NAVY'S OIL TANKS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 203, 28 August 1935, Page 5

NAVY'S OIL TANKS.

SYDNEY DISPUTE. EXPERTS AND "AMATEURS." MINISTER LOSES HIS TEMPER. (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, August 20. The Federal Defence Department has decided to erect and is erecting oil tanks to be used for naval defence purposes at Chowder Bay. This bushclad indentation is one of the prettiest and most popular bays along the northern foreshore of Sydney Harbour, and coming so closely on the heels of the trouble at Middle Head—where the Defence Department has leased a large area to a golf club—this fresh aggression has aroused a great storm of public indignation. Mr. Parkhill, as Minister of Defence, assured the people of Sydney and New South Wales that the tanks would not be conspicuous, that they would be built mostly below ground level, and that they "would be largely concealed by undergrowth and creepers. But the public organisations that take an interest in such matters were .by no means satisfied with this perfunctory explanation. They held meetings, at which very strong language was used —one speaker describing the selection of this spot for the oil tanks as "the most inexcusable desecration and the greatest act of official vandalism perpetrated here for years" —while another said that it was ''the most damnable thing in the devastation of the foreshores that has ever happened in this State." Finally, taking the advice of one of our leading champions of natural beauty, Mr. D. G. Stead, they resolved not to be dismayed by Mr. Parkhill's "bluff and humbug," but to beard the Ministerial lion in his official den. Deputation's Mistake. And so a great deputation, including the leading official's of the Parks and Playgrounds Movement, the Town Plan-

ning Association, the Town and Country Planning Institute, the Wild Life Preservation Society and the Bush Lovers' League, with a large number of members of local bodies, waited on Mr. Parkhill to remonstrate. They pointed to the inevitable destruction of the beautiful native bush, the disfigurement of the waterfront and the harbour, the defilement of beach and bay with oil and their destruction as bathing resorts; and then, rather indiscreetly, they went on to argue that tanks at Chowder Bay could not be protected against attack, that they would be vulnerable to gunfire from sea, land and air, and that the only effect of their establishment at this spot would be, in case of war. the destruction of the beautiful little suburb of Mosman, which lies right behind them. No doubt Mr. Parkhill was rather glad of this tactical blunder on the deputation's part, for he immediately fastened on this point in their protest, to the exclusion of almost everything else. He read them a long lecture on the necessity for preparing an effective scheme of national defence, talked about the huge sums that Britain and Fiance and Italy and Japan are spending on such purposes, assured them that this site for the oil tanks had been selected only after the most exhaustive investigation by engineers and military men, and repeated his earlier statement that the tanks would be practically invisible and that the beauty of the foreshore would not be destroyed. " Opinions of Amateurs." But Mr. Parkhill is not a patient man, and by no means for the first time in dealing with a public deputation he got angry. "Surely," he said, by way of clinching the matter, "surely I must accept the advice of military men and technical experts rather than the opinions of amateurs who represent music lovers and art societies." This contemptuous reference to the various powerful and popular organisations which had framed this remonstrance was singularly tactless, and though it was quite characteristic of the bureaucrat who prides himself on being "strictly business" and ignoring the artistic amenities of life, Mr. Parkhill may yet have cause to regret that he lost his temper over the oil tanks at Chowder Bay.