Rex Jory: Granite Island’s now a decaying white dinosaur, a museum of long-extinct seaside holidays
GRANITE Island – the jewel in Victor Harbor’s tourism crown – is a disgrace. It is a throwback to a more leisurely, less demanding form of tourism. It’s now a gracious horse tram ride to nowhere.
GRANITE Island – the jewel in Victor Harbor’s tourism crown – is a disgrace. It has become a white elephant, a throwback to a more leisurely, less demanding form of tourism. It’s now a gracious horse tram ride to nowhere.
Summer day-trippers to Victor Harbor, if they bother to cross the causeway, will be at best disappointed and at worst horrified at the general decline in Granite Island.
Friends who recently made the crossing with visitors from England couldn’t buy an ice cream or a cold drink on the barren island. The restaurant at the island’s horse tram terminus has been closed for two years.
Visitors can’t even be sure the limited tap water on the island is potable. Sometimes an enterprising operator wheels a fast-food barrow across the causeway.
Otherwise there’s nothing but a dusty and at times mildly hazardous walk around the island. Plans for an aquarium experience anchored off Granite Island is a small step forward.
But the magnificent penguin rookery, the source of a charming parade of penguins at sunset, is now deserted. Presumably nature, in the form of an explosion of fur seals in the area, has wiped out the penguins. The chairlift to the top of the island has long been closed.
Pathways, particularly on the offshore side of the island, are little better than goat tracks. To walk around the island requires a steep stairway climb to get started, which can be a challenge for young children and the elderly and is barely negotiable with a child’s pusher, let alone a wheelchair.
Oh, there’s an olde worlde charm about Granite Island, a sentimental journey for visitors who holidayed at Victor Harbor in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. I spent some enchanting school holidays at Victor Harbor watching hissing steam trains and eating fish and chips from newspaper packets.
Environmentalists want the island left as it has always been. Modern tourists are more demanding, more perceptive. Today’s children want fun parks and water worlds. They would quickly become bored with a 90-minute walk along a clifftop path.
Tourist competition has marginalised Granite Island as a must-see destination. Neither the State Government nor the Victor Harbor Council has the financial resources or, I suspect, the political will to drag Granite Island into the 21st century.
The choice seems clear. Option one: Granite Island remains a decaying dinosaur, a museum of long-extinct seaside holidays. Or option two: discrete areas of the island are turned over to private developers for housing and other limited commercial activities.
I am quite aware that even the suggestion of commercial development on Granite Island will be enough to generate a baying lynch mob. But only bay if you have a better idea.
Funds generated by selling or leasing pockets of the island to developers – and they’d have to pay big money – together with annual rate revenue and other tenancy arrangements could in turn be used to upgrade facilities on the island.
There would have to be limited traffic access and upgraded infrastructure like electricity and water.
Strict environmental standards, including no pets, would have to be enforced and any structures would have to be virtually invisible from the mainland.
But these are not beyond the competence of modern planners and architects. They may even enhance the appearance of the island.
I’m near the head of the queue in arguing that housing development on Granite Island is not the ideal solution for its growth and refurbishment. But sometimes unpleasant problems require unpalatable solutions.
I love Granite Island for its crashing seas, its wind-carved rocks and its childhood memories. But sentimentality alone will not save Granite Island. If housing development is not the answer, then what is?