Eveleigh railway workshops
insensitivity of the NSW Labor Government knows no bounds, and nowhere is this
so evident than at the former Eveleigh railway workshops.
were being re-developed around 1997, they
were identified as
‘the last surviving high
quality railway workshop dating from the steam era surviving in
Australia and possibly in the world’.
As such the collection of heavy
machinery for the manufacture and maintenance of steam locomotives, together
with the workshop buildings and their social history, had high heritage value.
They thus presented a unique opportunity for display and demonstration of not
only machinery from a bygone era, but of work methods and working conditions,
primitive by today’s standards.
Most importantly the Conservation Management
Plan stated that ‘The cultural
significance of the place is linked to the relationship of the machinery,
building fabric and setting as a whole’. Consequently, its policies included retention of bays
1 to 4 for the display and
interpretation of the machinery, which it said, should be kept in its original
place.
Despite this the initial re-development compromised many
of the heritage values; it alienated bays 3 and 4 and crowded the machinery into
little more than two bays of the workshops. This made it impossible to
adequately display and interpret the equipment and the working conditions of its
erstwhile operators. It drastically changed the historic location of many items
and the important working relationships between machines, and it destroyed an
important aspect of their significance. It made a mockery of the conservation
management process.
Apart from
compromising most of the heritage value of the workshops, opportunities were
also lost, such as the creation of a working museum of world significance, with
high potential for training, education, skills maintenance and
tourism.
Those
concerned at the profit-driven approach gained a little comfort from the
retention of bays 1 and 2 and of the blacksmith Guido Gouverneur, who has
brought delight and an understanding of a disappearing trade to thousands of
schoolchildren and grown-ups as well. Gouverneur kept the site alive and was
substantially instrumental in keeping the greedy eyes of the owning authority at
bay.
Now that the
Redfern-Waterloo Authority wants to evict him, one can only be suspicious of
their motives given the attitude of its predecessors; it just cannot be trusted!
What is certain is that making more income out of the site at the expense of an
activity highly valued by the community is contrary to the community’s wishes.
What is
angering many thinking Australians is the NSW government’s assumption that when
it identifies a space that could be developed, profit is the over-riding
determinate; that the quality of our lives and of our culture and heritage, and
the spiritual nourishment they provide, can be ignored or trampled
on.
Sydney is fast becoming a
soulless society because of the vandalism, avarice and insensitivity of our
State government.
Michael
Clarke
Normanhurst
10 August
2008