Aboriginal Australians see and feel tens of thousands of years in their relationships and interconnections with Country. Drawing on Indigenous author Callum Clayton-Dixon’s prize-winning book Surviving New England I write ‘Aboriginal Australians’ too because in Australia's heritage and history they come first.
ABOVE: Heritage is in your face, shaping moods and attitudes to knowledge and understanding. Bruce Pascoe, from video by Wiradjuri artist Karla Dickens, shown in historic casements, Middle Head National Park, Sydney Festival 2020. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
Heritage is ingrained in faces, places, buildings, objects, artefacts, ceremonies, rituals and rites. Heritage opens pathways to the past, enlivening and enriching our culture, our learning, our thinking, our views and attitudes. Heritage is important to our self-image, national identity, confidence, security and legacy as individuals and communities.
Studying your own face is the first and best lesson in heritage and how it relates to history. Heritage elicits a physical and emotional resonance with our ancestors, the power of the familia. Look in the mirror and take a closer look at the things you see in your living room and what you feel.
ABOVE: Detail from ‘Ghearra’ (Cockatoo) totem of Tayvonne Cora, dancer, oil on canvas by Jeska Valk. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
Visiting the childhood homes of celebrity guests with Julia Zemiro on ‘Home Delivery’ for example takes us into living rooms, bringing us to the universality of heritage and into the realm of sharing experiences from our formative years collectively. Heritage is history you interact with physically in three dimensions and a fourth in the extra dimension it gives to space and time by being there structurally, reliably and continuously.
Heritage can be revealed, explained and annotated by history but only if heritage structures are intact, accessible, and interpreted or interpretable. Rouse Hill House & Farm, Sydney Living Museums, is an excellent example of heritage preservation, interpretation and accessibility. Constructed in the early 1800s, occupied by six generations of the Rouse / Terry family until the 1990s, it’s a wonderful place to travel through time.
Each generation of the family left their mark, bringing their own touch to the decoration and furnishing of the house, demonstrating the tastes and fashions of their time, but leaving much of what already existed.
Every shelf, cupboard and drawer is filled with items once owned by the family – books, letters and receipts, kitchen and dining ware, clothing, ornaments, loose buttons and bathroom products – everything a lived-in house would usually contain. Each item is kept for the story it tells about the lives lived here – no item, no matter how small, is insignificant. It is for this reason that Rouse Hill is an extraordinary physical archive for those wishing to find out about how people lived and worked in the past. Sydney Living Museums.
Heritage preservation of this kind engenders intimacy and empathy, even more so in my case. My aunty Daisy Ivin lived across the road and down the hill from Rouse House. She used to clean for ‘old Mr Terry’ and took my cousins and me along in the early 1960s. The black and white television I saw in the living room is still there.
ABOVE: Living rooms are rich in heritage, especially when they layer the lives of six generations of one family. PHOTO: Lin Li, Dreamstime.com
When Windsor Road was diverted in 2010, the Rouse Hill Estate site of Sydney Living Museums was expanded to include an element of natural heritage in a surviving pocket of Cumberland Plain woodland, a section of the original Windsor Road laid down by Governor Macquarie in 1812 where the area’s first watch-house and a tollhouse were located, and the 1888 Rouse Hill schoolhouse. On rainy weekends I played Monopoly in the classroom with my cousins and the children of the school’s sole teacher.
Sydney Living Museums has also developed in partnership with Muru Mittigar at Rouse Hill and built a new freestanding Aboriginal Australian Cultural and Education Centre.
Muru Mittigar has taken up residence at Rouse Hill House & Farm, to facilitate this close working relationship and deliver curriculum-based Aboriginal cultural education programs, teacher training, visitor-orientated cultural programming and curated experiences. This initiative is creating a better understanding of Aboriginal culture in the wider community as visitors learn Darug traditional ways and participate in hands-on experiences such as boomerang throwing, art and the bush tucker investigation and cooking workshops.
By working together, Sydney Living Museums and Muru Mittigar have brought Aboriginal stories and voices to the interpretation of the Rouse Hill site; this includes staff from both organisations welcoming our visitors to the site. Sydney Living Museums
ABOVE: Darug people welcomed every visitor to their Muru Mittigar Cultural and Education Centre, Rouse Hill, NAIDOC Week 2018. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
Heritage conservation on the other hand, involving the restoration and repurposing of historic buildings, can make the paths to the past much harder to navigate without resources, intelligence, imagination and effort. The natural heritage, Indigenous heritage and military heritage of Harbour Trust sites have become a maze of prevarications and distractions centred on funding and support for easy options such as more food and beverage outlets. The Harbour Trust is a study in cognitive dissonance, ignoring the world’s oldest continuous living culture and related management of The Biggest Estate on Earth, The Sydney Wars, and two centuries of military heritage, in a desperate search for ideas!
The sites of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust involve preservation and conservation on a large scale. The Harbour Trust, as it is now known, was formed by an Act of the Australian Parliament in 2001 following a fierce and successful community campaign. The Headland Preservation Group (HPG) led by Linda Bergin and the late Don Goodsir, in conjunction with the Defenders of Sydney Harbour Foreshores whose inaugural chair was indefatigable lawyer Phil Jenkyn, saved former Defence sites on Sydney Harbour from being sold off to private developers. Linda, Don and Phil were each awarded an OAM (Order of Australia Meda) on Australia Day 2010 for their services to the protection and preservation of the environment, particularly heritage sites on the Sydney Harbour foreshore.
The formation of the Harbour Trust followed years of lobbying by community groups adamant that extraordinary places on Sydney Harbour should be maintained as public spaces and kept safe from redevelopment.
In September 1998, the Commonwealth Government announced the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust (Harbour Trust) – a statutory agency tasked with rehabilitating former Defence and other Commonwealth lands around Sydney Harbour, conserving their natural and built heritage, and returning them to the people of Australia. Quoted from Harbour Trust website.
ABOVE: Remembrance Day wreath placed on the front step of 10 Terminal in 2015 by Loves Data, a Harbour Trust tenant 2008-2015. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The Harbour Trust’s founding executive director, Geoff Bailey, an architect, deputy executive director Nick Hollo, an architect and artist, and consulting architect Richard Leplastrier AO and AIA Gold Medal recipient, had responsibility for the repurposing of the buildings and sites to meet the objects legislated in the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust Act:
a) to ensure that management of Trust land contributes to enhancing the amenity of the Sydney Harbour region;
b) to protect, conserve and interpret the environmental and heritage values of Trust land;
c) to maximise public access to Trust land;
d) to establish and manage suitable Trust land as a park on behalf of the Commonwealth as the national government;
e) to co‑operate with other Commonwealth bodies that have a connection with any Harbour land in managing that land;
f) to co‑operate with New South Wales, affected councils and the community in furthering the above objects.
ABOVE: Natural, Indigenous and military heritage on Harbour Trust sites are layered in many fascinating ways. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The commitment to the objects of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust Act, including to protect, conserve and interpret the environmental and heritage values of Trust land focused resources on remediation, capital works and maintenance, initially on: Middle Head (Kuba Kaba), Georges Heights (Taliangy) and Chowder Bay (Koreé); North Head (Garungal); Cockatoo Island (Wareamah), Woolwich Dock and Parklands (MocoBoula), Macquarie Lighthouse, South Head (Willárrá) and Marine Biological Station, Camp Cove (Metallar). The former Defence site HMAS Platypus Submarine Naval Base, Neutral Bay (Warrabri) was added later. A full list of current sites, including Snapper Island “yet to be formally transferred”. Quoted from Harbour Trust website
ABOVE: Linda Bergin, HPG’s founding president, drew on a previous IT career to organise an online petition rejecting a private aged care facility on Middle Head in 2014. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
Many Harbour Trust buildings and sites are on the federal government’s heritage lists and are subject to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC)1999. The convict prison buildings on Cockatoo Island are now also on the World Heritage List.
The Harbour Trust commenced with $127.5 million in capital funding (now less after a recent appropriation), another $23 million from the sale of former Defence Department residences in Markham Close, Mosman, remained quarantined in an interest bearing deposit even as operational costs continued to outpace revenue.
The Harbour Trust has had success with leases for self-contained commercial ventures such as Burnt Orange, Sergeants Mess, Gunners Barracks and Ripples Chowder Bay, Frenchy’s Cafe and Middle Head Cafe on Middle Head, and Deckhouse Woolwich. However, the broader scope of repurposing buildings, on Middle Head, North Head and Cockatoo Island, for office and other tenancies have been limited by the Harbour Trust’s unwillingness and inability to engage with tenants and assist them in overcoming challenges such as the Internet and mobile phone communications, energy, parking and public transport.
The myth of self-funding and the insularity of the Harbour Trust board and the executive from the community, bureaucratic relationships with tenants, political pressures, and narrow focus on property leasing, resulted in panicked attempts to attract partners, sponsors and revenue. The inaugural Outpost Art Festival held on Cockatoo Island in 2011, in the off-year of the Biennale of Sydney and attempting to leverage its success there, attracted visitors but was unprofitable. The Cockatoo Island Film Festival in 2012 was a public relations and financial disaster. The Outpost Art Festival scheduled to return to Cockatoo Island in 2013 “after attracting a record 86,000 people” was cancelled due to a huge shortfall from the Harbour Trust’s sponsorship partners.
ABOVE: Begs the questions if “fully self-funded” why the need for donations and how many gold coins to preserve key heritage sites?
The Harbour Trust has conserved and reused adaptively many buildings such as those in the Australian Pacific School Of Administration (ASOPA) precinct formerly housing the Hallstrom Pacific Collection. However, the failure to understand that the integrity and value of its unique portfolio of natural, Indigenous and military heritage assets stem from their relationship with each other led the Harbour Trust to support the proposal for a private aged care facility on public parkland and the site of the historic 10 Terminal building on Middle Head in 2013. The scale of the development would have destroyed both the heritage of this building and the precinct. The public furore this caused in the community, over the threats to the heritage of the building and surrounding public land, contributed to Tony Abbott's downfall as prime minister.
In its 2018 - 2022 corporate plan the Harbour Trust persisted with the myth of being self-funded.
The Harbour Trust has demonstrated that the self-sustaining model works when given sufficient government investment. Sydney Harbour Federation Trust Corporate Plan 2018–2022.
However in 2018 at a Harbour Trust board meeting in public on Cockatoo Island the chair, Joseph Carrozzi, finally dispelled the myth of self-funding, estimating former Defence sites' remediation could cost an extra $300 million and that funding shortage might mean closing off some areas to the public. A consortium of private collectors took this as their cue in 2020 to propose turning Cockatoo Island into their art island.
ABOVE: Heritage of the Australian School Of Pacific Administration (ASOPA) huts, including Sir Edmund Hallstrom Library, overlaid with military heritage, conserved by Harbour Trust at the eastern end of Middle Head as office space for commercial leasing. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: 10 Terminal was in excellent condition when it was handed to the Harbour Trust in 2001. It has been a case of demolition by neglect ever since. PHOTO: Marta Sengers
Artist Melanie Mununggurr, from Yirrkala, in East Arnhem Land, 2018 Australian Poetry Slam Champion, Biennale of Sydney 2020, Cockatoo Island (Wareamah). PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The Harbour Trust acknowledges its sites on Sydney Harbour include the locations of the first and continuous interaction between Aboriginal Australians and colonisers and the responsibility and the significant opportunity it has to participate in Reconciliation. The inclusion of Torres Strait Islander people in the statement below is significant. Do Torres Strait Islanders have a connection with ASOPA?
Our vision for Reconciliation is for “all Australians to recognise and celebrate the centrality of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, cultures, histories and continuing connections to these Harbour Trust lands.
Fulfilling this vision requires a commitment to deepening relationships with First Nations Peoples across our organisation, from employment and procurement through to the day-to-day management of our extraordinary places. It also requires visible leadership and working collaboratively with First Nations Peoples and communities. Quoted from Harbour Trust website.
However, the Harbour Trust is yet to appoint Indigenous staff, rangers and guides or include Australian Aboriginal language in maps and signage. There is no recognition on the lands of the original Aboriginal Australian clans beyond reactive references on the Harbour Trust website and ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies at public occasions. The token plaques in Headland Park with their cursory captions indicating ‘Bungaree was here’ are shameful. The challenge facing the Harbour Trust in achieving its Reconciliation plan objectives is monumental in more ways than one. Headland Park is littered with sculptures from the largesse of Macquarie Bank donations and their sponsorship of ‘Sculpture by the Sea” but no sculpture of Bungaree or any other physical acknowledgement of the presence of Aboriginal Australians. The Harbour Trust does however deserve credit for raising the Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags daily.
ABOVE: Bungaree was savvy and stoic in navigating a path with colonisers in the interests of his family. He stood firm on his land rights and found ways to make a living under military government. IMAGE: Lithograph on paper, hand-coloured with watercolour by Augustus Earle.
Bungaree had such an important role in post-contact Australian heritage and history as the first Australian-born person to circumnavigate Australia in the nation-defining voyage in the ‘Investigator’ led by Matthew Flinders in 1802-03. Bungaree was an active and essential member of the crew, applying his intelligence, linguistic and diplomatic skills, and humour, in an impressive career he survived and negotiated his way through colonial invasion and occupation to make the most of his opportunities for himself and his family. A bitter irony pointed out by Tiffany Shellam in her book Meeting the Waylo (and interview with Phillip Adams) was that he had to remove his uniform to show his initiation scars to overcome language barriers in encounters with different Indigenous people on his voyages with Matthew Flinders and later with Phillip Parker King.
In 1815 Governor Lachlan Macquarie allocated land on Middle Head to Bungaree and his family. Huts were erected for them and they were supplied with seeds and tools to develop a farm. This may have been done in response to a land claim or suggestions of one by Bungaree to Macquarie. Whatever the case, Bungaree made his land claims clear in welcoming the Russian explorer and navigator, Captain Fabian Gottlieb von Bellinghausen, and his Antarctica expedition crew to Country in 1820. 'These are my people … This is my shore', can be seen as a land claim over the north shore of Port Jackson. The Dictionary of Sydney and ABC Radio National Sunday Extra 6/12/20 ‘The story of a Russian visit to Australia 200 years ago’ Dr Elena Glover author of ‘From St Petersburg to Port Jackson: Russian Travellers’ Tales of Australia 1807-1912.
ABOVE: Cobblers Beach, Middle Head, launch pad for Bungaree’s boat, site of former colonial military wharf, and now nudist beach. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
How can the specific environmental and heritage responsibilities of what is now the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment, contribute to the advancement of the country’s natural and cultural environment in an authentic and meaningful way if its own Harbour Trust is not actively employing Aboriginal Australians and researching, interpreting and presenting the details of first contact and artefacts on the sites they are the custodians of?
Monday. 28th (1788): All the Carpenters & Artificers belonging to the Sirius & Convicts were employed clearing away the Ground round the encampment. AM. Went with Cap Hunter, the Master & one of the Mids about surveying the Harbour: On a point of land in the lower part of the Harbour, between Middle Head & Bradley point we saw several of the Natives on the upperpart of the rocks who made a great noise & waved to us to come on shore, there being a great surf we could not land at the Point we wished, which they observing, pointed to the best place to land & came down unarm’d to meet us, we of course landedunarm'd, taking care that arms were ready for us at a moments notice.
William Bradley - Journal titled ‘A Voyage to New South Wales’
ABOVE: Gene Kelaher, Aboriginal artist and educator, performed during Sydney Harbour National Park Bradleys Head to Middle Head cultural walk Tribal Warrior NAIDOC Week 2018. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The social and economic value of investing in Australia’s natural heritage, Indigenous heritage and built / military heritage on Harbour Trust sites remain largely unexplored, even as real estate developers and miners destroy heritage sites with impunity elsewhere in Australia. Although promoted with great fanfare and access for students, teachers, academics and researchers to an extraordinary online resource, the reality is the Harbour Trust’s Google Arts & Culture collection is underwhelming and ordinary. The promised digital apps to guide visitors would also be a poor substitute for a visitor interpretive centre.
HPG and other community-based organisations have consistently called for the development of a modern and properly resourced interpretive centre as a hub to engage people of all ages in the natural heritage, Indigenous heritage and military heritage incorporated in the objects of Harbour Trust. The community’s commitment to those objects was demonstrated loudly and clearly in the ‘Save Middle Head’ campaign to prevent the alienation of public land for the construction of a private aged care facility. HPG took its case to the Federal Court but the matter was settled out of court but the Harbour Trust never withdrew its approvals. The Minister exercised powers under the Act to cancel the lease.
Harbour Trust sites are also subject to the Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) 1999, which in practice has been porous. The independent review of the EPBC Act in 2020 was scathing, finding environmental protection laws are ineffective and failed to include the traditional knowledge, Indigenous Australians have of Country, into environmental decision-making or protect Indigenous heritage.
Australia’s natural environment and iconic places are in an overall state of decline and are under increasing threat. The current environmental trajectory is unsustainable.
Independent review of the EPBC Act, Interim Report, Executive Summary.
The Prime Minister Scott Morrison Government is hell-bent on spending $500 million on expansion plans for the Australian War Memorial and was just as adamant first as treasurer and then as prime minister, about spending $50 million on a monument to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Captain Cook's landing at Kurnell and ‘circumnavigation of Australia’ (sic). In the meantime, the future of the 10 Terminal complex at Middle Head, an army intelligence centre in World War 2 and the first base of AATTV (Australian Army Training Team Vietnam) the first contingent of the Australian Army formed to engage in the Vietnam War, remains in limbo. In the absence of funding the future of 10 Terminal remains precarious and continues to cause uncertainty and anxiety in the community.
ABOVE: Digital montage of the Group portrait of the first contingent of the Australian Army Training Team Vietnam (AATV) taken in 1962 in front of 10 Terminal, Mosman, NSW, which arrived in Saigon 3 August 1962 Ray ‘Simmo’ Simpson VC, DCM, front row, far left. One of Australia’s greatest soldiers. 1962 PHOTO: Australian War Memorial
ABOVE: Bus shelter installed on the corner of Middle Head Road and Chowder Bay Road after tenant and community campaigned for almost a decade. PHOTO: Marta Sengers
HPG has demonstrated the power of community campaigns and activism in defending heritage buildings and public parkland from private commercial development. The enthusiastic support, across Sydney and the wider Australian community, for the heritage and public nature of Harbour Trust sites, was evident in the campaigns against a private aged care facility on Middle Head, plastic grass on Middle Head Oval and Georges Heights playing fields. The community, however, continues to be held at arm’s length by the Harbour Trust. The Harbour Trust Community Advisory Committees (CACs) for example are required to sign confidentiality agreements, cutting off the community’s access to fulsome information.
Over the past decade HPG and other members of the community have spent countless unpaid hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash on community campaigns defending heritage and public land on Harbour Trust sites, including in recent years averting the installation of plastic grass on Middle Head Oval promoted aggressively by Mosman Swans Junior Australian Football Club and Mosman Football Club.
ABOVE: HPG ‘Save Middle Head’ public rally to stop development of private aged care facility on public land and 10 Terminal site. Mosman Council Square 2014. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: HPG ‘Save Middle Head’ public rally to stop development of private aged care facility on public land and 10 Terminal site. Mosman Council Square 2014. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: At a Harbour Trust board meeting in public, battle lines were drawn against the Harbour Trust’s support of the development of a private aged care facility on public land and 10 Terminal site. Marie Bashir Sports Centre 2014. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: At a Harbour Trust board meeting in public, the chair Anthea Tinney, flanked by her lawyer, under pressure from the media. Marie Bashir Sports Centre 2014. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
HPG’s Founding President Linda Bergin has been relentless in holding the Harbour Trust to the objects of the Act. She is currently prosecuting heritage values and objectives with the Harbour Trust, including the need for a Harbour Trust interpretive centre for visitors like The Presidio Visitor Center's ‘front door’ to natural, Indigenous and military heritage.
ABOVE: Visitor Center, the Presidio, San Francisco National Park, Golden Gate, signposting banner and visitor navigation point. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Visitor Center, the Presidio, San Francisco National Park, Golden Gate, traditional lands of the Ohlone people for thousands of years, later a military post for two centuries under the flags of Spain, Mexico and finally the USA. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, display panel overview of the Presidio. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, topographic map overview of the Presidio. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, display panel overview of Presidio’s natural heritage. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, display panel overview of Presidio’s Indigenous heritage. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, display panel overview of the Presidio’s military heritage. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
ABOVE: Interior of the Visitor Center, display panel overview of experiences open to Presidio visitors. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
The bulk of the funding for Harbour Trust sites is allocated to building restoration, repairs and routine maintenance, bushwalking tracks, one bus shelter, and salaries. The Harbour Trust employs an army of marketing and communications consultants full-time. The amount spent on research, interpretation and engaging the public in the internationally important natural, Indigenous and military heritage of the sites is miniscule.
Heritage is sidelined in the standard cut and paste organisation description in Harbour Trust employee LinkedIn profiles which helps explain the lack of vision with regard to heritage and the appetite for consultancy reports of the board and management.
The Sydney Harbour Federation Trust is a self-funding agency created by the Australian Government responsible for vision, planning and management of Sydney Harbour sites. The Harbour Trust’s role is to ensure these sites are integrated into the life of the city and create a lasting legacy for the people of Sydney and Australia. These public spaces and parklands now offer major events, exhibitions, venue hire, accommodation, tours and business tenancy.
In the past 10 years, under three different chairs and two different CEOs and shuffling of political appointments to the board, the prospect of a Harbour Trust Foundation has been raised and discussed without resulting in any action whatsoever. An endowment fund has enormous potential with a catchment of Harbourside suburbs such as Mosman, one of Australia’s wealthiest and biggest donors to nonprofits.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott suddenly promised funding of $20 million for the Harbour Trust in the 2019 federal election campaign as he desperately tried to hold off the challenge and climate change credentials of Zali Steggall for his seat of Warringah. He also organised photo opportunities, one of himself and his wife Margaret Aitken with 10 Terminal as the backdrop.
The Liberal Party had held Warringah continuously from its inception in 1922. The loss was devastating for Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party. The Liberal Party’s Mosman Branch is the oldest in the Party and the biggest in Warringah. Senator Andrew Bragg has been assigned the task of winning Warringah back.
In 2019 Hon Sussan Ley MP, Minister for the Environment, instigated her Independent Review of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust. Conducted by Ms Carolyn McNally and Ms Erin Flaherty it followed a tightly controlled community consultation and exceedingly well-documented process with no scope to question the Independent Review's purpose, the outcomes it was designed to achieve, or the validity of the process.
At the ultimate Independent Review of the Harbour Trust public consultation meeting, attended by Hon Sussan Ley MP, Minister for the Environment. Masonic Conference Centre, Sydney in February 2020, Nick Hollo, former deputy executive director of the Harbour Trust, challenged the need for 35-year leases, indicating that during his tenure the limit of 25 years for leases was not an issue for the Harbour Trust or its long term tenants. He said Harbour Trust lands are not commercial lands and that the Harbour Trust should “never look at it [leasing] to solve a problem, it must be grounded.” And that it is important for sites not to lose “a sense of diversity, the whole place has to evolve as an ecology, you don’t have to do it all at once.”
The high political stakes in the seat of Warringah and the concomitant pressures on the public parkland and heritage of Harbour Trust sites continue to cause deep concerns in the community, especially in the midst of the pandemic and the risk of expedient decision making. Criticisms by the community of the Harbour Trust board and executive in the Independent Review report require attention and action.
Notably, stakeholders were concerned about politicisation of the Board leading to a lack of specialist skills, particularly in relation to land-use planning, precinct development and heritage and environmental expertise. Independent Review of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust 2020
In April 2020, Sussan Ley, Minister for the Environment, Trent Zimmerman, Member for North Sydney, and Andrew Bragg, Senator for NSW, announced the release of $23 million from Harbour Trust bank accounts holding $30 million (a legacy of the historic sale of former Defence properties in Markham Close, Mosman, in the early days of the Harbour Trust). In September 2020, Minister Ley announced a further $40.6 million in the Federal Budget to fund urgent repair and restoration works on Harbour Trust sites. This included allocating an extra $4 million for 10 Terminal buildings.
Proposals such as the one for a private aged care facility and private art island come with access to or requests for large government subsidies, turning the perception of financial benefits to taxpayers into additional costs and contradicting arguments from community organisations such as HPG for proper government funding in the first place.
The art island proposal required government funding of $200 million for remediation and construction while offering a return on this investment of $100 million return to taxpayers. The Harbour Trust’s fixation on 35-year leases with the intention of nurturing a marketing, sales and revenue pipeline of commercial operators, notably in food and beverage, is troubling.
In an interview on ABC Radio on 14 February 2020, Joseph Carrozzi, Harbour Trust chair, said:
A lot of our leases that we can enter into should be more flexible so that when we work together with the private sector, not-for-profits and tenants etc. who want to help to rehabilitate our sites, they should have some sort of longevity in their leases so that they get their money back over time.
It is worth noting in this context that the Harbour Trust is responsible to the Minister for the Environment, Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. And while commercial tenants have access to large centralised recycling bins there is no provision for collecting and recycling consumer waste – the amount of litter on Harbour Trust sites is pronounced. The recycling of waste from consumer outlets such as cafes, bars and restaurants on Harbour Trust sites is not supported. At Frenchys Cafe and Middle Head Cafe in Headland Park for example any consumer waste collected at these locations goes into landfill. On Cockatoo Island the recycling of waste is left to the discretion of tenants.
HPG remains vigilant and determined to guide the Harbour Trust through the maze of its creation in the interests of citizens resisting the excesses of the Liberal Party at Federal and State levels, to protect the natural, Indigenous and military heritage of Harbour Trust public lands and buildings. HPG’s committee and membership have a formidable range of expertise from law to advertising, architecture, construction, history, heritage and commercial property leasing. HPG’s case against 35-year leases for Harbour Trust properties is compelling.
ABOVE: Jill L’Estrange, president HPG speaking at a public meeting called by her to consider Harbour Trust Draft Recreation Plan. Seniors Centre, Mosman 2019. PHOTO: Michael Mangold
BY MICHAEL MANGOLD