Hi everyone

It's been mad lately. The road signs we put up at Easter started a fire. Not so much the sign pictured with this post. But "Hometown Not Tourist Town" created a huge amount of ongoing media attention and publicity which has given us a platform for useful discussion. After a couple of days, trespassers had vandalised and knocked the signs down but result achieved - and the vandals' efforts probably helped!

Our intention with the hometown sign was to send a timely reminder to tourism promoters including Denmark Shire Council and the WA government, our community and oh yes the tourists, that this place is our home. And mass or overtourism is overwhelming and impacting badly on our home: the environment, our community.

There's been heaps of publicity recently about overtourism and how people and governments worldwide are starting to take action to curb and control it. Aljjazeera's story in the past week on how overtourism impacts local communities, featured the Canary Islands (go to https://aje.io/ys05sq). We sympathise and applaud the Islanders, who were protesting about their population of 2.2m being swamped by 14m tourists. 

Here the population is about 6.5K. Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions gave us figures from their permanent William Bay Rd traffic counter of average visitor numbers of 400,000K per year for the past two years to mid 2023. The Canary Islands have a 6.36 increase on their resident population: here it's a 61.53 increase on ours - nearly ten times worse than the Canaries. We are being invaded! Surprised that that we grieve and fear for the preservation of our wondrous, unique, biodiverse ecosystems and our community wellbeing? 

Keep the little that's left is our plea - to hand intact to future generations. It matters, more now than ever in this sad, diminished world, that the few remaining pretty-much-unspoiled places survive. To remind us of what was and, climate crisis notwithstanding, what may be again if we learn, fast, to reciprocate the life-giving gifts that the natural world gives to us. 

You help, have helped so much. Thank you again. The clock is running down now on Greens and the rezoning of 2446 (Lot 3) South Coast Highway, William Bay for tourism. Within the next month or so we expect Hon John Carey Minister for Planning will make a final decision to approve or reject the tourist rezoning. Please urge him to reject it: phone +61 8 9443 2359 or email Minister.Carey@dpc.wa.gov.au

In a while we expect to ask to present this petition to him. Before we do that we would like the signatures to grow - by a lot. If you could each please also spare some time to get a couple more people or organisations to sign that would be job well done. 

Many thanks

Helen