The ACT Environmental Protection service is to conduct tests on the Tuggeranong Homestead site today for arsenic and other toxic wastes.
A spokeswoman for the Minders of Tuggeranong Homestead said that half a century of sheep dipping on the station had resulted in a build up of arsenic, sulphur, organo-phosphates, dieldrin and diazadip which had leached into areas planned for housing and a park.
The old three-metre dip trench was open and dangerous. The chemical build up and leaching had run off dipped sheep and had come from routine pumping of the trench over the years.
The acting Secretary of the Department of Environment, Land and Planning, Greg Fraser, said that sheep-dip residue was not a new problem in Canberra developments. A site in Gudgenby had recently been cleaned up.
Tests would be taken today, but results would not be known immediately. Australia-New Zealand Environmental Council standards would apply and if the site were contaminated it would be cleaned to those standards before any residential development were permitted.
An Assembly committee recently recommended that two areas on the site be used for residential development and that some of the money raised go to restoring the homestead which is where Charles Bean wrote the Anzac volumes of the Official History of the Great War in the 1920s. The minders, the Conservation Council of Canberra and other groups are opposed to housing on the site saying it will ruin its heritage value. The Government argues that it is the only way to generate funds for restoration. The Australian War Memorial says it does not have the money to do any work on the homestead.