Western Port

Oh, it's down the peninsula.

It's on the Western Port Bay.

You look over towards...

Why have they got the plaque for that there?

When I was 14 years old, my family and I went on a boating trip out to Melbourne's Western Port Bay.

I remember being at the helm with my father, steering the little boat over the waves and then the next thing we knew, my big brother was shouting that water was coming in.

And it all happened so fast.

Now, the only way to get onto Phillip Island is via the bridge that comes in off the highway over, it's like a causeway, and it deposits a driver onto Phillip Island, and that bridge is, is quite a big, handsome piece of engineering, and it spans a very fast-flowing tidal channel.

It's the tidal channel that, that ebbs and flows into Western Port Bay and out again into Bass Strait.

So it is deep, and it's fast, and it is-- I've read up on this, and clearly if you jump into it when the tide is flowing, you will be swept out or swept in very rapidly, particularly out, at a ra- at a rate of knots.

In fact, faster than a person can walk is how, is how fast it is.

With regional unemployment at just 1.4%, Mayor Kate Macon says these workers are critical to filling vacancies and injecting hundreds of thousands of dollars directly into small-town economies.

Bass Coast Shire Council is making an urgent plea to the Victorian Government to introduce interim planning controls and protect the Western Port woodlands from potential sand mining.

The region's largest patch of remnant native vegetation remains exposed, even after the Council committed $500,000 toward long-term biodiversity studies to safeguard threatened local species.

A joint council meeting will take place on October 7 as the City of Whittlesea, Hume City Council and Mitchellshire Council unite to advocate for key regional development goals in Cloverton.

Eventually, they reached the coast.

They believed it to be Western Port.

In truth, it was Corio Bay, near the present-day Geelong.

They returned to Gunning in January 1825, exhausted, triumphant, changed.

The detail tells you everything about the difference between glory and reality in colonial Australia.

Recognition did not always arrive with comfort.

At first, Hume and Hovell convinced governors Brisbane and Darling that they had reached Western Port.

Later, doubts emerged.

We're actually out fishing together at the moment.

Sitting out in the middle of Western Port Bay.

And obviously you're not catching anything, otherwise you wouldn't be talking to me.

Correct.

You know, we've seen trees cut down at Macedon, you know, to make way for, you know, views from the Memorial Cross.

There's a whole bunch of other ones, including our fish, you know, We know that the fisheries offices in Port Phillip Bay, Western Port and in Victoria have been halved across in these really busy areas as well to let illegal fishing be really unregulated as much as it should.

So there's just a whole list of all the different examples of these decisions that are made and this is why we're coming together to alert people because A lot of people necessarily don't know everything that's happening.

So it's really to bring people together to let them know that this is not just one issue.

Um, so, uh, we'll definitely be watching, uh, if we trigger any of those sheep graziers warnings.

But right now we have a gale warning for today for the East Gippsland coast, strong wind warnings for, uh, West Coast, Central Coast, Central Gippsland Coast, all the other coastal waters, as well as Port Phillip and Western Port.

Tomorrow we'll lose that, uh, gale force wind warning for the East Gippsland coast, but we will continue to see strong wind warnings for the Central Coast, the Central Gippsland coast, and the East Gippsland coast as the cold front moves away.

Well, um, thanks very much for your time today, and thanks for the update.

Mm.

Um, I started life as an engineer rolling steel at the BHP in Western Port, and, um, I enjoyed that.

I went to a company called Honeywell after that, and I was selling fire systems and security systems, and I enjoyed that.

That was great.