While the Premier appeared to rule out a road through the Royal. National Park, its biggest fans have seen it all before. They are readying themselves to once more defend their favourite place. For the defenders of the Royal National Park, it’s on again.
And perhaps it was always going to be this way, given the park’s location on the edge of a city which is not just the nation’s largest, but also its fastest, most demanding, and let’s be honest, its greediest.
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This time round it’s a so-far vague proposal from transport bureaucrats to cut off about 60 hectares of the Royal to extend the F6 motorway and make the drive between Wollongong and Sydney a bit quicker.
The threat from the government is that it might be either slice off part of the Royal, or demolish 460 houses, to make it happen.
Many people had assumed that being a national park meant the land could not be touched. That was the difference, they thought, between a national park and a suburban dog park – you can’t touch it.
But it has happened before in the history of the Royal, Australia’s first national park and, depending on who’s counting, perhaps the second in the world.
While the public isn’t being shown any route, it’s believed to resemble a plan from the 1970s that involved cutting into bushland near the Sutherland bypass, perhaps curling east then south of Heathcote to meet up with the Princes Hwy.
And while transport department files obtained by Fairfax Media show the motorway would be considerably more expensive than a major railway upgrade, it’s the road getting the headlines.
Comments from Premier Gladys Berejiklian that she would “never, ever” damage the park appear to give strong hope to those seeking to preserve the park. But it is unclear whether they can be taken at face value.
At a media event related to the WestConnex project two weeks ago, Ms Berejiklian was asked by Sydney Morning Herald transport reporter Matt O’Sullivan about the Royal National Park proposal.
The Premier replied that the Government would “never ever, ever, damage that precious heritage national park”.
The Mercury asked Ms Berejiklian this week to clarify the comments, asking whether this meant she was ruling out any plan to put the F6 through what is now national park.
The Premier’s office dodged the question, saying instead that the NSW Government has a “proud record on national parks”.
Asked again, Ms Berejiklian’s office later said the Premier “stands by her words”.
They are not words that appear to give the Government any wriggle room. But national park advocates and green-minded cynics will be poring over these words for any way a major freeway cut through the park could possibly pass a “never ever damage” test.
Environmental offsets – acquiring other land for conservation so as to counter the destruction of native bush – would still involve substantial damage to the Royal.
The government will accept a donation of 600ha at Maddens Plains as an offset for ecological damage caused by South32’s Dendrobium mine at Mount Kembla. But this acquisition could hardly be counted against any F6 damage, as that would involve counting its offset value twice.
''There’s enough light from Sydney already that you can walk without a torch at night - even on moonless nights.''
Offsets appeared to be the thinking of Cronulla MP Mark Speakman, who recently spoke about “tweaking” the Royal’s boundary, and set environmentalists up as hard-core “ideologues”.
“To suggest that you could never tweak part of the Royal National Park’s western boundary along the train line by using the old F6 corridor, if you could more than compensate for that by adding land elsewhere, isn’t common sense environmentalism,” he said.
“It’s ideological extremism by the NPA spokespeople, and it’s rank hypocrisy by Labor, which will never hide the fact it was the party that cancelled the F6 and still opposes any F6.”
If politicking becomes to be the order of the day, a large stretch of the Royal National Park would be the pawn in the game.
But politicking may have saved the Royal from the previous attempt to drive the F6 through it. After a public campaign in 1977 then premier Neville Wran scrapped the proposal. Or perhaps it was reason. The Commonwealth Bureau of Roads had concluded the social and economic benefits of the road could be less than the cost to the community of providing these facilities.
What was lost might not be worth it.
Ask Bob Crombie where value lies and he will use words like re-creation, silence, and most of all, bewilderment. One of the first ranger-naturalists to work in the Royal National Park, Mr Crombie spent more than a decade there. Now retired and living in Sutherland, he visits almost every day.
He said the 1977 road plan’s defeat should have been the end of it.
“We particularly didn’t want it around East Heathcote. That would have been a bloody disaster. It would have cut out the headwaters of the creek that drained into Karloo pool,” he said.
He said the pollution from a major road, running off into the Kangaroo Creek system, would destroy much of the ecosystem of that area. The light from the road alone would “totally change” the habitat.
“There’s enough light from Sydney already that you can walk without a torch at night – even on moonless nights,” he said.
The National Parks Association is perhaps the most active in support of the Royal’s boundaries, and will stage a rally in Bundeena on Sunday in support of the cause.
“We’ve never regarded the Royal as being close to Sydney – it is in Sydney, and Wollongong – it always was,” Mr Crombie said.
“It’s Sydney’s lungs. It’s part of Sydney.”
The debate of nature v efficient human transport was a furphy. Mr Crombie said if this were Germany or Sweden, they would just build a tunnel underneath the park: problem solved. If it was central Sydney, there would be a tunnel dug underneath. But the 1130 species that live in the Royal, their habitat, and the value the place has for the residents of Sydney and Wollongong should not be so easily dispensible.
“It’s a profoundly interesting place. It’s one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world.
“I consider the biggest, most important value of all of the Royal National Park is its capacity to bewilder. For people, when they go in there, induced by the environment, can suddenly feel at peace.
“That’s life-changing, that’s re-creating.”