History of the Beyond Development - Part 1: Seeing Beyond
In the 1950’s some Anglo-centric Australians saw nonEnglish speakers as ‘invaders’ and prejudice against the rising influx of immigrants seeking refuge from the war was fairly common, if not a widespread attitude. One place where these views could be more freely aired and projected, maybe a bit more freely than in the wider community, was the schoolyard, a traditional haven for taunting and bullying.
While some students might gleefully indulge in this sort of taunting as common horseplay, some refrained, having been raised to be have a more tolerant outlook of others. One student, more empathetic than most, was repelled by the ostracism and marginalisation of those of ‘different’ heritage. He went on to carry and apply that empathy throughout his tertiary studies in social services and eventual state government service in the social services sector.
Steven Wright held and nurtured these core social values throughout his education and career in politics and as a public servant. These values were not limited to how society treated its members; they were extended to an abiding respect for the natural environment in the same sense that they applied to people. These values were based on a sense that fairness needed to be applied to the natural environment, borne of a deep sense of appreciation of what nature offered to the life and sustenance of the individual and to society as a whole.
You could say that Beyond Today was not Steven Wright’s first rodeo in this arena. The creation of the Beyond Today community was addressed after years of studying social work and planning a collective, sustainable community on the Yorke Peninsula, one that he was unable to ultimately actualise.
There was the renovation of a ‘farmlet’ in Inglewood and the creation of an extended family living environment. It was a long and widely practiced internship of experience; one that left him tested and ready to answer when the farmland at Hayborough called.
We learn from the memoir of Don Dunstan, the then Premier of South Australia, that in 1972 Steve approached the Dunstan government with the suggestion of a comprehensive tourist development at the southern tip of the Yorke Peninsula; to create and support a community farm for individuals suffering from stress and pressure, a time-out where they could learn to cope, with the help of social workers and group therapy.
The proposal quickly made it to the desk of the Premier, who was himself disposed to ideas of strengthening social services and expanding community development. The idea was so compelling and well presented that the Premier himself accompanied Steve and the Deputy Director of Tourism on a visit to the site.
Finding it to have all the potential that Steve had described, Dunstan then organised the working party that would eventually purchase the old port of Stenhouse Bay and its workings. The Working Party also initiated the enlargement of Innes National Park which became a spectacular natural resort area based at the old ghost town of Inneston.
Photo credit: Len Finney
The Education Department used this facility to assist students with emotional and learning difficulties in a setting which enabled teachers to get through to them in a way that was not possible in their usual school setting.
The Premier and the Tourism Bureau were impressed with the results and when Steve mentioned that he was looking for a job in the Public Service, the Bureau took him in. Steve’s deep and abiding compassion for those in need of the support and care of society became an integral part of his future efforts to better society and the environment.
As well as an employee in the Public Service, Steve developed a warm friendship with the Premier who took to visiting Steve and Margit’s ‘little farmlet with the primitive early cottage’ in the Adelaide Hills.
As Dunstan fondly recounts, he could leave his claustrophobic flat behind there, to plant trees, prune vines, ride horses and simply escape.
Dunstan also found that the farmlet, a collective of separate family homes scattered around the property, was organised around a system of mutual support and shared responsibility that was an early application of Steve’s vision of a socially integrated community.
Dunstan also relates that the friendship and loyalty in Steve that he came to rely on, due to the loneliness of the office he occupied, were vital for his mere survival, let alone the creativity of the kind to which the Premier strove.
In this fertile ground of creativity and social progressiveness, both his government work and the development of the farmlet planted and nurtured the seeds of Steve’s vision; of possibilities around environmental quality and its effect on humans and the place of humans in forming the quality of the natural environment.
His budding visions were fortunately fostered and furthered by the progressive Premier that he served alongside. This allowed the opportunity to apply his visions in a wider setting. Thus began, and so developed, a career in Public Service, a deep and abiding respect for environmental ecology and a commitment to social change and community development and enhancement.
The outcome of all those experiences were then called to play as the underlying sense of what Steve was able to see, all those years later in a denuded paddock by the sea, on hard-packed clay with a few scattered trees and a weed-choked and eroded old stream bed.
After the government he served was replaced, Steve set out to pursue his passion for social support and care of the environment.
He started planning a sustainable community to be developed on a large (1,500 hectare) plot of farmland north of Adelaide, in the hills near One Tree Hill, drawing up a contract for the property in 1984.
Steve spent the best part of the next decade developing an environmentally sustainable development at Yelki Grove, a precursor to Beyond Today at Chiton.
Years of planning and development work followed involving two state governments, two councils, intervening elections and innumerable consultants; all of which was self funded.
However the owner-farmer needed to sell up before Steve had sufficient finance and preparation to proceed. Steve was willing to terminate the contract, leaving the land again available for sale.
The farmer, who knew of Steve’s future dream and of his likely disappointment, offered that he had another fallow farmstead on the south coast of the Fleurieu Peninsula if Steve was interested. A trip to Hayborough left Steve with an immediate sense of what the 90+ hectare plot could become. It was contracted in 1994.
The opening paragraphs of an article about the Wright family and the Beyond Today development, published in the Fleurieu Living magazine in 2012, so beautifully summarises the meeting between Steve and the parcel of land that we at Beyond now live on:
Michelangelo once said, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free’.
How many of us can look at one thing, so similar to others like it, and see the hidden opportunity to discover a new wonder within its depths?
The area now known as the Beyond Today development was looked at by many people over the years, and all they could see was an old farm, or perhaps an opportunity to build a standard housing development between Victor Harbor and Port Elliot, pack 1200 houses in, sell them for profit and move on.
The only problem was the land was a family farm and it wasn’t for sale. Not to a developer. That is, until the Wright family entered the picture. Steven Wright, a combination of dreamer and strategist, saw an opportunity to do something unique. He was so persuasive and the vision so alluring that the farm changed hands.
What the Wright family acquired was denuded grazing land and an eroded creek that ran with storm water. It was land with as few as 40 trees and a gradient that meant the high side was always dry and the low side marshy after a rain event.
What followed the land acquisition was several decades of organising, planning, gaining approval and finance. This amounted to 20 years of dedicated and persistent efforts by Steve to keep the project moving forward and the dream alive, gaining acceptance and support from local council, state government, banks and insurance companies. This was followed by the task of managing the large number of contractors needed to accomplish it all, an immense task of sculpting a community out of a fallow paddock.
But Steve had the strength of that vision, could see the ‘angel in the marble block’. For him it represented another ecological and sustainable village here, at the foot of the hills that roll down to the sea, but also one for a wider community than the ‘village’ on the Yorke Peninsula.
By then he had also gained the organisational abilities to form the family business, ESD (Environmentally Sustainable Developments), a team that would oversee the project, to envision, design and then implement the vision. The core staff consisted of family; starting with wife Margit, an award winning landscaper, brother Bruce to handle project management and contractors and son Adam whose marketing background lent to his becoming sales director and the public face of Beyond Today.
The land could have gone to a build-for-profit development company that would have crammed 1200 houses on the site affording them the bare legal minimum of 10 percent left to open spaces. Instead, the community was designed, not with profit as the main driving force but with the quality of the residents’ environment as the priority.
Out of the 90+ hectares of the total land package, around 70 hectares, were immediately consigned to become a community reserve. The developers then allotted about half of the remaining 20 hectares to around 220 residential building lots (including the Chiton Retirement Village) with the remaining 10 hectares given over to open spaces and reserves as part of the residential building envelope. Those 20 hectares that we live on are the smaller slice off the original farmland and that left the 70 hectare allotment to become Beyond Today’s most spectacular feature – its wetlands.
‘The Wetlands - Building a home for more than people’ is proudly proclaimed on the Beyond Today web page.
Such was the promise then and the essence now of the 70 hectares of wetlands within the Beyond Today community boundaries, an area set aside for revegetation and grasslands.
This extensive natural sanctuary provides both a unique and stunning feature for the residential community whilst creating a new habitat for many species of native birds and animals. The restoration and re-creation of this large scale native ephemeral wetland and estuarine eco-system has seen:
Plantings of over 350,000 endemic native trees
Restoration and earth works on a severely eroded drainage creek line
Restoration of the saline affected floodplain
Creation of a large scale native habitat and wetland estuarine ecosystem that has:
introduced aquatic life – over 100 new aquatic species
provided a feeding/nesting habitat for about 120 different species of birds
allowed relocation of endangered fish species from natural environments that have become over polluted or too saline
The success of the created eco-system that is the Beyond Today wetlands has seen local council and other ecological authorities present it as a model of ecological and sustainable possibilities in community development, a centre for environmental field studies, educational workshops for schools, for the broader community and for the farming community in South Australia.
After the Wright family had incorporated as ESD, they sought out broad collaboration, engaging a range of experts and other visionaries in all areas needed to plan and produce a community based on the highest principles of ecological and environmental sustainability and enhanced social experience for the residents.
There were numerous associates close to the family who were brought in like Mick Lee who was made responsible for planting and managing the open spaces for the past ten years. In the initial stages some of the major players and concerns that came on board to support and propel the project included:
John Maitland of Energy Architecture, an award winning eco-architect, to help to define and set up the building guidelines for maximum self-sufficiency and sustainability, like orienting homes to engage passive solar heating in winter and maximum shade in summer.
Dr Neale Draper, Aboriginal Archaeologist, for cultural heritage, assessment, research and management and an expert witness in the fields of anthropology and native title.
Barry Ormsby, Adelaide Landscape Architect consulted on the overall wetlands design, development plan and implementation strategies.
Simon Tonkin of MasterPlan assisted the Wright family through the maze of local and state government planning processes.
Then began a long process of negotiating the planning, assessing, testing and certifying the land, seeking approvals and variances, meeting innumerable criteria of local council and state land use regulations, securing backers and finances.
Once that phase was completed came the search for and lining up of contractors able and willing to service and support the creation of a community being developed to higher standards and along stricter guidelines than those applied to a standard residential developments.
Most, if not all of us, feel fortunate to have found space in this unique and wonderful development, to have had the opportunity to make ourselves a part of this unique and special community.
It is unique in the basic philosophies applied to the higher-order development guidelines aimed at a better community experience for its residents. It is special for having taken a fallow paddock and turned it into an ecoparadise for all.
Residents here have chosen to accept and embrace stricter requirements and regulations in support of the community’s philosophies and goals. Yet the support and involvement expected of an owner/builder in this community amounts to a mere wisp compared to the enormous scope and extensive breadth of the task undertaken by the developers of Beyond Today in the effort to ‘carve the angel out of the marble’ so we can enjoy a community bounded by a sublime regenerated eco-system, carved out of a barren hillside.
