This is how the State Government looks after your Open, Green, Public Park Lands.

The last patch of green that was left on the eastern side of Frome Road in your Park 11, has now disappeared.

The Park will be replaced by the third wing of Botanic High School.

This is one of six Park Lands attacks authorised by the current State Government in their first 12 months of office. Since being elected in March 2022, the Malinauskas Labor State Government has produced plans or proposals or carried out confiscation of your Open Green Public Park Lands for:

• this new $98 million eight-storey high school building,

• a new $82 million aquatic centre,

• a new multi-storey car park in Kate Cocks Park,

• a new $3 billion hospital,

• a new police barracks and stables for the mounted police unit; and

• more bitumen to help stage carbon-emission motor races in your Victoria Park.

Over the past few months, the State Government has rejected appeals from Park lovers to put a new high school building on a City brownfield site, and is instead ploughing ahead with destruction of this, Frome Park/ Nellie Raminyemmerin Park.

In January 2022, the City Council wanted to protect this Park. However six months later, in July 2022, the Council did an about-face, and voted to sell this Park to the State Government, gaining for you, in return, effectively nothing; merely legal title to land, elsewhere, that was already part of your Park Lands.

BACKGROUND

This site was where the Royal Adelaide Show was located, from 1844 to 1925 – a total of 81 years.

During that time, there was a grand Exhibition building here. Later, it became a car park for the former Royal Adelaide Hospital.

In the 1990s, Frome Park / Nellie Raminyemmerin Park was transformed from a car park into a public green space.

During that 30-year window, this Park formed an Open, Green, Public corridor between Frome Road and the western (Gingko gate) entrance to the Adelaide Botanic Garden.

This small park has also been well used during the multi-day music and arts festival WOMADelaide, and more recently, the Illuminate Adelaide festival.

Frome Park / Nellie Raminyemmerin Park is one of the stops on our Park 11 Trail Guide.

The pocket of land is also “highly significant” for Kaurna people, and is near the grey-headed flying fox colony in Botanic Park, which the City Council (in 2022) predicted “may be detrimentally impacted” by the construction now under way.

It is too late to stop this destruction, but you can still take action to save the next Park Lands site scheduled for destruction, in Denise Norton Park / Pardipardinyilla (Park 2).