National Trust lashes out - Q station equivalent to Uluru: O'Keefe
14 February 2002

The oldest and longest surviving quarantine station in the world was a major heritage item, not a "cash cow" for the National Parks and Wildlife Service, National Trust chairman Justice Barry O'Keefe said yesterday.

He told the commission of inquiry investigating environmental aspects of plans to transform the historic North Head Quarantine Station into a tourist and hotel complex that the site was equivalent to such icons as Uluru and the Opera House.

"The future of the site should not be based on the premise of profit. The site is too important to be treated as a money-making commodity," he said.

The NPWS has said it needs income generated from the proposed 45-year lease of the site to Mawland Hotel Group to to help maintain and conserve not only the 160-year-old Quarantine Station but other NPWS heritage properties.

"The National Trust would never sacrifice, for example, Old Government House Parramatta, in order to get money to maintain one of its other properties of less heritage value," Justice O'Keefe said.

While the National Trust's policy, he said, encouraged "sympathetic" adaptive reuse of the Quarantine Station, it did not believe the Mawland proposal accorded with such policy.

He said the site was already subject to sympathetic adaptive reuse by the NPWS which runs tours and a function centre.

The NSW Heritage Council, a consent authority has also opposed the Mawland proposal because of the accumulative impacts of changes to the buildings.

Council heritage consultant Peter Phillips said out of the 104 bedrooms set out in the Mawland proposal, only seven remained completely unaltered.

The Heritage Council suggested possibly adapting the proposed reconstructed buildings in the third-class and Asiatic precinct, as well as the destroyed hospital building - should it be rebuilt - to house the three-star accommodation rather than changing the interior of the more highly valued buildings on the site.

However any suggestion to rebuild the hospital building, H1, for three-star accommodation has been rejected by Mawland as well as opponents to the privitisation plan.

The Heritage Council conceded it was yet to consider modifications "of a positive nature" Mawland has recently made to plans outlined in its environmental impact statement

The Heritage Council, as will as other stakeholders at yesterday's hearing also pushed for an integrated planning approach to the future development of North Head.

Groups have maintained that the School of Artillery site, now under the care of the Sydney Harbour Federation Trust, was far more suited to adaptive reuse as a three-star hotel than the more fragile buildings at the Quarantine Station site.

Friends of Quarantine Station also mounted their case against the Mawland proposal, disputing earlier evidence given by consultants for Mawland and the NPWS that Aboriginal and non-indigenous heritage and natural environments would be compromised by the plan.

National Aboriginal History society chairman John Patton said tribes from as far away as the Victorian border would go on "walkabout" to North Head and it harboured numerous significant sites for the Aboriginal community and plants used in Aboriginal medicine.

When asked what the Aboriginal community wanted, Mr. Patton replied: "We don't want to block out everyone because Australia is Australia... it's the last bit of beautiful land. People who see it must feel great to see it how it was - much as it was years ago - and I would like to see it remain that way."