Carolyn Reynolds Rock Centre appeal effectively ends with a whimper

ROCK Centre owner Carolyn Reynolds’ battle to keep the Doctors Gully climbing gym open is effectively over. A tearful Ms Reynolds told the court she had recently been diagnosed with PTSD following a series of misadventures

• Rock Centre dispute akin to fable of smelly Chinese emperor, Carolyn Reynolds tells judge
• ‘This is bullshit, your honour!’: Reynolds collapses outside court

ROCK Centre owner Carolyn Reynolds’ battle to keep the Doctors Gully climbing gym open is effectively over after a court ruled the council was now free to re-lease the property.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court was due to hear final arguments on Ms Reynolds appeal of an eviction order after her 25 year lease over the premises expired in 2019.

But in asking for a further adjournment, a tearful Ms Reynolds said she had recently been diagnosed with PTSD following a series of misadventures dating back to an ill-fated Middle Eastern yuletide grog run in the late 1980s.

“It all started in Christmas 1988 when I was in Pakistan, on the Afghan/Pakistan border, doing some mountain climbing,” she said.

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“The people who left me on top of the mountain to do some climbing went off and got a load of alcohol from China and came back and they got held up at gunpoint at the Pakistani border and I wasn’t able to get my passport back.”

Chief Justice Michael Grant said the court didn’t need to hear the entire history of Ms Reynolds’ troubles but accepted a medical certificate stating she was unfit to proceed with the hearing.

Carolyn Reynolds outside the Supreme Court in Darwin in 2020.

Given the need for a further adjournment, the council’s lawyer Wade Roper asked that the council be released from an earlier undertaking that they would not re-lease the property while the appeal was on foot.

Ms Reynolds responded that the council could not be trusted with the property after they “left it open for all the itinerants to go and destroy it” after taking back control of the asset last year.

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“It got broken into and they left it for a whole week with the door open so anybody could go in there,” she said.

“I was terrified that somebody might die, your honour, just fortunately (my daughter) Gemma’s sensible enough to have taken all the bolts down to make sure the inside was safe so we didn’t have a dead body in there.”

The court adjourned the case until May and agreed to clear the way for the council to re-let the property but Justice Stephen Southwood warned Ms Reynolds “you have to have instructed lawyers by then or be in a position to deal with it yourself”.

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A council spokesman said it was yet to determine what future use would be made of the former World War II oil tank.

“Given it’s age, City of Darwin will need to conduct a review of the oil tank and look at its structural integrity to determine what future use could be made with this historic council property,” he said.

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