MidCoast Council
Welcome to the MidCoast region, we hope you enjoy your holiday with us.
Due to recent floods, many MidCoast waterways, parks, reserves, showgrounds, sports fields, campgrounds and other spaces may be closed due to damaged infrastructure or unsafe conditions.
As you visit, please observe all signage and obey directions of lifesavers at beaches.
Use your judgement and treat all flood-affected waterways as potentially contaminated unless they have the all-clear.
The following information is correct as of Thursday 1 April, but conditions can and do change so exercise caution when visiting.
Waterways
Both the Forster Ocean Baths and the Blackhead Ocean Baths have been tested and are safe for swimmers.
MidCoast Council
MidCoast residents will have a chance to show they love where they live when the Festival of Place comes to the region.
Rolling out from 26 March until 17 April, the Festival of Place is an initiative of the NSW Government Department of Planning, Industry and Environment funded through The Festival of Place – Summer Fund.
Some of the region’s best local musicians will perform free on main streets, continuing to support the revitalisation of the heart of our communities after a year that was anything but fun and spontaneous.
The Festival will also incorporate the creation of a group public art mural – with everyone invited to contribute a small 10cm canvas that is colour mapped to produce a large artwork. Two sessions, at Manning Regional Art Gallery in Taree and at Forster Library, will be held during the Festival.
Date Time
Deliberately lit bus fire at Forster
Police remain at the scene of a deliberately lit bus fire on the state’s mid north coast.
About 1.15pm (Thursday 11 March 2021), emergency services were called to the corner of Lake and West Streets, Forster, following reports a bus was well alight.
Fire crews extinguished the blaze a short time later, which has completely destroyed the vehicle.
Police have been told a female passenger entered the on-board toilet facilities and allegedly lit a small fire.
The male bus driver safely evacuated all six passengers from the bus before alerting emergency services.
The female fled the scene, with officers attached to Manning-Great Lakes Police District currently conducting extensive inquiries into her whereabouts.
MidCoast Council
Local author, Terry Stanton, will visit Forster and Taree Libraries this month to talk about his latest novel, ‘No Mayday! No Mayday!’.
Terry is a retired English solicitor living in NSW with his wife Christine. This is Terry’s second novel, his first ‘Deliver me from Evil’ is about the real 17
th Century Earl of Strafford whose head was cut off by Parliament.
He wrote No Mayday! No Mayday! because the official accounts of MH370 seemed not to add up, but his book is fiction, not representative of any real person and explores what might have happened.
The book’s main character, is Lynn Galloway, a television reporter from Sydney who is filming at Sydney Airport when a distraught Australian woman harangues her. The woman’s husband was on a plane flying to Beijing when the plane vanished, now everyone wants to know what happened. How and why did it disappear? Was the plane hijacked or did the pilot commit suicide? Did it crash somewhere?