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The historic 19th-century villa Willow Grove, controversially pulled down to make way for the Powerhouse Parramatta and a flashpoint for public protests, will never rise again.
The Minns government has jettisoned the former Coalition government’s planned rebuild of the heritage riverside home, which is lying in pieces in a storage facility in south-west Sydney.
Instead, Arts Minister John Graham has nominated the Roxy Theatre as a priority heritage project of the Labor government and a final business case was being developed to reactivate the venue.
Never to be rebuilt: An artist’s impression of what Willow Grove would have looked like.
“It was a tragedy that Willow Grove was demolished, particularly against the community’s strong wishes to preserve it. However now that it’s been pulled down, it’s a terrible idea to try to rebuild it,” Graham said.
The announcement was welcomed by heritage advocates, including the North Parramatta Residents Action Group which had led the campaign and public protests, saying any rebuild would have amounted to “fake heritage”.
“The Parramatta community does not support replica heritage buildings being the precedent for developments that are too lazy to incorporate our-fast disappearing heritage,” the group’s president Suzette Meade said.
The historic building was demolished in 2021 after an unsuccessful bid in the Land and Environment Court to save it and a union green ban was revoked.
It was a condition of development consent of the Powerhouse Parramatta – to open in 2025 – that Willow Grove be rebuilt. Three new sites had been shortlisted at a cost of $7 million before the change of government.
Graham said Willow Grove’s significance as a key site of female and First Nations history, and in nursing and midwifery would be honoured differently with a book about the site’s broad history and interpretative text panels in the Powerhouse undercroft, an open basement space built to collect floodwaters.
The building’s slate roofing, windows, the front door, timber framing and stairs, the front fence and more than 90 per cent of the original bricks of Willow Grove were in secure storage.
Bricks of Willow Grove lying on pallets in a south-west Sydney storage facility.Credit: Nine
The government would seek advice from heritage and community groups about the best use of the stored materials.
“Given the heritage and broader community are strongly telling us that attempting to rebuild the beloved Willow Grove would be a bad use of taxpayer money – that it would be a ‘fake heritage’ – and that there’s no money to do so, today we are drawing a line under this sorry saga. Willow Grove will not be rebuilt,” Graham said.
Meade said the demolition of Willow Grove was very raw for the thousands of people who spent years campaigning to save it from the Powerhouse development.
“We will be pushing this government to make sure that the 1890s-built Willow Grove and its history from home to hospital and the story of the passionate community battle to save it has an enduring commemoration,” she said.
“We would like to see the loss of Willow Grove not be forgotten by any government and in some way be able to live on an annual heritage grant for Parramatta heritage projects.
“It would be ethically and sustainably prudent for the remains of the demolished Willow Grove to be donated to a similar era building for restoration use.”
The rebuild was opposed by the National Trust, which had withdrawn in 2022 from a reference group formed to find a new site.
“We don’t believe you can rebuild it in any true sense because any new building would have to meet new building code requirements,” Trust’s conservation director David Burdon said. “We’d essentially have a new building with some old pieces stuck on it, that’s the reality of it.”
Professor of cultural heritage, and president of the Australian chapter of the International Council of Monuments and Sites, Tracy Ireland, said reconstruction of heritage items can be important to communities where a treasured building has been lost in a fire or through violent conflict.
Willow Grove in Parramatta before the site clearing.Credit: Steven Siewert
However, reconstruction of demolished buildings or their relocation to more convenient locations was “generally not in line with a contemporary values-led conservation approach that focuses on conserving what communities value”.
“Values are inevitably contextual and derive from the relationships between people, narratives, and places,” Ireland said.
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