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Welcome to the 'Save Diggers' Drive' website.
THIS site went 'live' on Sunday, May 14, 2006, and most sections are still evolving. That said, you will find in the following pages a handy introduction to the background, heritage and prospective challenges facing Diggers' Drive, located in the magnificent tree-lined and very popular Kalinga Park, in Brisbane's northern suburbs.  Artist's impression of the manicured, landscaped vista that will have replaced Diggers' Drive by 2012. We appreciate and welcome any constructive feedback and if you have news that the local Kalinga community should be made aware of, please contact us.
Please bookmark this site and let your friends and relatives know the URL...it's not too late to join the fight to ensure Diggers' Drive does not become history! Share
 This community noticeboard has been erected by the State Government-appointed construction authority to remind the public that, no matter what you can see all around you, Airport Link actually is a good neighbour to this World War I-era Avenue of Remembrance. © February 2010 Peter Collins |
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Diggers' Drive needs a hand.. |
 Artist's impression of the entrance to the Toombul (Digger's Drive) end of Airport Link. Schulz Canal is off to the right and the present alignment of Sandgate Road is in the middle distance. What remains of Diggers' Drive is at top right. All the picture-perfect hoop pines indicated will ever be a faint echo of the fully-grown ones ripped out during construction.  So just how much water can Kedron Brook send down to Toombul? On May 21, 2009 this was what the eastern - the future tunnel-mouth end of Airport Link - looked like.
Coo-ee, Kalinga! Airport Link buries a local ANZAC memorial.
ON Monday, May 19, 2008 - almost two years to the day this website made its debut - the fate of Diggers' Drive was sealed when the Queensland State Premier, Anna Bligh, declared Airport Link a done deal.
On February 17, 2011 - two years, nine months and two days later - the multi billion-dollar Airport Link project and the associated Inner Northern Busway behemoth reached the tunnelling half-way mark beneath the suburbs of Windsor, Albion, Lutwyche, Wooloowin, Kalinga, Eagle Junction and Clayfield - en route to Bowen Hills. At the intersection of Sandgate Road and East West Arterial Road a massive tunnel mouth has gobbled up the most poignant part of Diggers' Drive, at the eastern end of Kalinga Park near Clayfield.
 Passengers looking out the window on the Airtrain saw this view of the flood-swollen Schulz Canal on May 21, 2009. The stacks of demountable offices of the BrisConnections workforce can be seen on the left bank of what used to be the lower carpark of Toombul Centro.
 Diggers' Drive, Kalinga Park...in 1931 Kedron Brook's flood fury destroyed this bridge. 'The Brisbane Courier', April 11, 1931, pg16.
All along Bowen Bridge Road (opposite Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital), Lutwyche Road and Kedron and Wooloowin the mechanical behemoths and workers in their orange reflective overalls have been busy. The eastern approaches to Kalinga Park (adjacent to Sandgate Road) and a large swathe of Diggers' Drive have been obliterated and entombed in a concrete sarcophagus. The rest of Kalinga Park has been converted into a sprawling construction camp, operating 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
 An Airport Link runs through it...an artist's impression of the grand tunnel mouth in Kalinga Park. Behind the fictitious big pine (oddly there used to be a grove of mature hoop pines in this very spot) is the multi-storey exhaust stack needed by the tunnels.
The social, cultural, historical and environmental values both Diggers' Drive and Kalinga Park embody have been clear-felled, uprooted and permanently fenced-off from the public. In its place is an open-cut minesite. Huge lorries, digging machinery and demountable bunkers are on the scene now. The gantries required to lower the two tunnel boring machines into the ground tower over the worksite, which is in turn hemmed in on the south-western approaches by fence more than a dozen metres high. The 10-storey smokestack skyscraper is taking shape. Bike tracks have been sealed off and new ones on the opposite side of Kedron Brook (the old ice rink side) are in place.
In act of supreme arrogance and contempt, on virtually the first day of tearing up Diggers' Drive, two, mature, original Digger-planted tallow wood trees were clear-felled beside the original Diggers' Drive alignment at the Sandgate Road end of the memorial. A forest of companions were chipped. Two sizeable former dwellings were demolished adjacent to the East-West Arterial intersection (the western side of Sandgate Road) and barricades are everywhere.
To try to neuter public alarm at the obvious contradictions associated with strip-mining a national War Memorial, the proponents of Airport Link wage a relentless PR campaign. A lowpoint was reached when householders across the northside of Brisbane were sent a full-colour brochure, festooned with photographs of the Diggers' Drive entrance sign and declaring all will be well with the world after the Airport Link construction juggernaut has done its darndest. Bollocks!
Once Airport Link is finally pronounced open for commuters - now expected late in 2012 - the pretty Diggers' Drive end of Kedron Brook will forever be just another soul-less, landscaped, concrete-sided extension of the eyesore that is "Schulz Canal"; just a glorified stormwater drain beside sterile, monolithic tunnel mouths, in the shadow of monstrous flyovers and noise barriers. Its avenue of mature trees - mostly tallow wood (Eucalyptus microcorys) and hoop pine (Araucaria cunninghamii) - were planted (by hand) to honour the memory of the Fallen Sons of Kalinga, by actual World War I returned servicemen (not landscaping contractors with bobcats). What most likely will replace this vista is a forest of saplings and pine bark chips in manicured garden beds.
Airport Link's intrusion into Kedron Brook's alluvial floodplain soil (right at the stretch of the waterway that is already subject to saltwater tidal flows) will drastically alter - forever - the water table of Kalinga Park, and there is an elevated likelihood of acid sulphate soil disturbance which could, over time, lead to the demise of all the mature trees that comprise the western segment of Diggers' Drive. In short, the integrity of this unique and important War Memorial is under threat...
 A report about the opening of Kalinga Park. 'The Brisbane Courier', September 2, 1910, pg6
Every single mature tree at the eastern end of Diggers' Drive was tattooed at the trunk and summarily executed. Like the characters for whom they were originally planted, these specimens wore a metal "dog tag" up until they were laid low. The Airport Link proponents (the Queensland State Government) asks - in its PR literature - for the public to take special notice of the massive, 300-year-old narrow-leafed ironbark (Eucalyptus crebra?) tree just east of the Sandgate Road bridge. Imagine the changes - and the people - this particular specimen will have witnessed. It is literally 'the last tree standing'.
 This path wend its way through an avenue of mature hoop pines on Remembrance Day (November 11) 2008 at the eastern end of Diggers' Drive in Kalinga Park. All these trees were removed within days of this picture being taken. © 2009 Peter Collins
This website is a non party-political, community-focused and volunteer-resourced attempt to raise local public awareness about the reality of Airport Link and what stands to be lost forever: the serenity and suburban amenity of Kalinga Park and environs. No money is being collected. No signatures. If the notion of the loss of an original, hand-made War Memorial concerns you, find out more about what the Airport Link proponents intend doing with Diggers' Drive. Ask them what specific plan is in place to reinstate and appropriately acknowledge the debt of gratitude and solemnity that Diggers' Drive has embodied for more than eight decades.
 What a community achievement...the addition of Diggers' Drive in Kalinga Park was universally hailed. ('The Brisbane Courier', April 10, 1924, pg9).
Will you be satisfied if the entombed and permanently off-limits eastern portion of Diggers' Drive is marked by a cheap brass plaque on a park bench near a "no-go area" in the shadow of a flyover and a six-lane tunnel entrance? Diggers' Drive - until 2008, all 1,200 metres of it - deserved/deserves better. If you're still struggling to understand why it matters so much, picture this otherwise non-descript stretch of Kedron Brook being transformed by 83 former soldiers into a "living" monument to the memory of the 182 men and four women (who were nurses) from the Kalinga Division of the Toombul Shire who saw active service between 1914 and 1919.
In constructing an Avenue of Remembrance, these men simultaneously provided a dignified place where the fathers, mothers, siblings, mates and sweethearts of these Sons (and Daughters) of Kalinga could seek solace and mourn.
In the absence of a gravesite to visit - the remains of Australian service personnel killed overseas were not repatriated home during World War I - Diggers' Drive sufficed as a place of mourning and grieving; enabling Eagle Junction district's close-knit community to come to terms with its own flesh-and-blood contribution to the ANZAC Legend. Historian, Dr Michael McKernan, in the January 2009 issue of Memento*, posits that "thousands of Australian families lived through what we now easily call the 'interwar years' in grief and loneliness. The war had changed Australia. It was indeed a nation in shock".
 View of the eastern end of Diggers' Drive on March 8, 2009. © 2009 Peter Collins
The City of Brisbane has ANZAC Square; a place rightly considered sacrosanct and heritage legislation-protected. Diggers' Drive represents a similar inheritance, but one this State Government has wilfully defiled.
Lest we forget...
 An article from a 1919 edition of Brisbane's 'Daily Mail' newspaper.
*FOOTNOTE: Memento [ISSN 1327-4155] is a free publication of the National Archives of Australia. It is published twice annually. Shell-Shocked: Australia After Armistice was an exhibition at the National Archives in Canberra until April 27, 2009.
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