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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-12-04 Daily Xml
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Port Adelaide Heritage

Dr CLOSE (Port Adelaide—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:21): I am very pleased to stand to talk about Port Adelaide but disappointed that what I have to talk about is a threat to a building regarded by many in the Port Adelaide community as one of the last remnants of our heritage. I am talking about Shed 26. For those who may have visited Port Adelaide, it is on the Semaphore side of the Inner Harbour and it is often known also as the Sawtooth Shed. It has the attractive lines of the sawtooth that so many sheds had that were built in the last century. The Sawtooth Shed is not classified officially as heritage, and the Heritage Council has not regarded it as being suitable for protection. But I can tell you that many people in the Port Adelaide community are devastated to hear that it is very likely that soon they will be losing one of the last sheds in the Inner Harbour and the very last shed with the sawtooth shape.

Port Adelaide's development, for the last 20 or 30 years, has gone through very difficult times. When containerisation of shipping meant that the ships were able to get bigger and no longer could fit into the Inner Harbour, at that point there was a need for a dramatic change in Port Adelaide. When West Lakes was first built, taking away from Port Adelaide what had been for many years the second busiest retail area in Adelaide after Rundle Mall and dragging people into these newfangled malls, you saw the twin destruction of Port Adelaide as a vibrant centre.

Many things have been done to lift Port Adelaide. There are magnificent museums in Port Adelaide, for example. There has been an ongoing dedication by the community—the Aboriginal community, artists, environmentalists and people who are dedicated to and have been part of our maritime history and our present to do everything they can to keep the vibrancy of Port Adelaide alive. But some time ago, there was a misstep and the misstep was the Newport Quays development.

Although many people live in Newport Quays and love it—and it is a very beautiful place to live, particularly looking out at Hart's Mill—the big error that happened when that occurred was the view that this development would grow and expand around Inner Harbour. There were other errors made in terms of not listening to the community and not reflecting the maritime history of the community in the buildings, but the problem I want to talk about is that nearly all the sheds were knocked over back then and nothing has been built on them.

Indeed, it was not until I became the member for Port Adelaide and Jay Weatherill, the member for Cheltenham, became the then premier that the contaminated soil generated by knocking over all those sheds was scooped up and most of it placed into Shed 26. After I became the member and the member for Cheltenham became the premier, we emptied out that shed, freshened up the area and got rid of that heap of contaminated soil. People in the community thought there was a future for Shed 26: 'It has been cleaned out and is going to be used, it is going to be activated.'

We moved to have two big new developers—one Dock One on the port side and the other Cedar Woods on the Semaphore side—to start bringing more people to live in Port Adelaide, which everyone in Port Adelaide wants to happen. We know we cannot have a thriving business community and we cannot have a healthy tourist and visitor economy unless we have more people living in Port Adelaide and more people working in Port Adelaide.

The working in Port Adelaide part has been dealt with—although somewhat awkwardly since the election—by taking 500 public servants down, but we need more people living there. However, we do not need that to be at the expense of the last sawtooth shed. There is such a thing as adaptive re-use. We saw, on the initial plans, that the sawtooth shed shape was still there; as a community we thought we had a chance of retaining the feel of the port without continuing to have the emptiness of the port, that we could keep the feel and fill it up with people.

We thought we had developers and we thought we had, at the time before the election, a government that was committed to making that happen. Since the election not only has there been nothing from the government about what it is going to do to preserve our heritage but I have not even had a response to a letter I wrote to the minister some time ago. There has been no response, no sense of responsibility for maintaining our heritage in Port Adelaide.

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