TERROR OF BATS
more important than the people. That’s the way it is here in Charters Towers.”
Mr King built a sandpit in his yard for his grandchildren to play in under a tamarind tree. They can’t use it because of the faeces and urine.
“I used to have a blue tarp over the clothes line but it rotted away quick because of the urine and manure,” he said.
Mr King said governments cared more about than about people.
Mayor Liz Schmidt said she was pursuing state and federal legislators to see if the laws that protect the bats over and beyond the welfare of residents could be changed. She said that in the meantime council was looking at ways to manage the existing colonies.
She said legislation stated that council could “move on” the bats bats, but added there were clauses in the small print that made it illegal and impossible.
“You can’t trim trees where there is a flying fox in it. You can’t move them on if there any babies. We have had to close our parks and even the swimming pool. There’s too much risk,” she said.
“The bats have killed the trees. There’s always a danger a dead branch will fall off.” ANY government, state or federal, that stands by while people to live as prisoners in their homes because of bats should hang its head in shame.
These people in Charters Towers – cancer sufferer Cyril King and young father Nathan Beitz – shouldn’t have to live b behind closed windows with airconditioners running because of the sour stench and the noise from the bats.
Their yards are no longer safe havens. Mr Beitz’s twoyear- old son Alex has to stay indoors because of the bat w waste that litters the ground.
The screeching noise the b bats make is incessant. Mr King, a pensioner, cannot afford to run an airconditioner 24/ 7. At night he lies awake, unable to sleep because of the screeching noises coming from just above his bedroom roof.
In Mr King’s yard, even during the day when the bats are least active, there is still the heavy beat of their wings as they fly low, looking for another place to roost.
Lissner Park, once a beautiful part of Charters Towers, a tranquil oasis in the city where people would get married against a backdrop of majestic trees and green lawns, is now a war zone. The trees are dead and the grass is covered with bat waste, dead bats and even foetuses. Now, no one in their right mind would set foot in Lissner Park.
Charters Towers can’t keep copping this. Using the power of legislation to force people to live in filth verges on criminal.
The people here, especially those being forced to live as prisoners in their own homes, whose cost of living is being driven through the roof and whose yards are sewers, must surely have recourse to a class action against governments ignoring their plight.
It is time for these people and for Charters Towers to fight back. Good luck to Mayor Liz Schmidt in having legislators rewrite the laws that put bats over people.
Maybe these legislators can camp out for a night in Mr King’s or Mr Beitz’s yard. This would provide them a taste of what it is like to live inside a bat colony.