Page 1200 - Week 05 - Tuesday, 24 April 1990
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history of Canberra is very much a history of working people. Our earliest domestic and office buildings - and there are very few of them remaining now - were built by very hardy, pioneering people.
I think we can appreciate the kind of hardship that they had to face as we confront the chill of winter in the ACT. We can appreciate what their lives must have been like. They were indeed a robust and a resolute group. I think the ordinary working people who built this city and whose forebears were responsible for settlement in the area - going right back to Aboriginal times - are not well understood and are not recognised in the way that they should be.
As I have said, Mr Deputy Speaker, nothing in what the Chief Minister has said, nothing in the Alliance's policy and nothing that we have seen from this Government so far indicates to me that things will be otherwise.
Mr Collaery: We have stopped demolishing bus sheds.
MS FOLLETT: I think it is up to the Government to prove that their so-called wide-ranging heritage legislation will make up for the shortcomings that they have demonstrated so far in their understanding of what constitutes heritage. I would like to note that the ACT has already lost a lot of the heritage of its ordinary working people. For example, the old Causeway buildings have been lost to us yet they were the original working cottages there and were very important. The old Capitol Cinema went with hardly a whimper. The old Jolimont Building, that magnificent wooden office building that was very significant in the ACT, was demolished many years ago. There are a number of dairies and little dairying homesteads out at Fyshwick. One of them is in the way of the bulldozers at this very moment. I think that even where we cannot protect the buildings we must ensure that their history, their heritage, their significance in the ACT industrial landscape is well and truly marked.
There are indeed some other prime examples of industrial heritage that are still unprotected, and my guess is that under the Kaine Government they are likely to remain unprotected because of their working-class status. I will list a few of them. The first is the former railway line which was built in 1921. It linked the Queanbeyan and Eastlake - now Kingston - region with the north side of Canberra. Just on the question of Kingston, the whole of that shopping centre remains unprotected. It was the first commercial centre in the city of Canberra; it was opened in 1925. It is my fear that we will see happen at Kingston what has happened at Manuka - the demolition, the clandestine annihilation, of the remaining vestiges of the federal architecture that is there.
I think these things are worth protecting. The ordinary housing in the Kingston area, the FCC housing as it is
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