High Court of Australia – Griffith CJ said: ‘I do not think that any case of accretion is made out. The law as stated by Blackstone (2 Bl Com, p 262), is that ‘if this gain be by little and little, by small and imperceptible degrees, it shall go to the owner of the land adjoining. For de minimis non curat lex. … But, if the alluvion or dereliction be sudden or considerable, in this case it belongs to the King; for, as the King is Lord of the sea, and so owner of the soil while it is covered with water, it is but reasonable he should have the soil, when the water has left it dry.’ The word ‘imperceptible’ refers to the slowness of the additions to the soil. Assuming, then, that a moment has arrived at which the mouth of the lagoon became permanently closed, the suggested accretion is not an addition of an imperceptible quantity of soil to the plaintiff’s land, but of an area of many acres occurring at the moment of permanent closure, so that, according to the plaintiff’s contention, on one day the land belonged to the King as Lord of the sea and on the next to the plaintiff. This is a sudden and considerable alluvion or dereliction, and does not operate to confer a title by accretion.’
Judges:
Griffith C.J., Barton, O’Connor, Isaacs JJ
Citations:
[1910] HCA 12, (1910) 10 CLR 341
Links:
Jurisdiction:
England and Wales
Cited by:
Cited – Lynn Shellfish Ltd and Others v Loose and Another SC 13-Apr-2016
The court was asked as to the extent of an exclusive prescriptive right (ie an exclusive right obtained through a long period of use) to take cockles and mussels from a stretch of the foreshore on the east side of the Wash, on the west coast of . .
Lists of cited by and citing cases may be incomplete.
Land
Updated: 16 May 2022; Ref: scu.606897