A bullish market in once dirty-as-anything Burleigh Heads… 

A couple of months back, BeachGrit reported the sale of a one-hundred-year-old wooden shack on six-thousand square feet at 10 Goodwin Terrace, Burleigh Heads, for seven million bucks, almost two-and-a-half mill more than it sold for in 2016.

The couple who bought the joint, Brian and Lauren McMaster, had been trying to buy it for three years. After the last refusal by the owner to sell, the pair bought a six-mill penthouse a little further down the street.

The agent that sold ‘em the penthouse then  convinced the owner of 10 Goodwin to sell ‘em the house, too, for seven mill.

A nice little pair of boltholes, although the plan for the historic house was to flatten the thing to make way for a “standout family home.”

Now, the place is believed to be under contract to the developer, Spyre group, for eleven mill or twenty gees for every hundred square feet. 

A four-mill profit in eleven months.

It ain’t bad.

The land is zoned medium density and has a three-storey, fifty-feet feet height limit, which means the developer ain’t gonna toss a tower on the land, although developers have been known to work many behind-the-scenes miracles.

Once one of the grittier parts of the Gold Coast, third in shittiness behind Coolangatta and perennial winner Palm Beach, Burkeigh Heads has been transformed into a paradise for investors, including the Chinese man who bought the Old Burleigh Theatre Arcade, the former home of Surfing Life magazine, for eighteen-mill.

“She doesn’t give a damn… She doesn’t care. She just wants people to spend money."

Echoing the claims of adult entertainment fans who complained of price gouging and a lack of explicit content on world number 25 surfer Ellie-Jean Coffey’s XXX channel shortly after it was launched, former pal Renee Gracie has accused EJ of bring the industry into “disrepute”. 

Speaking to Australia’s The Daily Telegraph, Gracie, whose full-service menu has been banned from Instagram and Twitter, said EJ promised XXX but delivered PG.

“She doesn’t give a damn… She doesn’t care. She just wants people to spend money… I said to her ‘there’s no point collaborating together if we’re not putting similar content up online’… It’s hard enough to get fans to respect you and trust you in this industry. It’s not just her reputation, it’s all the women in the industry she is affecting without knowing it.”

Gracie told The Daily Telegraph that because, unlike her, EJ don’t sex on camera, fans have become terribly upset. 

“I show and do everything. She does not. And when we met, she looks nothing like she does in her photos. I don’t understand how she continues to get away with it. And nothing has been done about it.”

In the story, Gracie also revealed they pair fell out after she refused to collaborate on a video shoot with EJ. 

Four months ago, if you remember, Gracie was photographed frolicking with EJ at a Gold Coast nightclub.

Gracie, who is a retired V8 Supercars driver (forty-eight starts, no wins) and who says she’s made almost two-mill from her Only Fans site, “was spotted groping her blonde companion’s chest, while Ellie-Jean closed her eyes in apparent ecstasy. Ellie-Jean, who is openly bisexual, was also seen bending over a table while Renee danced close to her bottom.”

EJ, a former world twenty-five on the WSL’s qualifying series for women, caused much tabloid sorrow in 2019 when she was the subject of a “lewd ambush” by the author of the best-selling biography of prime minister Bob Hawke. 

A terrible episode.

If further proof was necessary of the sanctity of the Great White Shark, and I doubt it is, well here y’go.

A little over a week ago, a Western Australian judge gave hell to an Albany deckhand who posted photos of himself surrounded by the carcasses of two Great Whites that had been caught in the boat he was crewing on’s nets.

Tyrone Leigh Harding, who is thirty four, pleaded guilty to one count of taking a protected fish in April 2019 after he and his skipper James Stewart Tindall pulled in the two Great Whites after they became tangled in their gill net in April, 2019.

The judge suspended Harding’s fishing license for one year and fined him twelve-and-a-half-gees. Magistrate Dianne Scaddan described the pair posing with the Great Whites as “barbaric” and “vulgar”, two hitherto unknown offences.

The skipper, James Tindall, who fronted court on April 1, has been fined twenty gees and had his fishing license suspended for his transgression; a little rich, I think, considering both animals were dead before they were pulled on deck.

Fisheries officers were put on the case after someone reported finding severed sharks in a nearby river one month later.

Cops got onto Harding, searched his joint, found the jaws, the photos and the videos.

Harding’s defence lawyer said Harding and Tindall were three-and-a-half clicks off the coast when the Great Whites got caught in the nets.

Cutting the net away from the Whites, he said, would’ve risked the crew’s safety and the net would’ve drifted into the ocean, environmental nightmare etc, so the pair dragged ‘em in, cut ‘em up, souvenired the fangs.