Y.I.R JULY 2023: Locals rub shoulders with royalty, Fairmont, and the humble phone box still in play

Only fitting

With her tennis background and her close association with Wimbledon Judy was invited back this year to sit in the Royal Box and watch the current crop of champions do their thing. Maureen accompanied Judy and the pair soaked up every moment of it.

From the best seats in the house (Catherine, Princess of Wales was their neighbour) the two watched the fairy tale Women’s Final where Czech player Marketa Vondrousova beat Ons Jabeur to become the first unseeded player to win the Wimbledon women's singles title.

If that wasn’t enough the gals later met Men’s final winner Carlos Alcaraz in the Wimbledon Restaurant and cosied up to the triumphant Spaniard for a photo. Carlos had earlier defeated four-time defending champion Novak Djokovic in the final.

Fairmont a fairy tale?

In July for the first time, I came face to face with the developer behind the denied development application to construct the five-star Fairmont resort in Port Douglas.

Paul Chiodo promised me that construction will start early next year, and it was full steam ahead to achieve that goal. Douglas Shire Council rejected the $300-million luxury resort proposal at a meeting in September 2021, on the grounds that it did not comply with the Shire’s planning scheme.

Planned on the old ‘Havana’ site – at 71-85 Port Douglas Road between Oaks Hotels and Resorts and the Mirage Country Club, the resort proposal as it stands is ‘dead in the water’. T

he Planning and Environment Court of Queensland with Her Honour Judge Nicole Kefford presiding dismissed the appeal of the Chiodo Corporation Operations Pty Ltd against Douglas Shire Council, leaving the development application as it stands, REFUSED.

That decision means it’s virtually impossible for Paul Chiodo to keep that promise of starting construction of the resort in 2024.  

Phone box explosion

Back in July I was walking down Macrossan Street when I saw some workman upgrading a payphone and it got me thinking. The huge uptake in mobile phone use in Australia was expected to kill off the suburban phone box.

But in fact, new usage figures show the number of calls made from public phones in Australia have increased dramatically over the last few years. In the past 12 months or so , around 23 million payphone calls were made from Telstra's network of 14,500 public payphone. It's an increase of four million on the previous year, which had already seen a massive surge after Telstra made all calls from payphones free in 2021.

Telstra is paid to maintain the country's payphones by the government because of the role they play in connecting vulnerable people and communities, especially in regional areas.

In the past year, almost a quarter of a million calls were made from payphones to critical services like triple zero and Lifeline. Telstra maintains 14,500 public payphones in Australia.

For those with the means and technical literacy to access Wi-F, the free connection provided by some Wi-Fi-enabled payphones was also a well-used service. So, I'm getting a sense that not only do we have a critical reliance on payphones already, but that reliance is probably going to get higher.