Seven Suggestions to Salvage Adelaide Park Lands from an Archaeologist’s Point of View

At this point, the question isn’t whether the North Adelaide Public Golf Course development within our Adelaide Park Lands will go ahead. It is underway and will continue. These Park Lands are on the Australian Heritage Register because they have outstanding heritage significance to Australia, assessed against nine national criteria by the Australian Heritage Council. Just another thing we can thank Midnight Oil frontman and then Federal Environment Minister Peter Garrett for, who in 2008 formally approved the Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout for inclusion on the National Heritage List. 

So how can we stop the beds from burning, face the facts, and set a fairer precedent for every other project that will closely follow, including the MotoGP works at Victoria Park? Because what we do now will matter for every future development proposal. 

1. Stop tree removal until August

National Heritage status makes the Park Lands a matter of national environmental significance under the EPBC Act. That means actions likely to significantly impact their National Heritage values (like major earthworks, tree loss, or big new buildings) must be considered under federal law, not just state planning rules. While the Federal Court has ordered the State Government to give 48 hours’ written notice before cutting any tree over 3.5 metres as part of the golf redevelopment, one more step would be to stop all remaining tree removal until Federal Court Judge Natalie Charlesworth hands down her decision in August. That would spare the Government the embarrassment of chopping down more heritage‑listed trees only to have the court or a future federal environment referral say the project should have been handled better. The remaining trees marked for removal can wait six more weeks.

2. Send golf plan for federal review

There is a specific clause in Australia's main national environment law, Section 68 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act), that allows a government to voluntarily send its own project to Canberra for an independent review. So, Premier Peter Malinauskas could refer the golf course redevelopment to the national Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water (DCCEEW) and ask for a proper federal check on whether the project really protects our listed National Heritage place and the plants, animals and cultural sites within it. 

Obviously, not Federal Environment Minister Murray Watt, who also plays on the same political team as Malinauskas, because that would be a conflict of interest(!). But if Watt formally delegated the decision to senior officials in the DCCEEW (standard practice under the EPBC Act), it means the project would be assessed by someone other than the state government that is also building/developing it. If the government takes its obligations to a National Heritage place seriously, an independent body reviewing their decisions would help demonstrate that the project has been properly investigated. Then we might see that difficult decisions about the Park Lands are being made in good faith.

3. Replace discovery with proactive archaeological survey

The warnings about this site are not new. A 1998 report on the Indigenous Cultural Significance of the Adelaide Park Lands recorded that ‘the section of the river west of the weir has been affected by the landscaping of the golf course,’ and that ‘works on the banks in this area turn up the bones of Aboriginal graves, indicating that the site has not been completely destroyed by landscaping.’ (page 39).  

That same stretch of riverbank lies within Pirltawardli / Possum Park (Park 1), which the State has included in the application area for the North Adelaide Golf Course redevelopment. More recently, a 2023 cultural heritage report found that the southern end of the golf course was almost certainly a significant Kaurna camping and ceremonial site with a high probability of traditional burials occurring within 1.5 metres depth of the natural land surface (Executive Summary, page v).

Section 10 of the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act 2025 only activates Aboriginal heritage protections when sites, objects or remains are found during construction, meaning problems are discovered after work has begun rather than prevented in the first place. It risks repeating what happened at Riverlea, where cultural heritage studies did not stop a major housing project from disturbing and removing Kaurna ancestral remains mid‑project. Parts of the development were paused after discovery under a stop‑work order, where remains could be removed in a culturally sensitive way, even though Kaurna elders and community members have repeatedly said they wanted the remains left in situ.

Before any ground is broken, major projects in New South Wales and Victoria routinely begin with non-invasive geophysical surveys (ground‑penetrating radar). GPR has been used successfully in Adelaide at the Walkerville Wesleyan Cemetery, identifying 168 probable unmarked graves and demonstrating the value of this method for managing burial sites. Adopting the same proactive approach here would show respect for Kaurna people by properly investigating the area, instead of relying on a reactive chance‑find model that waits until remains are uncovered during construction.

4. Kaurna cultural heritage monitors on site with stop-work authority

In October 2025, the State Government announced 31 conditions under the Aboriginal Heritage Act to protect Aboriginal heritage at North Adelaide. But those conditions apply only to the small Par 3 section south of War Memorial Drive (page 19), not to the much larger golf course and driving‑range footprint shown in the State’s own project description (page 5) where most of the new earthworks are planned.

A straightforward way to appropriately manage this would be to have an independent cultural heritage monitor from Kaurna Yerta Aboriginal Corporation on site every day any ground is disturbed, with clear authority to stop work if something significant is found, so it can be assessed before damage occurs.

Without a Kaurna monitor with real‑time, site-wide stop-work authority across the redevelopment footprint, the government’s 31 conditions and the Cultural Heritage Management Plan risk becoming a rubber stamp. All good on paper, but no practical guarantee that Kaurna heritage will be protected in practice, as Kaurna elders have already warned the safeguards fall short.

5. Publish full design, including what's missing

When the government unveiled its golf course design in December 2025, the glossy images and videos left out some basic information the public needed to understand the proposal. The Adelaide Park Lands Association have rightly pointed out that the government did not show which trees are to be cut down, where new car parks and maintenance sheds will go, how large the new clubhouse and event storage areas will be, or what impact tall driving‑range fences will have.

At the same time, the Premier’s media release and the North Adelaide Golf Club’s own redevelopment pages make it clear that detailed plans already exist. When the Premier released designs in December 2025, he confirmed 585 trees (6.5% of an estimated 9,000) would be removed and described new facilities including an 18‑hole championship course and a driving range, with project descriptions and concept maps inviting people to explore the layouts.

That means the project team clearly knows the answers to questions about parking locations and numbers, access points, building footprints, which individual trees will be removed and the likely height and extent of fences. They just haven’t put that information together in one clear, public plan. Publishing the full design, with every tree loss, every new building, and every major fence line clearly marked and labelled is the minimum level of transparency the community deserves.

6. Legal limits on event fencing

Under Section 22 of the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act 2025, the Minister can fence or cordon off ‘the whole or any part of the project site, or any part of an event support zone’ whenever they consider it necessary for public safety or ‘otherwise for a good purpose’. There is no limit in the Act on how tall those fences can be or how long they can remain in place.

This is in direct conflict with the Community Land Management Plan and the National Heritage Management Plan for the Adelaide Park Lands and City Layout, which emphasise accessible green open space, views and vistas, and free public access as core values the national heritage listing was designed to protect. If tall ‘temporary’ fences can legally stay up for months, those vistas risk being replaced with an iron curtain of mesh and netting. 

Clear statutory limits, for example, maximum fence heights and number of fenced days per year, would ensure that a golf tournament does not slowly become a semi‑permanent, fenced‑off zone in what is supposed to remain an open public park.

7. Time limit on ministerial ownership

The Minister now has the power to expand the project boundary simply by publishing a ministerial notice, according to the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act 2025. The Hansard record shows that Parliament was aware it was vesting Park Lands in ministerial freehold, owned outright by the Minister as if it were private property, rather than held as a public park. There are no built-in requirements to return the land to public ownership or to align future expansions with the Park Lands Management Strategy or National Heritage Management Plan.

There is no reason a public golf course needs to work this way. Championship-level courses and major tournaments in Victoria and NSW commonly sit on Crown or council land and are managed through open-space frameworks. Adelaide already has the structure for this with the Adelaide Park Lands Act 2005 and the Kadaltilla / Adelaide Park Lands Authority to keep the Park Lands under protective, community-oriented management.

Two amendments to the North Adelaide Public Golf Course Act 2025 would fix this. Firstly, once the redevelopment is complete, ownership should automatically return to the City of Adelaide or a new independent Park Lands Trust, with strong legal protections keeping the site as a public park indefinitely. Secondly, any future expansion of the project boundary should require a vote in Parliament and must be consistent with both the National Heritage Management Plan and the Park Lands Management Strategy.

Why this matters

Full disclosure, I don’t play golf, nor am I a motorsport fan. My concern isn’t about sports. But more about how we treat a nationally recognised heritage-listed landscape that’s regarded as a masterwork of urban design and signifies a turning point in the settlement of Australia, as well as the stories shared within it. In places like the Netherlands, cultural heritage and archaeology have been pulled into the centre of planning laws, so that historic landscapes, river plains and buried sites are mapped, understood and built into local plans before projects are approved. If Adelaide wants to build a world‑class golf course in a world‑class heritage landscape, it should learn from that kind of integrated approach, not treat the Park Lands as expendable when a new project idea comes along.

The least we can do now is push for changes that make this redevelopment less destructive, more accountable, and honest. So when the government comes for the rest of the Adelaide Park Lands, it will face stricter rules with clear management expectations. And we can honour our natural and cultural heritage with the same vigour Peter Garrett took to the world stage.