A missive To The Householder arrived in the mailbox yesterday. On one side was an extract from the Canberra Street Directory (presumably they had copyright permission). My place is right in the centre of the map.
The missive had the ACT crest on it, so I presumed it was from the Government, and therefore here to help me. The other side was ominously headed Symonston Periodic Detention Centre Upgrade and Temporary Remand Centre, with initial capital letters like a 1930s newspaper to indicate the matter was Very Important. Under the heading was a note that the ACT Government is considering an upgrade of the Periodic Detention Centre at Symonston – just the other side of Hindmarsh Drive from my suburb. Was this the thin end of the wedge which would make it inevitable that the prison would be built nearby – as in right in my back yard?
The missive invited the burghers of Red Hill to an information session. Would this be just another example of the Government diligently consulting and then doing precisely what they want.
Now, I have some experience with the destruction of residential amenity that I would like to share with my Red Hill neighbours. It is – and I choose this word carefully – enlightening.
Years ago I lived in Lyneham. At the end of the street was a great deal of vacant land, on the southern side of Ginninderra Drive.
Then one day the bulldozers arrived. I was appalled. They were going to build a Buddhist Centre at the end of my street. There would be – in the words of the erstwhile Residents Rally MLA Michael Moore – a parking holocaust. There would be incense smells and loud banging of drums and ghastly bright colours that are used on temples in the Third World to brighten up their drab and poverty-stricken lives.
The temple was built. Twice or three times a year a festival might cause a car or two to be parked outside my place. I never smelt any incense. The monks were very quiet neighbours.
There was quite a bit of vacant land left over. Some years later the dreaded in-fill program began under which the ACT Government designated areas in the territory plan – coloured pink like British Commonwealth countries on a 1960s geography map — for housing. Most of it was medium density housing. And on the vacant land went egregiously crammed boxes with garages and driveways and cars. Those cars clogged my street every morning and evening in peak hour and every night late residents of the boxes hooned up and down in lowered cars with wide wheels and fox-tails on their aerials and no mufflers to speak of.
Oh foolish day that I begrudged the monks their Buddhist temple. The monks did not drive mufflerless cars at night nor clog the roads in peak hours.
I am now enlightened.
When I look at the map in the Government’s missive, I see that there is a lot of vacant land on the southern side of Hindmarsh Drive where the Periodic Detention Centre and prison might go. I also see that it is possible to drive down Dalrymple Street, La Perouse Street or Monaro Cres – within mufflershot of my house – and into the city or Parliament House.
Now, prisoners – like Buddhist monks — do not drive cars in peak hour to work each day.
So I say: Come on detention centre, come on jail. Two jails. In my backyard now.
Anything but the 1990s rat-race through North Canberra caused by housing in-fill near roads never designed to take that volume of traffic.
Join the new group Residents Against Traffic Running Across Canberra’s Ecosystem (RATRACE) now.