The new Granite Island causeway is schmick and brutalist, with all the charm of a freeway overpass in Dubai
It’s Victor Harbor’s latest attraction, at a cool $43m, but local pollies have swapped charm for something that looks like a bad Jeffrey Smart painting, writes Peter Goers.
Opinion
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The new and controversial Granite Island causeway opened 11 days ago. Unfortunately, 500m of art, beautiful Ngarrindjeri-Ramindjeri Dreaming stories sandblasted into the concrete on which we walk have been instantly stained, scratched and covered in bird poo from the local terns who prefer the new causeway to the old. Everyone’s a critic. Clearly, one good tern does not deserve another.
The new causeway is for the birds. They prefer it more than the people using it.
The new super duper causeway to Granite Island off beautiful downtown Victor Harbor is all concrete and steel. It’s big but bigger isn’t always better. It’s schmick, brutalist and has all the charm of a freeway overpass in Dubai. It looks like a bad Jeffrey Smart painting. But it’s supposedly more useful. It’s wider still and wider than the much-loved, noble old causeway which has staunchly served the world since 1864.
The new causeway replaces a jetty-like structure with a road. The surface is baby-bottom smooth. It’s serviceable but more bland than grand. The old causeway, 10m west of the new one, is still extant and still safely useable and people are voting with their feet and using it in preference to the new. Even though the White Rabbit Adult Boutique was closed last week, Victor Harbor is coming apart with deliriously happy holidaymakers and visitors all contributing to the pensions of the majority of the residents. Good.
If you want a last sashay, jaunt or perambulation along the old heritage-listed causeway of soon to be blessed memory, you have until sometime in February when the government destroys it. There will be two 20m bits left to remind us of what has been sacrificed.
The new causeway does usefully have a tactile paving strip so that the blind are led to and fro land on the bland. It’s much more inclusive for prams and wheelchairs, and there’s a lovely new rubber strip for the horses pulling the trams. But it ain’t charming. It’s modern, new, solid and boring – which sounds like a firm of architects. The concrete is also harder to walk on than ye olde timber. It’s harder on feet and joints.
The really good news is that there’s no bike lane. Yet.
Of course it’s really all about cruise ships. The plan is that cruise ships will moor off Granite Island and disgorge many thousands of cashed-up passengers by tender on to the island into a fleet of waiting buses which will whizz people across the causeway to McLaren Vale. Why, I’ll never know? Local pollies have promoted this.
A few years ago the government spent a motza restoring the old causeway which will now be demolished. The government ignored two of its own reports recommending the further restoration of the causeway and ignored the evidence of the beautiful restoration of a railway bridge at Port Adelaide and the Busselton Jetty.
The new causeway was budgeted at $31.1m in 2020 and has now opened at the cost of $43m. Oops. The old causeway was never unsafe. It’s still safe and being used. Victor Harbor is a glory, and a key part of the charm of Victor and Granite Island is that old causeway.
Granite Island is the rock of all South Australian ages. Seals, people and a name change have killed off lots of the penguins. They disappeared when someone changed their name from fairy to little.
And did these feet in ancient times walk upon the well-worn timber of the causeway? Yes. Now you can buy the timber from the government. It’d make a wonderful decking and talking point for your patio.
As a kiddie I was never allowed to use the dinky tractor-drawn train across the causeway because my grandmother said it was a waste of sixpence. The horse-drawn tram is now $15 one way. That’s inflation. But is the $43m new causeway a waste of the taxpayers’ sixpence?
Peter Goers can be heard weeknights and Sundays on ABC Radio Adelaide.
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