Destruction of Heritage Collector Creek Bridge - this week?

If anyone on here had anything to do with the preservation of the Tharwa Bridge

All you have to do, see, is build a time machine, go back in time to 1983, and have the Australian Heritage Commission enter your bridge on the Register of the National Estate.

It’s a dilapidated old bridge that is irrepairable and needs replacing. I’ve driven over it a few times and I reckon any work to improve would largely be polishing a turd.

C’mon people, have a look at that thing! It’s hardly going to attract architectural enthusiasts from all over to come and admire it? As bridges go, its as boring as bat shit and should be demolished. Instead of fighting to save this nothing structure how about petitioning to have its replacement designed in a manner that will make it more appealing to discerning bridge admirers the world over.

This country is festooned with old railway trestle bridges that regularly get destroyed in the name of progress and you want to make a big deal of that eyesore?

Who cares it is a bridge. All infrastructure is built with a serviceable working lifespan, when it reaches the end of it’s serviceable life tear it down and replace it with concrete and reo bar. Pour all the money that would have been spent maintaining an old bridge into something useful like building $800,000 school canteens.

If they do knock it down, do you think I could get some of the wood? 🙂

Is it just another ‘old’ structure well past it’s use by date? Or is it a small but integral piece of the Collector communities history. Relegating a late 19th century wooden structure to the scrapheap I believe will be yet another unrecoverable loss to the town’s heritage. The town has been bypassed and it should retain any assets that maintain the character and warmth of the village.

When there are no more aesthetically sympathetic (and functional) structures left and we are only surrounded by steel bar reinforced, concrete aggregate architecture I think we may look back and see the economy of the refurbishment as short sighted.

Where is collector? I thought it got bypassed…

Puh-lease… when bridges are built on highways and byways they have a known life-span and the older they get the more expensive they become to maintain, and eventually problems caused by deterioration of materials means that it is cheaper and safer to replace them with newer technologies and materials. When an engineer designs a bridge, and when the relevant authorities build it, it is known that one day it will become too old and need to be replaced with whatever newer technology is available at the time. That is the way of the world. No amount of bleating and whining about heritage values is going to change that.

So to be fair, what are your options? Well, one I can think of, if the preservation of the old bridge is vital to the well-being of the community, is to discuss the purchase of the old bridge materials and development of a plan to reconstruct the bridge elsewhere for non-traffic uses. If, as you bleat, it is such a vital item of heritage significance, the community will get behind you and fund the horrendously expensive process of relocation, planning, engineering and oversight of Collector’s newest pedestrian walkway.