To quote Mark Twain: "Buy land, they're not making it any more!".

The Danksta agrees. The production line of freshly minted land stalled long ago, but we're occupying more and more of what's left with more and more of us and everybody else too!

Unless a continental-sized slab of real estate should suddenly rise from the adjacent sea, we're not just going to be singing along to Crowded House, we're all going to be crowded in but not necessarily housed sooner rather than later.

Just when the good, the bad and the indifferent citizens of South-East Queensland have gotten grudgingly used to their newly merged local councils, along comes the State Government with yet another decree about our future demography that belies current democracy!

This week Premier Anna Bligh (with a silent T) announced the fast-tracking of the release of 40,000 hectares of land so that 600,000 more incoming people can be added to an already accelerating population post-haste.

While most of the new layer of newcomers will be consigned to Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan and the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast will have 4000 hectares to accommodate 75,000 people fast-tracked, whether we or our council wishes it so or otherwise.

The Danksta feels he has enough neighbours to contend with already and hasn't yet resigned himself to the innumerable extra faces he will very soon have to familiarise with - and fast!

However, the Danksta believes that there is another solution at hand for our increasingly populated land!

The Sunshine Coast should pre-empt the State Government's land release by declaring its own absolutely final Great Land Rush!

What is a land rush you ask. No it's not the side effect of whatever medication or recreational substance somebody or other sampled.

A land rush is an open invitation for anybody and everybody to acquire a block of land on a certain date.

Council declares certain holdings of allotted and to be up for grabs at a set price commencing at such and such an hour on such and such a date only and merely sits back and lets everyone rush in and secure a block of land as quickly as they can - first in, best dressed.

Then, when the dust has settled and the debris of the latecomers has been swept aside, and this very last intake of land rush immigrants have all settled the purchase of their chosen blocks in perpetuity, council then declares that a Population Hardhat or Population Helmet will deflect any further attempts to throw more masses into our faces.

In other words, anyone who wants to move to the Sunshine Coast will only be able to do so during the one day land rush, or forever miss out on the chance to belong with us.

To make it fair, only individual land buyers would be eligible to acquire land at an affordable price. Then once the land rush is over, nobody else will be allowed to move here, although visitors will still be welcome! After all, we don't want to isolate ourselves entirely - or do we?

What's more, Danksta claims that a land rush would be a much more exciting, sporting and colourful event that would satisfy public demand for remaining land much more readily than some fast-tracked process of releasing land that has clearly been earmarked for development by a select coterie of companies.

So, get ready all you Boomers and Sooners intent on moving on in around here from the sunny coast to the sunny side up hinterland! Come one, come all to the Geat Sunshine Coast Land Rush, 'cause Danksta says if you don't join the stampede, you might as well keep the address you've already got going for you at wherever else you still live!

Danksta advises that full details of the Great Sunshine Coast Land Rush will be downloaded in due course! It will surely work better than the unplanned press release planning process overwhelming the land.

Meanwhile Danksta's Detective Division has had to re-open the Case of the Shifting Sands, based on new evidence delivered by the latest lot of deluges.

Descriptions of the great Oklahoma (no, not the musical!) Land Rush of 1893 give a useful indication of what the great Sunshine Coast Land Rush of later this year or early the next will be like! This excerpt from the Eyewitness History website tells what happened:

"By the time of the Oklahoma land rush of 1893, America was in the grip of the worst economic depression it had ever experienced. This was one of the factors that swelled the number of expectant land-seekers that day. Many would be disappointed. There were only 42,000 parcels of land available - far too few to satisfy the hopes of all those who raced for land that day. Additionally, many of the "Boomers" - those who had waited for the cannon's boom before rushing into the land claim - found that a number of the choice plots had already been claimed by "Sooners" who had snuck into the land claim area before the race began. The impact of the land rush was immediate, transforming the land almost overnight.

"...the rifles snapped and the line broke with a huge, crackling roar." ...A quarter to twelve. The line stiffened and became more quiet with the tension of waiting. Out in front a hundred yards and twice as far apart were soldiers, resting easily on their rifles, contemplating the line. I casually wondered how they would manage to dodge the onrush; perhaps they were wondering that too. The engine, a few hundred feet away, coughed gently at the starting line; its tender and the tops of its ten cattle cars trailing back into the state of Kansas, were alive with men. Inside the cars the boomers were packed standing, their arms sticking out where horns ought to be...

Five minutes. Three minutes. The soldiers now stood with rifles pointing upward, waiting for the first sound of firing to come along their line from the east. A cannon at its eastern end was to give the first signal; this the rifles were to take up and carryon as fast as sound could travel the length of the Cherokee Strip.

All set! At one minute before twelve o'clock my brother and I, noticing that the soldier out in front was squinting upward along his rifle barrel and intent on the coming signal, slipped out fifty feet in front of the line, along the railroad embankment. It was the best possible place from which to view the start. It has been estimated that there were somewhere around one hundred thousand men in line on the Kansas border. Within the two-mile range of vision that we had from our point of vantage there were at least five thousand and probably nearly eight.

Viewed from out in front the waiting line was a breath-taking sight. We had seen it only from within the crowd or from the rear. The back of the line was ragged, incoherent; the front was even, smooth, solid. It looked like the line-up that it was. I thought I had sensed the immensity of the spectacle, but that one moment out in front gave me the unmatched thrill of an impending race with six thousand starters in sight.

While we stood, numb with looking, the rifles snapped and the line broke with a huge, crackling roar. That one thundering moment of horseflesh by the mile quivering in its first leap forward was a gift of the gods, and its like will never come again. The next instant we were in a crash of vehicles whizzing past us like a calamity...

The funniest of all the starters was the engine with its ten carloads of men. From our stand fifty feet directly in front of it I was contemplating it as the chief absurdity of the race when the rush began. The engine tooted incessantly and labored hard, but of course she could not get under way with anything like the quickness of the horses...

Of course everybody on the train was mad with excitement, particularly since they were packed in without a chance to vent their emotions in any but some noise-making way. With the first toots of the engine came revolver shots from the crowds all along the tops of the cars, and at least a few from those penned up inside. The fusillade, which kept up all the while the train was pulling out past us, had a most exhilarating effect; my old gun, I suddenly noticed, was barking with the rest of them...

A little before midnight, we woke to a distant clatter of hoofs, shouting, and shooting. 'Number - section - township - range -. Keep off and get off!' Then crack! crack! went the rifles, after each call, from the pretty country we had been admiring at sundown... "