Paying The Price For Private Sun And Surf
The Age
Saturday January 8, 2000
What price a Portsea beach? It depends on how you pay.
Trucking magnate Lindsay Fox paid dearly for his when he was widely attacked last year for staking out his land with posts in the sand.
His Portsea neighbors, including critic Kate Baillieu, have paid in cash for theirs, with astronomic rates (up to $60,000 a year) on cliff-top mansions, which come with exclusive access to a private beach.
So should Mr Fox have just moved down the road? No, says Portsea estate agent Warwick Anderson. Not only will a cliff-top mansion with a private beach set him back as much as $6 million, they almost never come on to the market.
Mr Anderson says he receives dozens of inquiries each month about properties with private beaches. But he says there is no such thing as a private beach in Portsea because all beaches are Crown land. Private beaches do exist in a practical sense, though.
If you own a cliff-top mansion between Point King and Point Arthur, for example, odds are you own a private set of steps to the beach. Everything from the high watermark down is public property, so everyone is legally welcome, although only gatecrashers with boats can join you.
And these rocky quasi-private beaches aren't sheltered from prying eyes. The passenger ferry between Sorrento and Portsea steams by every hour and skipper Warren Neale, who has run the business for 25 years, is an expert on who owns what.
He is happy to fill in passengers on which properties belong to the Baillieu family or developer Max Beck or Rupert Murdoch's relatives or any of the other wealthy people along the cliffs. His crew do not miss a trick either. One, a part-time photographer, says he has spotted a few naked millionaire bottoms.
Holiday makers keen on watching the rich and famous at play can also take a walk through their back yards. There is a public track that begins at Lentell Avenue (off Point Nepean Road) and ends at Lindsay Fox's place.
As you walk towards Portsea, private steps descend to the sea on your right and to your left are private gardens. Although there are gates all along the way, the entire walk is on public land.
Yesterday, David Horgan was in his back yard enjoying drinks with family and friends. He rented the only cliff-top home open to the public. ``It's a $10 house with a million-dollar view," he said. A mere snip at $3500 a week.
At the end of the exclusive track is a beach, and at the end of the beach yesterday was Fox. The trucking magnate was heading out on his jet ski but had become bogged on the beach while trying to launch it. He was understandably guarded but said the brouhaha about his posts was a beat-up. ``But what would I know, I'm just a simple truckie," he said.
Mr Fox may have a point. Legally he did nothing wrong. Perhaps he would have done better to take the advice of the wit who quipped: ``Don't try to keep up with the Joneses, bring them down to your level, it's much cheaper."
© 2000 The Age