Forestville Hockey Club has recently opened its new facility to hockey players and Unley High School students, but the journey has not been without conflict. (Image: new Forestville Hockey Club pitch. Source: Mia Handley)
By Mia Handley | @miajh1428
There is a fight lurking in Adelaide’s south-eastern suburb of Netherby.
The suspenseful atmosphere is undeniable. A high school sporting ground has finished construction after a two-year-long public land debate.
For some locals, the artificial turf signifies a rebirth for Australia’s oldest hockey club.
Its LED light towers are statuesque, beaming across 350 senior and junior members and thousands of high school students.
Training commenced this month at the Netherby sporting grounds. (Image: Mia Handley)
But for others it is a sobering reminder of a public park once populated with Kikuyu grasses and soccer nets.
They fear that artificial turf will cause excessive plastic waste in the open space, which was gifted by Peter Waite to the Department of Education in 1913.
Back in March 2022, when Forestville Hockey Club first announced its tender for a hockey pitch at Unley High School, the public response was divided.
The club successfully proposed a $4.1 million hockey pitch and clubrooms to replace the soccer fields across Balham Avenue Reserve to be a shared space between the hockey club and Unley High School.
Unley High School principal Greg Rolton says he supports the development.
“This is a facility that I could never fund and provide.”
Rolton says the multi-sport pitch will enable “netball … five-a-side soccer and touch football” for 1,562 high school students throughout winter, as the school only has grass sporting fields that close due to muddy conditions.
One of the strongest supporters is former Unley High School student and Forestville Hockey Club president Helen Stone. She says the communal usage of the ground “just makes sense”.
“For a long time, Forestville Hockey Club has been training in different places, playing in different places,” she says.
“You don’t always come together as a whole club. But the pitch will enable that.”
It has been a tough road for Forestville, with the club having reviewed over 20 locations since 2010. In 2020, the then-Liberal state government proposed Unley High School.
Not everyone thought it was a positive idea, and the proposal brought “a real anger” to local resident and member of the “NO to Forestville Hockey Club in Kingswood/Netherby” Facebook group, Bradley Chalkers*.
After Chalkers received a letter from the club in 2022 proposing the pitch, residents held their first meeting in fear that “the community [was] going to get pushed over”.
However, negotiations were never on the table as, according to Chalkers, the state government declared the pitch essential infrastructure and told residents early on that “no matter what the community wants, this is going ahead”.
“You don’t expect a licensed bar in a school. You don’t expect a school every night of the week to have its lights on, on a field that’s 20 metres from you, until 9:30 at night,” he says.
Tensions culminated at a Mitcham City Council meeting on October 10, 2023, where residents presented a petition signed by over 2,000 Kingswood and Netherby locals concerning the available parking, western side access, use of public land and LED lights.
“One of the councillors at the end of it said, ‘Well, basically, we’ve got to vote, because otherwise we’re going to look stupid to the federal government because we started this,’” Chalkers says.
The meeting led the council to grant Forestville $140,000, citing appropriate engagement with the community and four other State Commission Assessment Panel (SCAP) conditions as reasons for approval.
Craigburn Ward councillor Karen Hockley – not the councillor mentioned by Chalkers – voted in favour so that the hockey pitch “could be the best it could be”.
“Council really had no ability to withhold any funding or decisions … as it is a state-funded development on state land,” she says.
“The money that council put in was minuscule … [but] it gave us the leverage to do some things [Forestville Hockey Club] may not have agreed to otherwise.”
The grant was awarded from the 2023/24 budget, even though “Mitcham Council has no ownership on the land or Forestville Hockey Club,” Boorman Ward Councillor Andrew Tilley says.
“I spoke against that as hard as I possibly could, but I could see immediately that the mood of the chamber was support. And I was just flabbergasted.”
Tilley’s issue is less about noise and parking, and more about sustainability and “the hypocrisy of declaring a climate emergency” despite using artificial lawns.
“Piles and piles of this [synthetic grass], which doesn’t break down, stuck in landfills everywhere, leeching little microplastics … into the … water system,” Tilley says.
He fears that a “filtration plant can’t stop microplastics” from infiltrating the “iconic” Urrbrae wetlands just 200 metres away.
In response to the backlash, Forestville Hockey Club installed a microplastic filtration unit into the pitch’s stormwater drainage system.
The pitch is manufactured by Polytan, a German-owned synthetic turf company that recently surfaced the 2024 Paris Olympics hockey field.
Forestville’s president Stone acknowledges that Forestville Hockey Club’s pitch will be recycled by Polytan through their partner program RE4ORM in a synthetic turf recycling centre in Victoria.
The light tower output has been independently tested and the club will have protocols for access to the licenced area in the clubhouse.
But it was publicity that the council meetings brought, and it led to accusations from both sides, with The Advertiser journalists Taro Miko and David Penberthy labelling the residents as “NIMBYs” championing the not-in-my-backyard movement.
It hurt the residents.
“It’s horrific. It is. And [Penberthy]’s never talked to us,” Chalkers says.
Penberthy was contacted by On The Record’s Mia Handley but failed to reply before publication.
“I don’t own a Mercedes,” Chalkers says.
“I own an old Corolla that’s been waiting to be repaired. This is not me, I overextended myself to buy this house. I love the environment; I love what this area has to offer. And I get the community, and I get into sporting events.”
Griffith University Urban Management and Planning Professor Paul Burton says that classic nimbyism is “people inappropriately resisting every and any change in their neighbourhood and trying to preserve it as it was when they moved there.”
“The challenge is you have to sometimes look in detail at what exactly the NIMBYs are saying and take them on point by point. It may be on some points you go, now that’s fair enough,” he says.
“But how much weight do you give it?”
Despite the tension, Stone hopes she can provide a hub for volunteers, hockey players and the community.
“All of a sudden, we’ve got some new people volunteering in a circumstance where volunteers are harder to get,” she says.
Chalkers is less optimistic.
“Maybe we’ve reached a point where, you know, there’s so many hurt feelings … everything will now feel contrived unless it’s not the actual impact things,” he says.
“The building of such a facility should generally be a beneficial and readily welcomed addition … however, the lack of having the resident community recognised as a vested party from the beginning party has left us fighting against the imposed plan.”
Chalkers calls for a state requirement for community consultation, compromise over parking access and lighting operation times, and regular meetings with the high school or hockey club to protect “the little guy”.
As a way of renewing relationships, Stone says the club wants to introduce social games, walking hockey, and scratch matches for teens and adults.
“We’re a club of 350 people, plus all of our families, and we will be looking after that new facility for the next hundred years.”
“Come and meet us.”
*Name changed for anonymity
Reporter Mia Handley has a family member who plays for Forestville Hockey Club.
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