Defence kiboshes Belconnen grassland refuge plan

hey, when you are 9 years old, and your father is in the RAAF, if he says you would get shot, you believe him….

Not me. We used to raise merry hell on base when I was a kid, even got subdued by a guard dog once. Being brought home by the MPs was the worst though, especially when your old man was CO base SQN.

depends on the base. Darwin, now, they would have looked the other way. Great Bunkers there, especially on the cliffs by the port. edinburgh or amberley, you would be in a world of pain….

toowoomba was the best base of the lot. many happy memories. The areas that were off limits to us kids were usually pretty smelly, or they had lots of bunkers around.

I reckon cleaning it up and keeping it as a grassland / nature reserve / mountain bike park is the go. If you build houses there people are going to get sick and sue – it’ll cost more in the long run.

If people are that desperate for a cheap house in Belconnen that they’ll happily live in a wasteland, then they should move to Charnwood.

peterh said :

hey, when you are 9 years old, and your father is in the RAAF, if he says you would get shot, you believe him….

I have to agree with Pete on this one, The old mans was a RAAFie and his word was law. If he said back then that i would be shot i would have believed him. He had a lot of good stories about things hidden around and under Canberra.

Just as a note of interest, Boeing were using that area in 2006 and they had quite a large set up in there.

Danman – The tip at McKellar was down on the eastern corner, near William Slim Drive & Owen Dixon Drive. They have now cleaned it up *cough* *cough*, built a little pond and medium density housing. I wonder how many of the people living there know what’s under their houses?

hey, when you are 9 years old, and your father is in the RAAF, if he says you would get shot, you believe him….

Uh oh … you just broke your promise!

*chuckle*

Drive you home if you promised not to tell anyone you’d gotten over their fence more like it.

and aircraft maintenance crews used freon to get oil off their hands….

not at all good.

I remember when lawson was a place that stuffed up radio reception, and I never once tried to go over the fence to check it out. Wasn’t worried about the hazardous chemicals, my father just told me that the navy would shoot me.

Families were using DDT as flyspray when I was growing up.

And I bet it worked better then the weak-arse flyspray you can buy now.

DECC appears to accept that “Disposal of Non-Scheduled Solid PCB Waste” will take place in landfills. It does appear that the concentration of PCBs appears to be the limiting factor with regard to how you dispose of it. Since we are talking about PCB contamination of soil, I guess that is pretty low concentration.

When I was a wee tacker living in Giralang, we all knew that “Lawson” which was active at the time had asbestos cement buried on site. This was mid/late 80’s.

Funnily enough – I was talking about this to mother of Danman and she said she remembers when we moved into our street in 1977/78 that McKellar was not in existance and that a local tip was where McKellar now stands.

Mrs Danman remembers when she moved into Florey – and hers was one of scant few houses in paddocks.

Decontaminate the site and make it an urban nature park i reckon.