Jules Claydon, Crabbes Creek
Sitting in on the Joint Regional Planning Panel (JRPP) to consider the development application for the Butler St Bypass, I am surrounded by such luminaries as council project planners, and the big winners of the day, GHD Pty Ltd, who will get to construct this new road in the Bay.
Then, there’s the rest of us, ordinary folk who’ve written their objections, concerns and doubts about the proposal, waiting patiently for an opportunity to give one last protest about this inadequate plan to create a highway through a local community.
There’s a perfectly good corridor for the road on the disused and abandoned rail track – enough for a rail trail, road and pedestrians, and past EIS’ – two in fact – have identified this as the ideal route for the proposed bypass. But, no, despite all the objections, endless hours of research and community effort, council are insistent in going ahead with the bypass, right on the doorstep of a heritage community where people have lived for generations.
The question gets asked ‘Why?’ many times over, but no response from council. At the end of the day, the JRPP give their consent for council to approve the DA for the construction of the Butler St Bypass. They’ve done all the right things, taken it to the community, let them have their say, but in the end they’ll go ahead and do what they’d always planned to do anyway, and no answer as to why this is the preferred route.
I flashback to a distant memory: Back in the day when I was a junior staffer for the Minister for Housing, and part of Gough’s team. Sydney City Council wanted to erect an expressway which would cut a swathe through a small community called Wooloomooloo. We were visited often by a small team of protestors from the community, led by Wanita Nielsen, a passionate lady who wanted to save her community. Despite all the efforts of the local action group, the big construction guys had their day and the Cahill Expressway was built, a small local community decimated, and Wanita Nielsen disappeared, out of the picture, never to be seen again.
I looked over at the small group of local Butler St residents who came to protest to save their community against the onslaught of the bypass – ordinary Mums, Dads and their kids. Many had lived in this heritage precinct for years – mothers, sons and daughters were there from one generation to the next.
And I thought: times haven’t changed much. The ordinary folk who just want to live their lives the best they can, haven’t got a chance against councils, planners and big construction companies who have a vested interest in doing what they want, and never explaining why.
Oh – and the Cahill Expressway remains the ugliest construction through an otherwise beautiful precinct. Try as they will to bring back some of the old heritage value of Wooloomooloo, it remains an ugly reminder of the cost of planning decisions and the fatal attraction of money.
Jules,
I would like to write. But it was not me who was there.
It seems by the heavy traffic that all roads lead to Byron but you don’t need to be a Rhodes scholar to sit in on the Joint Regional Planning Panel (JRPP) to consider the development application for the Butler St Bypass. I am there to listen, and at times there was heavy silence that you could hear the leaves from the trees outside drop as a contrast to the future noise of the traffic in the mind that was to be the future of Butler Street right next to much revered and valued Byron wetlands.
Those wetlands because they are wet will attract and take up the exhaust fumes and pollution of the traffic and the carbon monoxide and the wetlands around there that surround Byron will become polluted from the rubbish of tourists and their commercialism.
Council planners were there as well as their Plan and the contract winner GHD Pty Ltd, who will construct this new road in the Bay.
In my mind there seemed to be an imaginary rock wall in the room, but sorry, I thought I must have been on Bilongil Beach. Just what is happening to Byron, the town named after an English poet who was born on January 22, 1788. Right now you can ride a horse down Butler Street, but in the future there may be 1000 horsepower on it per minute, every minute, every day. Who will be able to afford to live in Byron? The present population will be moved out for a new population with money to move in.
Two highly irrelevant points on these letters. Byron Bay was named by Cook in 1770 – after the sailor John Byron, grandfather of Lord Byron. What a wonderful piece of misleading malapropism to call the streets after poets though. And while the Cahill Expressway remains an ugly construction it did give rise to Jeffrey Smart’s very moving painting of the loneliness and alienation of modern life. That was painted in 1962 though, long before the Whitlam era. I lived for a while in Sydney in ’74 and recall from that era protests against such a road but was it perhaps another road? Never mind what the road was you made your good point. I haven’t lived in the Bay for 50 years so would not presume to make any serious comment on the Butler Street issue, save to say I can imagine the rail route would make sense if the Railways would relinquish it.