Engineering report/council approval for retaining wall?

Hi

We thought our retaining wall would be below a metre but on further investigation it looks like it will be 1.2-1.4m at it's highest point.
It's a 27m wall and the majority of it will be below 1 metre.
I rang our council and they said we need to get an engineering report done and council approval.
We can download the council approval form but how do we go about the engineering report?
Is it expensive?
Or are there ways we can avoid the report as it's only 20-40cm?

Someone said we should just build up the lowest point with compacted soil and build the wall on that to reduce depth.
Or do a terraced retaining wall (but is more expensive and we lose some of our land).
Or just build the wall and cover up the extra depth with dirt (*******?).

We plan to use concrete sleepers.

Any advice would be very much appreciated as we hope to do it asap.

If the wall is over 1m you need an engineers design, as it is important to get the footing correct so the wall does not fall down, if you do a ******* and the wall falls down on someone you can be held liable so keep that in mind. In qld it costs about $250 and the companys that do foundations designs for houses usually also do engineering design for a wall and will also come out to inspect. We had all our walls over 1 meter designed and inspected this was for a besser block retaining wall.

Cheers Lou

Engineering plans will cost you about $1200 -- that's what mine for our 1.4m x 36m wall cost. The council building permit application fees and other things will probably run you about $1000 all up. We then had to pay $1200 to raise the sewer inspection bit and $2000 to raise the stormwater pit to meet the new ground level. So that's $5.4k before we even started building the wall itself.

All up it's taken a little over 2 months to do, so don't expect anything to happen quickly, either. We're desperate to get the wall built as our fencing has to go on top of it.

The council will require clearance from any easement requirements (we have both sewer and stormwater), engineering approval, build-over-easement approval and only then will issue the permit. We're still waiting for ours, btw -- the stormwater pit is supposed to be raised this week, so we're crossing fingers the permit will be issued next week some time.