SPECIAL REPORT by Noel Murphy
THE crunch underfoot while walking the former Eastern Geelong gun club site says it all.
Four years after the EPA issued a clean-up notice to Department of Sustainability and Environment, two years after DSE and City hall were meant to complete a master plan for the site, shattered clay targets still make up the topsoil.
It’s three years since the shotgun blasts stopped but the battle plan of returning the site to passive recreation and integrating it back into Eastern Park is no nearer completion.
The gun club site is smothered with black lead and tar-riddled clay target remains.
The shoreline below is the same. Anyone who didn’t know better would think the water’s edge was a black, stony beach.
Right next to the gun club, historic lime kilns have been neglected and vandalised, daubed with graffiti. Rubbish including old bicycles has been dumped at the site and tourist information signs defaced.
All this just a stone’s throw from the site earmarked for a $1 billion Elms project at Eastern Park, from the CSIRO’s high-security Animal Health Laboratories and an internationally-listed RAMSAR birdlife haven at Moolap’s saltworks.
Geelong MP Ian Trezise says City Hall considers the abandoned areas as wasteland.
“Some areas of the Corio Bay foreshore are great and I’ve fully supported them but areas like these, areas where I grew up, are a wasteland and have been described as such by City authorities,’’ he told the Independent, calling for a central committee to tackle the bay’s problems.
“At the moment it’s all hotch-potch. A central committee is worth investigation.’’
The gun club and lime kilns are just part of the Corio Bay’s problem.
The foreshore is a litany of rubbish and neglect from North Geelong asbestos deposits and a dangerous, unsecured old power station through Rippleside’s abandoned slipway and jetty precinct and Western Beach’s eroding cliff face to Eastern Park.
City Hall says the bayside sites are a combination of State Government Crown Land and private freehold property.
The power station and Rippleside slipway are privately owned.
The old gun club site is under the State Government’s aegis to rehabilitate and make safe before it is handed to the City to manage.
The City is land manager for much of the Crown Land on behalf of the Government.
noelmurphy@geelongindependent.com.au
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