HOW AN OLD GEM BECAME EMERALD
The proposal to redevelop a flood plain to create Emerald Lakes drew controversy. Here is how it unfolded.
PLANS to redevelop one of the Gold Coast’s most famous landmarks into a golf course and housing estate on a flood plain was controversial from the beginning.
Emerald Lakes was one of the city’s biggest projects of the 1990s and 2000s and dramatically reshaped Carrara.
The golf course this week made headlines for all the wrong reasons, being the location of a tragedy. Young sportsman Nicholas Hunter drowned in one of the ponds after a night celebrating with mates.
It was a sad turn of events for the precinct, which traces its origins back to the 1990s.
Developer Nifsan filed plans with Gold Coast City Council in December 1995 to rezone more than 125ha of flood plain for a $150m residential project with room for more than 750 homes and 46ha of waterways.
It had already taken over Carrara Golf Club in 1990 and renamed it Emerald Lakes.
The project was the brainchild of Japanese businessman Toshiaki Ogasawara, Nifsan’s founder who came to the Gold Coast in 1988 to play golf on a business trip and fell in love.
The proposed site of the development was the former home of the Surfers Paradise International Raceway.
Built by Sea World founder Keith Williams in 1964, it first hosted drag races on April 10, 1966, while the first race meet at the 3.2km track was on May 22, 1966.
Famed driver Sir Jack Brabham was a frequent competitor in its early years.
Twelve-hour endurance races were a feature before sixhour events became commonplace by the end of the 1960s.
The track closed in 1987 and eventually became home to a Tiger Moth joy ride and helicopter charter business, as well as a go-kart track.
By 1995, the bulk of the site had been empty for years.
Nifsan’s proposal immediately drew criticism from the Australian Conservation Foundation’s Gold Coast president Peter Farrell who warned it had “the potential to be a disaster”.
“In 1974, a 72-hour deluge filled the Gold Coast flood plains, cutting roads and isolating entire communities – let’s not forget that regular floods are a normal pattern on the Gold Coast landscape,’’ he said.
“This development is smack-bang in the middle of the flood plain and development may also force flood waters to back up and flood other areas adjoining the site which may not flood in normal circumstances.’’
Mr Farrell said he feared the canals and waterways would become “killing fields’’ for thousands of fish if acid sulfate soils were disturbed.
Nifsan director Ian Mclean said Mr Farrell’s claims were simple scaremongering.
“He’s doing a good job of trying to create a situation of frightening people and people should be aware that the Gold Coast City Council has to approve this plan in accordance with good engineering hydrology,’’ he said.
The council ultimately chose not to act on the project in the required approval period, in essence giving it a “deemed refusal”. Nifsan took the council to the Planning and Environment Court in 1997. A tense series of hearings followed.
Mr Farrell, while giving evidence, claimed corruption was “rife” in the council.
Both council chief executive Dr Douglas Daines and the Criminal Justice Commission (CJC) launched immediate investigations into the claims, which the CJC found “vague, imprecise and unsubstantiated”.
Nifsan redeveloped its plans in consultation with the court and council and resubmitted. Approval was granted in 2001.
Under the new plan, more than 85 per cent of the site remained open and undeveloped.
A controversial plan to link the major lake on the site to the Nerang River via a lock and weir system was shelved.
The remaining businesses on the former international raceway site also closed in 2001 and bulldozers moved in later that year to clear the site.
More than $200,000 was spent relocating five fig trees which had been planted in the 1930s by Carrara pioneer Billy Birmingham Snr. He had brought a seedling from Casino in 1930 when he established his family’s dairy farm on the future Emerald Lakes site.
The Emerald Lakes precinct, which would ultimately cost more than $1bn, was completed by the early 2010s.
Mr Ogasawara did not get to see his dream entirely come to fruition. He died in late 2012 at age 85 following an 18month illness.
Then-nifsan chief operating officer Louise Bird told the Bulletin in 2012 that Mr Ogasawara had always had a passion for the city.
“The fact that he endured as an investor in the city while many of his compatriots fell by the wayside bears testimony to that,” she said.