Latest news with #EasternSuburbs
Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Shock details emerge about an Aussie man's alleged cocaine 'dead drop' worth $9.7million
From a parked van near an inner-city reserve, a man retrieves a sports bag he allegedly believes contains cocaine worth millions. It's called a 'dead drop' - with a long history of use in espionage - but unfortunately for the guy who came to collect the package on Friday in Sydney, he was on the wrong side of the intelligence gathering. Australian Federal Police had already replaced the 30kg of wrapped cocaine bricks inside the bag. The amount of drugs had a potential street value of almost $9.7million and would have equated to about 150,000 street level deals, the force said. Officers then arrested their suspect at the end of a foot chase following his return with the goods to the city's salubrious eastern suburbs. Police said they seized the fake cocaine along with encrypted devices and anabolic steroids from his Double Bay home and a nearby unit. Officers were operating undercover, wearing bright orange hi-vis work wear to appear to be tradies, The Daily Telegraph reported. Jonathan Lindsay Fagan, 40, has swapped the prestige postcode for a jail cell after declining to apply for bail in Parramatta Local Court on Saturday. He has been charged with attempting to possess a commercial quantity of unlawfully imported border controlled drugs, which can carry a lifetime prison sentence. The case returns to court on Tuesday. The arrest came after a three-month AFP investigation into an alleged transnational drug trafficking syndicate operating in Australia. The inquiry had disrupted the group's operations, Detective Superintendent Morgen Blunden said. 'This result should serve as a serious warning to potential drug traffickers in Australia - don't get comfortable - because the AFP is constantly working to target and disrupt your criminal operations and bring you to justice.' Friday's operation came a day after another man flew in to Sydney from Dubai allegedly carrying more than 10kg of cocaine in a suitcase.
The Guardian
21 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Why can't you catch a train or tram to Sydney's beaches – and are we dreamin' to think new rail lines could be built?
Michael Caton enjoys living a short walk from Sydney's Bondi beach, but when the actor needs to venture into the heart of the city for an appointment, he knows to never schedule anything before late morning, well after peak hour. 'You wouldn't dream of taking the bus in the morning,' the 82-year-old says on speaker phone while taking his Toyota RAV4 for a drive. 'They're all full. They just don't really do the job.' When it comes to telling Australians about dreams, Caton has form, of course. His character Darryl Kerrigan in the classic film The Castle coined the catchphrase 'tell him he's dreamin''. Caton also fronted a 1998 campaign by Bondi locals opposed to a controversial plan to extend Sydney's Eastern Suburbs railway line from Bondi Junction to the beach. 'It will be the end of the line for Bondi,' Caton proclaimed at protests against the privately led train extension, the ABC reported at the time. Crowds chanted back at Caton in response: 'Tell 'em they're dreamin'.' Sydney's expansive rail network is Australia's busiest, but it's almost impossible to catch a train to a beach to catch some waves. That's despite a long history of proposals to extend lines to the city's world-famous beaches. Unlike Rio de Janeiro's Copacabana beach, New York's Coney Island and even Melbourne's Brighton beach, residents and tourists can't catch a train to Sydney's globally recognised Bondi or Manly – or indeed any ocean beach in the eastern suburbs or north of the city. (Cronulla beach, 20km south of the city centre, can be reached by train, but the trip takes an hour.) Instead, beachgoers are forced into often-crowded buses or cars, the latter being expensive and difficult to park on busy days. Roads in summer can be heavily congested. Why Sydney's beaches remain inaccessible is explained by how the city expanded, as well as a mid-20th-century decision described as 'organised vandalism' and persistent efforts by beachside locals to limit public transport and a perceived influx of 'outsiders'. It might be hard to imagine today, but rail was once the main mode of transport to the city's beaches. Railways were first built in New South Wales primarily to send agricultural products from rural areas into Sydney, says Dr Geoffrey Clifton, a senior lecturer in transport and logistics management at the University of Sydney. Sign up for Guardian Australia's breaking news email Heavy rail lines were gradually extended and, as Sydney expanded, so did the train network. By the late 1800s, light rail – or trams – emerged as an alternative. 'Trams made more sense in the east of Sydney, where distances were shorter and the land was already developed,' Clifton says. But rural politicians and leaders with interests – commonly land speculation – in the comparatively underdeveloped western suburbs continued to support heavy rail. 'It was a competition between those who saw trams as the future and those who believed in trains.' Tram lines sprang up across Sydney's north shore and eastern suburbs, including to the beaches. Sydney developed one of the largest tram networks in the world and services were fast – in many cases speedier than the few modern lines resurrected 100 years later. The expression 'shoot through like a Bondi tram' was born. But Sydney, like much of the world, was then changed by the car. 'Firstly, after world war one, returning soldiers who'd driven trucks in the war bought themselves bus licences, and that drove suburban development away from trams and started the sprawl of Sydney,' Clifton says. 'After world war two, everyone was buying cars, patronage started to drop off, and by that stage the tram network needed serious investment and renewal.' Instead, leaders chose to tear up Sydney's tram network and replaced it with buses, most of which still run today. The decision was popular at a time when buses were cheaper to run and could cope with demand, but it is now seen as foolish by many transport experts. Mathew Hounsell, a researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, describes the destruction as 'the largest organised vandalism in our nation's history'. In the decades since the last service on Sydney's original tram network concluded in 1961, there have been campaigns for new train lines and extensions to beachside suburbs. A 1970s study proposed building a heavy rail line from North Sydney station to the farthest of the northern beaches. Half a kilometre of tunnel was constructed towards Mosman, but the plan never progressed, mostly because of local opposition and challenges in acquiring land and traversing difficult terrain. There were plans to extend rail through Sydney's eastern suburbs – including further than the limited Bondi beach proposal that Caton objected to in the late 1990s. The Eastern Suburbs line to Bondi Junction in the 1970s was a rare example of a rail line built to an already densified part of Sydney in the post-tram era. During construction, about 100 metres of tunnel was built beyond Bondi Junction towards the beach. But it has since been repurposed to turn trains around. There were also proposals for extensions to Maroubra and Malabar that failed to materialise. The resistance to adding rail infrastructure to already settled suburbs was evident in Woollahra, where a partially constructed station on the Eastern Suburbs line was never completed. Partially built platforms remain visible but unused due to resident objections in the 1970s. Recent calls to finish building Woollahra station go to the heart of the nimby v yimby ('yes in my back yard') tension. Generally, increased housing density has been the basis for new train lines being laid in Australia 'A lot of the problem with why these proposals go nowhere is because these suburbs are already well developed, there's already higher density and apartments,' Clifton says. 'So there's less incentive for governments to spend the money without the potential to get an uplift in housing, a return on investment.' The transport academic says this philosophy dictated development in Sydney well before the current Minns government's transport-oriented development program. 'The problem for beach suburbs is that they already had the rail investment when they were growing, and while they've only become denser since, the tram lines have been torn up,' Clifton says. Despite the lack of a train station at Bondi beach, people still flock there. Traffic and parking woes have intensified in the decades since locals successfully defeated the rail proposal. Buses that have filled the void are among Sydney's busiest. Annual ridership on the 333 'from the city to the sea' bus route, which runs as often as every three minutes, has exceeded 8 million in recent years, significantly more than some of Sydney's heavy rail lines such as the T5. Caton is frustrated when catching a crowded bus that has to contend with traffic snaking up the hills of Bondi towards the city – but he doesn't regret campaigning against the train line. 'The train did absolutely nothing for the locals, sure, it was good for getting more people to Bondi, but it didn't do anything for us,' Caton says. His opposition was based on the proposal's lack of additional stations to serve residents along Bondi Road or the north of the suburb. Having just one station at the beach would have led to chaos, he insists. Caton says his anti-trains stance was not nimbyism but admits that in the years since he has rallied with fellow residents against several other proposals regarding local traffic and moves to reduce street parking. 'We are fighting all of these changes, but it's because they're stupid decisions; they don't consult the people who live here.' He says a train to the beach would make more sense elsewhere, such as at Maroubra. For now, Sydney must make do with low-capacity buses. An articulated bus such as those that run to Bondi can hold about 110 passengers compared with an average Sydney train service that moves 1,200 people. Buses also have a bumpier ride, are susceptible to traffic jams and aren't always accessible for older passengers, people with young children and those with disabilities. The lack of trains makes getting to beaches in Sydney harder but the nimby campaigns haven't made the city's sand exclusive. 'There are no gatekeepers,' says Louis Nowra, the author of a biography of Sydney. He notes that the bus between Bondi Junction and the beach only adds 10 minutes to the journey for people travelling from western Sydney, for example. 'If you live in Bondi, you have to put up with crowds and cars. I don't see a train system alleviating that,' Nowra says. Many people prefer less busy parts of Sydney, argues Nowra, who was turned off Bondi after attending a recent literary festival. 'I found the crowds claustrophobic, so I think Bondi has reached saturation point without more fucking visitors.' Asked if it's more difficult to live in Bondi in 2025 compared with 1998, when the rail extension was proposed, Caton is frank. 'Oh God yes, but a train would have turned Bondi into Surfers Paradise.' Given the transport-oriented development focus of the current NSW government, hopes for new rail infrastructure to the beaches are subdued. Clifton says extending existing light rail from Randwick to Coogee beach and from Kingsford to Maroubra beach are the most plausible options. But it would need significant support and campaigning from the local council and community, with Clifton pointing to the City of Sydney mayor Clover Moore's continued lobbying for the George Street light rail. 'If local communities want that, they should be developing plans and … advocating to government for those extensions,' Clayton says. The Randwick council mayor, Dylan Parker, says he would welcome government investing in such extensions. However, the council has not been actively lobbying for them. Guardian Australia understands the incline on Coogee Bay Road has been identified as a barrier to extending the light rail to Coogee beach. While trams historically travelled that route, the gradient could be problematic for the larger rolling stock in use today. Outside of extending light rail, future projects in Sydney are for driverless Metro trains, with the era of extending Sydney's heavy rail network, which has been hamstrung by maintenance problems and union disagreements, considered over. The NSW government is considering potential eastern extensions of the Sydney Metro West line set to open next decade. Proposals include running trains from the CBD to Green Square, the University of New South Wales and on to Maroubra and Malabar – which Randwick council supports.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Simone Holtznagel rubs shoulders with Tyra Banks as she attends glamorous VIP opening of the supermodel's Sydney ice cream store
Simone Holtznagel was in esteemed company on Thursday night. The model and mum-of-one stepped out for the VIP launch of SMiZE & DREAM Ice Cream, the new Sydney store founded by American supermodel Tyra Banks. The 31-year-old stunned at the shindig, holding her own alongside Tyra in a black sweetheart corset that showed off some bust. Simone added a pair of skin tight black jeans with a flared bell bottom and a pair of strappy gold heels. For makeup, the blonde chose a clean look with a pink lipstick and wore her hair down in soft waves. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. The stunner recently sparked romance rumours with Dina Broadhurst's Eastern Suburbs property developer ex-boyfriend Max Shepherd. According to The Sunday Telegraph, Simone was seen cosying up to Max at Justin Hemmes' Silver Party charity gala, fuelling speculation that the pair are quietly dating. While the relationship is still in its early stages and yet to be made official, sources tell the publication that the two are already 'smitten' and have been spending lots of time together. Simone is no stranger to headlines – especially since her high-profile breakup with celebrity trainer Jono Castano, with whom she shares a daughter. The pair ended things last year after a tumultuous on-off relationship. Meanwhile, Max Shepherd, 32, has carved out a name for himself in the property world and was previously linked to Broadhurst, a famed Sydney-based artist known for her nude self-portraits and edgy art installations. He also dated US actress Vail Bloom. Interestingly, Simone doesn't appear to be Max's usual type – with the developer historically gravitating towards older, brunette women, a far cry from Simone's signature blonde bombshell aesthetic. The timing of the romance comes as Max and his ex Dina are in the process of offloading their multimillion-dollar Rose Bay apartment, which they purchased together in 2022 for $5.2 million. The luxury two-bedroom, two-bathroom property was initially listed in November with an eye-watering price tag of $11.5 million after undergoing a dramatic high-end renovation. But six months on, the price has been slashed to $8.4 million, according to property records. Simone's younger sister Madeline Holtznagel is currently dating hospitality tycoon and Merivale CEO Justin Hemmes, 51 and recently they welcomed their first child together. Simone previously dated celebrity personal trainer Jono, 34, before the pair ended things late last year. Jono has since moved on with Love Triangle star Emily Ryder, with the two debuting their relationship on social media. Earlier this month Jono was spotted enjoying a romantic night out with Emily at the Sydney Opera House. The pair have reportedly been dating for several months and are taking things 'very slowly'. Sources close to the couple say Jono and Emily bonded over their shared passion for fitness and adventure, and are often seen working out together.
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Margarita towers, caviar bumps and beachside luxury: Real Housewives of Sydney star Krissy Marsh hosts extravagant three-day birthday bash in Noosa
Real Housewives of Sydney star Krissy Marsh pulled all the stops for her husband Johnny over the weekend to ring in his 59th birthday. The reality star, 53, who has appeared in all three seasons of the series, shared a slew of pictures and videos of the extravagant three-day celebration, which included margarita towers, caviar bumps and Sydney's Eastern Suburbs elite. The festival-esque weekend kicked off with boho-themed drinks on Noosa Main Beach, which saw those lucky enough to be invited to the shindig in crochet, fur and linen as they partied the night away. Day two saw the family hire out the iconic Sails Restaurant for a lunch overlooking the beachfront, with guests dressed in all-white as they sipped on champagne and slurped on oysters. Krissy and the kids - Nicco, Billy and Milana - gave heartwarming speeches for the birthday boy, with Krissy taking centre stage behind the mic in a sleek, one-shouldered dress that elegantly fell to the floor and stuck to the all-white theme. From A-list scandals and red carpet mishaps to exclusive pictures and viral moments, subscribe to the DailyMail's new showbiz newsletter to stay in the loop. Real Housewives of Sydney star Krissy Marsh pulled all the stops for husband Johnny over the weekend to ring in his 59th birthday The reality star, 53, who has appeared on all three seasons of the series, shared a slew of pictures and videos of the extravagant three-day celebration, which included margarita towers, caviar bumps and Sydney's Eastern Suburbs elite Day three called for a recovery day, which saw the family invite their loved ones to their Noosa home to recharge on Bloody Mary cocktails and reminisce on the weekend bender. The at-home party was littered with personal touches, such as a cardboard cutout of the man of the hour stationed outside the front door and a DJ set played by his son Billy. Also in attendance were Real Housewives of Sydney stars Victoria Montano, Victoria Rees and Matty Samaei, and of course, the Marsh family's nearest and dearest - including Krissy's sisters. Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail, Krissy said of the glamorous birthday bash: 'Why do 60 when you can get in early and do 59?' If this is how the Marsh's do 59, we can't wait to see what they do next year! The opulent weekend comes after Krissy opened her jaw-dropping Eastern Suburbs home to Daily Mail Australia in March. The reality star and her husband nabbed the luxurious abode, which features six bedrooms, 2300 sqm grounds, and a $30million price tag, in 2022. 'I would like to think it's my forever home,' she said, despite not knowing what's around the corner. The at-home party was littered with personal touches, such as a cardboard cutout of the man of the hour stationed outside the front door and a DJ set played by his son Billy 'You never say never and you never say forever because you never know what tomorrow brings.' However, the mother-of-three's decision to make the big purchase spans beyond the house's lush amenities. 'I love the whole community,' she says, adding: 'I love the fact that we're the house that everyone drops into.' The star revealed she has an open invitation dinner every Tuesday night where some of Sydney's biggest (and slightly smaller) names drop in for a bite to eat, a chat and a Housewives watch party. As for some of her favourite things in the Double Bay home, Krissy lists her dogs, Bronte and Bondi, her family, her extensive art collection (think Slim Aarons and Dina Broadhurst) and her $30,000 chandelier.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Aussie council's $220k move after chaotic beach scenes anger locals
A city council has vowed to drastically ramp up efforts to contain crowds that flock to the beach to party on Christmas Day, after years of numbers swelling into the high thousands and numerous complaints from fed-up locals. Bronte Park, at Bronte Beach in Sydney's eastern suburbs, attracts several thousand revellers each year on Christmas Day, who flock to the popular seaside spot to celebrate in the sun. While the partygoers can hardly be blamed for wanting to enjoy such a pristine location, it's come at the ire of locals, who argue crowds become rowdy, leave behind mountains of rubbish, and prevent residents from enjoying their suburb. In recent years, locals said numbers had swollen to their "worst ever" rates, with 2025's event also renewing concerns. Bronte residents said they're sick of being forced to pitch in to clean up the filthy waste annually, including broken glass and even vomit, which is routinely left behind by the throng — largely made up of travellers. Now, after a string of complaints to Waverley Council, it has vowed to act. Speaking to Yahoo News, a council spokesman confirmed on Wednesday that it had decided on how best to manage revellers in 2025, following a meeting on Tuesday night. At the meeting, four proposals were put forward. Option 1 was to take no action, with no additional services provided. Option 2 proposed keeping the same crowd and waste management systems as in 2024. Option 3, which received the most community support, involved enhanced management, more cleaning, security, toilets, police presence, and a communications campaign to discourage attendance, costing around $220,000. Option 4 suggested fencing off the entire park and beach for a fully ticketed, alcohol-free event, but this was deemed costly (minimum $360,000) and logistically risky, potentially pushing unruly partygoers to other beaches. After significant community consultation, "councillors endorsed the recommendation outlined in the report — known as 'option 3'," the Waverley spokesperson said. This plan proposes a more robust and proactive strategy than what was implemented previously, with a strong emphasis on safety, cleanliness, and crowd control, without physically fencing the park or requiring ticketed entry. 🚮 Aussie councils warn crowds after 'disgusting' scenes 🧑🎄 'Disgusting' scenes as thousands hit famous Aussie beach for Christmas 🏝️ 'Worst ever': Outrage as iconic beach trashed At a minimum cost of $220,000 to Council (including staff time), the scheme will provide expanded service provision across key areas. These include: Increased cleaning and waste management to handle large volumes of rubbish. Improved toilet facilities to meet heightened demand. Enhanced security and a visible police presence to deter antisocial behaviour. New or strengthened alcohol bans or checkpoints to curb public drinking. A key feature of this option is a comprehensive public communications campaign to discourage attendance at Bronte on Christmas Day and to set clear expectations around acceptable behaviour. The plan also includes greater collaboration with rideshare operators, emergency services, and traffic control to manage congestion and safety risks in the surrounding area. Enforcement will be tightened, with council rangers empowered to issue fines for littering or misuse of public space. Although this option does not attempt to fully prevent visitation, it is designed to mitigate negative impacts while maintaining public access and avoiding the significant financial and logistical challenges of a full park enclosure. Do you have a story tip? Email: newsroomau@ You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.
