industrial Logging

Forest loss - (Secondary) roads from industrial logging fragment ecosystems (ChatGPT)

New roads in forest frontiers enable secondary roads that amplify human impacts. Roads are key proximate drivers of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation.

"Tropical forests face widespread environmental threats from road expansion. Previous research established that roads enable human incursion, break up ecosystems, and intensify deforestation through land clearing, fires, and illegal resource extraction. The role of secondary roads in amplifying these effects has remained poorly quantified, leading to gaps in environmental impact assessments and conservation strategies.
Environmental impact assessments failed to account for the full scale of road-induced deforestation. " (source)

"In the tropics and beyond, roads are key proximate drivers of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation. These secondary roads in turn can dramatically elevate forest and biodiversity losses."

Jayden E. Engert et al, Explosive growth of secondary roads is linked to widespread tropical deforestation, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.017

Floods and the Perilous March of Australian Sprawl

Australia’s urban sprawl into flood-prone regions presents a profound case of civilisation’s unchecked expansion colliding with the very processes of nature. In the philosophy of organism the world is not a static entity but an unfolding process, a constant interplay of forces. The spread of human habitation into precarious landscapes—buoyed by a reliance on fossil fuels that further intensify climatic volatility—is a prime example of what I have termed the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”: the tendency to treat abstracted human aspirations as if they exist apart from the living, shifting reality of nature.

Cities and suburbs stretch outward in search of economic growth and comfortable living, yet the land itself is not a passive receptacle for human will. The dynamism of rivers, floodplains, and weather systems does not submit to the rigid grids of development. The increasing frequency and severity of floods, driven in part by the very fossil-fuel-intensive activities that enable this expansion, illustrate the failure to integrate our urban ambitions within the deeper rhythms of an evolving planet.

There is an irony here—a civilisation that prizes rational planning is, in fact, perpetuating a chaotic and unsustainable trajectory. This is a problem of abstraction divorced from process. The concrete realities of atmospheric instability, rising sea levels, and the saturation of flood-prone soils are ignored in favor of a narrow economic calculus that sees only the immediate, not the emergent.

What, then, is the remedy? It is not merely a technical fix but a reorientation of thought. True wisdom does not impose an artificial stasis upon a dynamic world but seeks harmony with its processes. A city that respects the patterns of water, that adapts rather than resists, is one that aligns itself with the creative advance of nature rather than standing in opposition to it. If we are to avoid catastrophe, we must cease treating the world as an inert backdrop to human activity and recognize it as the active, evolving reality in which our own future is enmeshed.

(Curated text by Alfred North Whitehead, Process & Reality, Cyclone Alfred, Bellingen Area and ChatGPT.)