The School of Arts on the corner of Mann St and Georgiana Tce, Gosford, opened by Sir Henry Parkes, served as a centre of cultural activity and a focus of learning for our community until it was recently sold off to a Canberra developer, DOMA, by the NSW Government, for monetary gain.
No regard was given for our heritage and the building’s cultural significance and it is now to become a commercial coffee shop. It’s a disgrace. The building has served widely to support our public activities since its inception, having been built by public subscription. The citizens of Gosford and the Trustees of this community building did not entrust this building to the Education Department to be sold off as a coffee shop.
The School of Arts housed our fi rst public library, acted as a focus for community cultural activities and events such as educational talks, flower shows to raise money for such community activities as building the cenotaph, a recruitment centre for WWI, home of Erina Council, and acting as a focus for a wide range of civic activities, including associations with Masonic Lodge and other community social institutions and organisations. More recently, since being handed over by the community itself to the care and custody of the Department of Education, it has continued as a significant place of learning, housing school classrooms, inspector Waterhouses’s office, school counselling and pupil assessment services, and a Special Education Centre. Now, heedless of its cultural significance and place in our community history, the building is sold off by the State Government to a Canberra developer and relegated to coffee shop status, at a time when our council runs not a single museum nor CBD cultural centre for exhibitions to bring a cultural heart to our city.
The building should be handed back to the community who placed it in the care of NSW premier Mike Baird. It could have housed an exhibition of our Triassic fossil fi sh, discovered in the CBD in 1887, and of international signifi cance. One of the specimens included a lungfi sh named ‘Gosfordia ‘ for the town. The protection and promulgation of learning about our heritage is the direct responsibility of Gosford Council. Also, as the ICOMOS Paris Declaration asserts, Council also has a signifi cant duty and opportunity to market our unique history to tourists and to make it available to current and future generations of residents, and to our children. Why is this aspect of our cultural life so ignored?
The School of Arts, with the intervention and support of Gosford Council and the State Government, could have provided a focus for signifi cant cultural tourism, telling the story of South Mann St’s cultural history, our most signifi cant social history precinct, which still house buildings by such signifi cant early architects as Mortimer Lewis, James Barnet, and Edmund Blacket. It could have become a building to tell of our proud civic history to visitors and to our children. Instead the State and Federal Governments, ignorant or simply uncaring, delivered up to the community not a cultural facility, but a coffee shop. We deserve, and must demand, better from our ignorant or careless political masters.
To Gosford Council, this DA threatens our cultural heritage via the inappropriate development on land sold out from public ownership. You obligingly approved the boundary realignment to permit this sale to be made. What provision are you requiring to protect the archaeological remains of the heritage listed Police Sergeant’s residence adjacent to this site and what protection are you requiring to preserve and protect both the fabric and history of this heritage building of such signifi cance to the community? Do you even know or care that you are obliterating our unique heritage? What formal studies of the School of Arts’ history will you be requiring of the developer before you approve its future use?
Gosford will never become a leading city while our cultural heart and our unique heritage continue to be destroyed by our governments. Every heritage study commissioned by both Gosford Council and CCRDC has addressed the School of Arts’ ‘high heritage signifi cance’. The community built the building. Now the State Government has sold it with no return to the citizens of Gosford and in spite of its heritage signifi cance. Scott Morrison has participated to ensure it was sold to DOMA for a coffee shop. Give it back to the community that built it in the first place!
Email, Feb 5, 2016 Kay Williams, Pearl Beach