Inverloch Beach: Disappearing dunes, a sinking surf club and the sandbag solution

If you have been to Inverloch beach you would have seen the rows of hefty sandbags placed on the beach in front of the surf club to stop the encroachment of the ocean swallowing up the building and taking it out to sea.

All along Gippsland’s coast towns and communities are facing similar problems, which is leading to local councils and conservation groups to step up the pressure on the state and federal governments to prepare for rising sea levels, water inundation and coastal erosion.

South Gippsland Conservation Society

A petition signed by 599 concerned community members and handed to state parliament in 2024 called for urgent and immediate action to be taken to save the surf club building, which was officially opened in 2011.

The state tipped $500,000 towards constructing a geotextile sandbag wall.

Aileen Vening is a geographer who assists with the education program at the South Gippsland Conservation Society (SGCS). She told the Monitor the sandbag solution had worked relatively well, but now the beach required continuous trucking of sand from Point Norman to Inverloch to maintain the dunes and coastline.

Vening said a storm in the second half of 2024 brought days of howling winds where “metres and metres of beach were lost and now it's all panic stations”.

SGCS’s Philip Heath told the Monitor, “the coastline has moved towards the land by up to 70 metres since 2013”.

The Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Action (DEECA) and SGCS will move 150,000 cubic metres of sand to Inverloch surf beach this year with the aim of maintaining the dunes and natural environment.

Heath said “they're not doing the full length of the beach with this initial work because of the funding constraint, but they're doing the most critical section of the surf beach”.

Vening described this as a “middle-term measure, provided we don’t get another immense storm”.

Heath said he “would like the federal government to step up with a national strategy”.

Each town faces unique rising sea level challenges

South Gippsland Shire Deputy Mayor, Sarah Gilligan, is a Venus Bay resident and an advocate for more proactive preparation and policies on rising water levels.

Gilligan said people often thought of erosion as the steady decline of the coast but “what erosion also does is it allows water to flow differently. Inundation is a much bigger issue for most of the Victorian coastline. There's going to be isolation of communities because roads are going to be cut off”.

She said that by 2040 towns such as Venus Bay wouldn’t be inundated with water, as the houses are built on a rise, but that the one road in and out of town would be inundated.

According to the CSIRO, “since 1993, the rates of sea-level rise to the north and southeast of Australia have been significantly higher than the global average”.

Last year the South Gippsland Coastal Strategy won a leadership in climate adaptation and resilience award at the Victorian Marine and Coastal Awards.

“It was literally a strategy that says ‘don't build in a floodplain’,” said Gilligan.

Gilligan wants to see the State Government produce coastal hazard overlays similar to its bushfire overlays.

“It will strike fear into many people's hearts, I'm sure,” she said. “[But] we need a planning tool that allows us to pause and ask, ‘What's coming? How are we going to deal with it?’”