ACT planners were about to denigrate a significant national cultural site, according to the Canberra Conservation Council.
The council pleaded yesterday for the preservation and restoration of the Tuggeranong Homestead and surrounds where Charles Bean wrote the Gallipoli volumes of the Australian official history of World War I. The council opposed the development of housing near the homestead and opposed the conversion of the permitted land use on the homestead and surrounds to commercial which would permit a Federation Square-type development.
“”This is the spot where Bean’s two volumes on Gallipoli _ an episode which has a unique position in Australian history _ was penned,” the president of the council, Jacqui Rees, said. “”It is incongruous in the extreme that such a place is to be draped with vistas of intruding paling fences and drying washing.”
The urban renewal unit of the Department of Environment, Land and Planning said a decision on 250 homesites and commercial use on the Tuggeranong Homestead section is expected by the end of the year.
A land-use proposal for the Richardson site bounded by Johnson and Ashley Drives is for 250 townhouse style homes, a commercial-entertainment-tourism around the homestead itself and the rest open space. The homesites would be in two nodes: 100 in the north-west of the section and 150 in a slice along the Johnson Drive, south of the homestead.
The commercial use might be for a restaurant and shops like Federation Square.
At present the site is leased month-by-month by Anderson Holdings.
Public submissions closed last week, but the proposal will also have to go through the Assembly’s Planning, Development and Infrastructure Committee, which might take further submissions.
At present it is going to ruin and the public has no access.
Ms Rees, who with Clem Llloyd has written To the Last Shilling. A history of Repatriation in Australia@ to be published in November, said planners had attempted to denigrate Bean by suggesting that he was responsible for destroying a woolshed on the site. Ms Rees said that, in context, Bean was doing no more than any tenant might do to an contemporary dwelling.
The important point was that the homestead was still an historic site of cultural significance. The real desecrators were those who wanted to convert a site of national heritage into real estate.