Page 3914 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 23 October 1990
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This matter of what to do with the remnants of the Orroral Valley and Honeysuckle Creek tracking stations has been awaiting some effective decision making for several years. Our immediate thanks go to Mrs Grassby for helping to initiate this inquiry, and to her department, and then to Mr Duby's department for the necessary help in resolving this matter. What should have happened five or six years ago was this: The Federal Government should have acted immediately after the closing of the facilities to protect and preserve the sites as places of great historical significance. That significance is briefly described in the report and I will not repeat it here.
We understand that NASA, the United States space agency, made some such tentative proposal but nothing was done, and we await further advice on this matter. In due course, under self-government, we inherited two sites which have been stripped of most of what made them significant and have been badly vandalised to the point where they are dangerous. This again is described in some detail. We have been left to pick up the pieces. I want to stress here that we should pick up those pieces not at our expense but with the financial support of the Commonwealth Government, and that is our final recommendation, recommendation 14.
Had these two sites been in the United States I suspect that they would have been mothballed, at the very least, or more likely would have been maintained in some way as historical scientific sites and sights. We must now do what we can to do justice to these two tracking stations. As it is, our committee had to deal pragmatically with the realities of neglect. That is the nature of our report - to cope with that. Basically, we are suggesting that we clear the Orroral tracking station down to near ground level and that we seek further advice about the best way to deal in a somewhat similar way with the clearing of the Honeysuckle Creek station. I will not repeat the recommendations, but I draw the attention of members to pages 14 and 15 of the report.
Let me stress that even at this late date we can preserve the historical memory of the two tracking stations by plaques, by photographs, by other historical remembrances of the two sites, and by appropriate written material about them - material to be made available to all visitors to the ACT. Some other members of the committee will speak to that. This task calls for much imagination from our Parks and Conservation Service and from the ACT Heritage Committee in conjunction with NASA.
In the same way that our Assembly is now responsible for 19th century Lanyon and for early 20th century Calthorpes House, so are we now entrusted with caring for the memory of places of late 20th century symbolism and significance, Australia's earliest role in the exploration of space. As the centuries roll by - of course, none of us will be
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