Surfers rally behind one of Australia’s last affordable beach escapes as bureaucrats ready the bulldozers

"There are no clocks or TVs and mobile phone won’t work. The point of Don Hearn’s Cabins is to provide a space where you can just stop."

A little over sixty years back, a World War II vet who’d fought the Nazis in Africa and the imperialist Japanese in New Guinea came back to Australia and built half-a-dozen cabins on pristine almost-beachfront land on NSW’s South Coast.

After years of being soaked in the blood of other men in the desert and the jungle, Don Hearns returned an avowed pacifist, what would be called, in the American sense, a liberal. He used whatever materials he could find to build the modest cabins on four acres of crown land at Cunjurong Point.

Australian surfers who wanted to avoid the Vietnam draft hid away at Don Hearn’s cabins and ol Donny showed his pacifist colours when he sent a dead Blue-Ringed octopus to the prime minister in protest at Australia’s involvement in the war.

Over the ensuing years, Don Hearn’s cabins became a popular holiday destination not just for surfers, but families who didn’t want to be slugged five hundred or a thousand bucks a night for some dressed-up, characterless house down a back street.

Don Hearn’s cabins has a compelling sell.

This is a different kind of place – it suits some people and definitely does not suit others. We provide a place where you can reconnect with yourself, your partner, family, friends, your dog (yes your pet is welcome) and nature itself.

How long is it since you lit a campfire, sat around it to share tall tales and gazed awestruck at the Milky Way?

There are only six cabins on four acres so there are plenty of quiet places to stretch out your hammock between the trees.

The cabins are not self contained but when you get the key to your cabin, it also opens your own bathroom in the amenities block so you are not sharing with everyone else – you just need to bring a torch so you can get there at night.

There are no clocks, radios or TVs and most mobile phone won’t work. The whole point of Don Hearn’s Cabins is to provide a space where you can just stop; jump off that rat-wheel of daily distractions.

 

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Of course, in a country where speculative real estate, snitching and rule following are national pastimes, Don Hearn’s cabins drives the bureaucrats nuts.

And, so, shortly, Don Hearn’s cabins are gonna be closed after “issues” were identified with the site.

“Detailed assessments identified issues including the poor condition of the buildings, bushfire risk at the site, sewerage infrastructure problems and presence of endangered ecological communities,” a government spokesperson said.

Lexie Myer, who became caretaker in 1991 after Don Hearn’s death, says the government has kept her on a thirty-day lease for almost a quarter of a century.

“It will be 22 years trying to run an accommodation business where people want to book next year but I don’t have more than 30 days’ certainty at any time,” she told ABC, saying that during the hysteria of COVID she was forced to go to charities for food, “I didn’t qualify for any assistance…so I had no income for almost 18 months.”

Close the joint and, says Myer, and “I’ll be homeless, unemployed, with a three-legged dog and 70 years old… I thought I’d be here for the whole rest of my life and be carried out in a box.”

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