The best place around Hobart for an international stadium for international cricket and international class events, was and is the old Showground at Elwick, which has parking capacity, a highway running past it, traintracks to the door and already has lights. With eyes the size of cricket balls and bats the size of B52 bombers, the Tasmanian Cricket Association greedily eyed Bellerive and fought with all their power to acquire the old Bellerive football oval, even though there is no room for parking, access is confined and lights would blast the Bellerivians like a air-raid at night.

Unfortunately, the Clarence City Council chose the path of clear-felling heritage many decades ago in favour of large new developments. It was only by a whisker that the Rosny Sewage Works was not located at the Kangaroo Bluff Battery (I have a letter from a government department at the time pleading with them not to do it). The old Town Hall was unfortunately demolished and replaced with a white elephant, the Quay Building, that would have been better parked by Eastlands. And so many historic shops have been blown away over the years, that a town that is number two in Tasmania after Hobart for history and heritage has been mortally maimed as a visitor destination.

Will the recently restored rowing ferry boat find a home in Bellerive? It could have, if the Council had saupported our suggestion for a local history museum and visitor information centre in the old Police Station in Bellerive, in sight of the ferry terminal. But clearly, the Council has always been blinded by the lights of progress now blasting from the Bellerive Oval at night and incapable of seeing that Bellerive is a fragile jewel, with far too many of its heritage values now lost beneath the bulldozers.

Is there still a hole in the middle of Bellerive, like a hole in the brain, where 4 old shops were demolished in 2001, the remnants of the old street-scape? The engineer’s report showed that two had been neglected but could be restored and the two that I had my studio in for over 12 years were solid brick, with a waterproof tiled roof and solid concrete floors. It was a purely speculative demolition pushed by the blind leading the blind, as the lights of mindless progress glared back through time from the Bellerive Oval, a monument to King Midas.

Kim Peart

These brainless councillors are just the edge of the political crap heap that is driving the planet to catastrophic climate change, because they are unable to accept evidence or work with the people who elected them.

Lights on Bellerive Oval are driving the planet to catastrophic climate change? Whoa, who would have thought that?

What happened to CO2? And the extension to the Kingston Bypass?

I lean towards Kim’s views about the destruction of the old Bellerive, but salamander has to introduce a level of irrelevant hysteria.

(and I think the old TCA ground would have been the best place for cricket)

I look forward to watching cricket under lights at Bellerive finally!

St Marks Church is outshone ... some residents are cross …

Clever!

Well done to the TCA for continually developing Bellerive Oval (& for giving some Tasmanians something else to whinge about.)

I really feel for the rare Spotted Handmoth of Bellerive that will have it’s natural habits severely effected by these lights.

Re: 4 - James

Should the same weight in gold that has been poured into the Bellerive Oval have also been invested in the heritage fabric and visitor potential of historic Bellerive? It is criminal negligence that one has been pumped up at the expense and neglect of the other.

Kim Peart

Kim
I bagged you on another post the other day, but must say well done on your comments here.
Showgrounds would have been perfect.
Sam

You just have to wonder about all involved in this stupidly misguided development. I’d love to think there was corruption involved because at least that has some sort of logic but I fear the whole thing is an offering to the god of development - with those involved showing the intellectual rigour of adherents of cargo cults.
I can’t even imagine the collective wisdom of those intellectual giants of successive Clarence Councillors could have cobbled together such a naff idea.
I’m just waiting to see how long it is before surrounding properties are subject to compulsory purchase to provide car parking. My guess is a lot of the aldermen would be salivating over such a fine development - it would be progress after all. Particularly if they get the chance to chop down more trees & use more concrete.
In the 1830’s Charles Darwin walked along Bellerive Beach right past the site of the oval.  Luckily it wasn’t 2009 or maybe we’d be stuck with survival of the fatuous.

Kim: spot on. 
I moved to Hobart in the 1980’s & went back to the 1950’s on the the plane just like in the Twilight Zone.
And THEN I moved to Bellerive and back to the Permian Period - the age of amphibians - well at least at local government level (amphibians were the top dogs back then but still slow, not very bright & slimy swamp dwellers.
My Geological Survey of Tas (Hobart) map shows the oval on Quaternary deposits - but there is Permian abutting & how apposite if it were to be underneath?