Landscape Architect Michael Wright, Glenluce
As debate continues about the siting and design of new facilities for the football and netball club, it is timely to recall that this is public land, crown land, and it belongs to all the community.
The design prepared by consultants for the shire should be inspiring, ambitious, and it should invoke the history of the town and its surrounds. Instead, the proposal is awkward, lack lustre, perhaps even inept and poorly conceived. The proposal has not explored many key issues, such as including a full-sized AFL oval, the side-by-side location of football and netball, nor equal access. The proposal is also largely a monoculture, because uses other than sport can barely occur on the site. Other uses are an afterthought. These issues might make it challenging to satisfy the funding criteria of Sport and Recreation Victoria, but as yet no-one really knows.
The alternative design prepared by our office shows what can be done if a full-size AFL oval was included on the site. This necessitates placing the pavilion either to the south end, or the north end, because there is insufficient space on the east and the west. Both locations flood, so the building must be raised, which is common and feasible.
In both schemes, though, active sport dominates, and this is not just the playing surfaces, but includes the fencing, parking, light poles, roads and other items that come with high-level competition sport. There is almost no site left when a compliant design is drawn.
Issues about ‘what is left over’ seem to the key to the current debate, because the ‘needs’ of a couple of user-groups occupy nearly all of the public land, and only for specific sporting uses. It is the case that these uses could be placed elsewhere, co-located with other AFL grounds, on dry sites, with ample parking, and no floods. It is not yet known if that is possible, but it may be desirable.
It may be desirable because it is probably cheaper, faster and better for the sporting clubs, and it might be a way to get A-grade facilities much sooner than, say 2030. But such a question could only be answered with objective evidence that the funding bodies may need to see, such as a recreation & active sport demand study. Such a study would enable the council and all community groups to understand underlying demand for AFL facilities, and whether other sites could adopt a shared-use arrangement. These questions might also need to be answered in any future funding application. The key question is: “Are these facilities needed here or are there better sites for the facilities to go?”
No one can deny the need for new facilities for the clubs, but it appears the need to permanently alter the public land at Camp Reserve has not been objectively demonstrated. In some ways, this issue has a much higher level of public interest than the arrival of McDonalds, with its presumably compliant use on a commercial site.
The Camp is actually the missing civic heart of Castlemaine. It used to be the place to go for everybody, on a promenade from the civic centre, across the rail and the creek. But now, for much of the community it is fenced off, barren, a place to avoid because there is nothing to do. That won’t change until sport uses move elsewhere or are designed to be properly multi-use. That is not easy, because the site is too small. The clubs have outgrown the fair use of this public land.
It is time to restore Camp Reserve by moving unsympathetic uses elsewhere and build a central city park for the future and for all Castlemainians.