Labor’s further acts of philistinism: Blighting Lights for brutalized Bellerive

Kim Peart Environmental Heretic Brisbane
HAVING been in the heart of the fight to question whether the Bellerive Oval is a suitable home for an International class stadium, it concerns me to read that the push is on, with State support, for big bright lights at Bellerive. The best place for such a stadium was ever at the Elwick Show Ground, with train line north and south, highway access and parking.
The problem with Bellerive has ever been the play of politics over and above applied intelligence, with local and State vested interests seeking to jam giant projects into this tiny old town and suburb, such as demolishing the Town Hall to plug in the Quay building complex, which should have been located in the logical area for large buildings and CBD to be at Eastlands.

Bellerive’s real values are its history and fragile heritage values, which like Salamanca Place, could have translated into dollars with tourism, but the attitudes appear to have become firmly set in the 1960s when the Council attempted to locate the city sewage works at the Kangaroo Bluff Battery.

Once the cancer had begun, much of Bellerive’s fragile heritage was steadily eaten away. While the Bellerive Oval rose, the push went on to demolish old shops in the village, where I had my art studio for over twelve years. They were nearly a hundred years old and had accidentally missed out on heritage listing. There loss became a hole in the heritage of the street in 2001. Sadly, it was another speculative demolition in the dream of something big. Is there still a hole in the ground there?

Everyone loves an archaeological dig and yet when the demolition ensued, an illegal excavation also happened on adjacent land. It was the only site in old Bellerive where there was an opportunity for a dig and all parties knew about it, as a letter from the State Government acknowledging the fact were included in the Tribunal hearings. All that knowledge in the ground went to the tip.

Big bright lights at Bellerive is yet another hammering of the old village, which will need to be followed by plans to jam the cars in, night and day. The tragedy of Bellerive is the laziness of State governments that have allowed vested interests to systematically destroy Bellerive’s heritage values and thus weaken the overall visitor attraction of the State. The people of Tasmania pay for this lack of vision with that much less employment and income.

Because the heritage vision for Bellerive has been dimmed for so long, the Bellerive Oval will likely get its big bright lights to blind the district. The burning question may be: What will fall next in this battle of wills between the fragile values of heritage and the brutal reality of blind progress?