The project to build a new basketball stadium on Wallarah and Blackley Ovals has now been listed on the NSW government’s Major Projects Planning Portal. I had a quick skim through the available documents, and two things stuck out.

Firstly, the Scoping Report has a section on Community Engagement, that has a list of stakeholders that Newcastle Basketball has “undertaken consultation with to inform the project planning.” Conspicuously missing from this list are the two groups that will be most negatively impacted by the project.

1. The sporting groups who currently use the ovals.
2. The local residents who will have to suffer the traffic and parking chaos the development will cause.

I am at a loss to decide whether these omissions are due to incompetence, error, conflict avoidance, or deliberate action to keep the community in the dark.

The second item that caught my eye, was in the “Heritage NSW Advice on SEARs” document, which states that “the site does not contain any known historical archeological relics.” During World War 2, the site of Wallarah Oval contained four gun emplacements, as shown in the 1944 aerial photograph below.

As recently as 2014, aerial photographs show parch marks that hint that some remnant of these gun emplacements may still be under the surface. The extent and significance of these remains is uncertain.

Update, November 2024: After the initial writing of this blog post, additional documents were made available on the project portal, including “Appendix HH – Historical Archaeological Assessment” which does include details of the WW2 gun emplacements, which apparently were dummy guns.