Karen Read found out the Supercars were coming to Newcastle in the local paper, under a big photo of then New South Wales premier Mike Baird. The lord mayor announced it with a “vrrroom vrroom” and a chequered flag emoji. Three months later, Read sat in a residents’ meeting watching footage of car crashes.
“The organisers showed us this video of kids with hands over their ears,” she said. “Cars crashing, no barriers. Some brave person raised their hand and said, ‘Do you think this is going to make us think we want this here?’”
In November the Supercars series, which includes several street circuits, is coming to Newcastle for the first time, after its contract to race at Sydney Olympic Park in Homebush was not renewed last year. Organisers say the three-day event will be one of the biggest events the city has ever had, bringing in $57m from tourism over a five-year contract running until 2022.
But for aggrieved residents it has tapped into a well of anger they didn’t even know they had. In the small seaside suburb of Newcastle East, the Supercars – with their dust, noise and alleged impending disruption – are all people can talk about.
Residents say the course of the race runs closer to houses than any other in Australia, with some homes only three metres from the tarmac. A joint letter from 70 local medical professionals says the noise will breach the human pain threshold and cause permanent hearing damage after 15 minutes spent in some living rooms.
Nearly every day, residents led by Read, who is the chair of a local action group, complain to Supercars Australia, Newcastle City Council and the tourism organisation Destination NSW, which organised the event together.
They say they have been encircled, cut off from work and school, that Nippers has been cancelled and the family court forced to close. Again and again, they say the event has been foisted on them by uncaring Sydneysiders, sitting in state parliament down the M1.
“I’m not the type of person who writes letters to the editor,” says 66-year old John Hudson. “I’m normally a laidback kind of person but my blood pressure goes to a hundred when I think about it. When I wake up in the morning I think about it, I think about it when I go to bed.”
Newcastle East sits on a headland, which means the 2.6km track – which runs along the foreshore, past the ocean baths and across the park – leaves much of the suburb completely enclosed.
To create the circuit, the area’s heritage-listed streets are being upgraded, widened and relaid. In Newcastle the Supercars will race along existing roads – no special stadium is being constructed. It is an event that prizes ordinariness, closeness and a sense of being inside a regular city.
A flyer saying: ‘Hey, great news’
“The whole point of Supercars is they want to race cars that look like your car, through streets that look like your street,” says Dr Peter Saul, a local intensive care specialist at John Hunter Hospital.
Resident Dominique Ryan says it came as a shock. “We essentially live inside a racetrack now. There’s no consultation. We received a flyer in the letterbox saying: ‘Hey, great news’ and then we realised we were enclosed by the circuit.”
For Victoria Grigor and Cate Turner, who are on-call medical workers, the road closures have disrupted their work and forced them to take leave.
“I’m on call at two emergency departments,” Grigor says. “If my vehicle is parked out of the zone, I won’t be able to access it. I’ve taken two weeks’ leave over that period. We’ll be taking out children out of school and we’ll be leaving town.”
Turner is a midwife in the high-risk unit and says she has been taken off the emergency roster.
“I can’t guarantee I can leave my driveway. We’re 3.2 or 3.3 metres from the road that’s going to be the track. My mother-in-law, who is 86, lives down the road and she will be completely blocked in.”
In defence of the event, organisers say the 2015 Adelaide 500 generated 400 new jobs, while races on the Gold Coast in 2016 and in Townsville in 2012 brought in $40m and $32.4m respectively. This year, they’re expecting 26 cars and 150,000 spectators, 220m households watching on TV and performances from Cold Chisel and Spiderbait.
The council has also paired the construction with $8.8m worth of civil works, which it says were either already planned or overdue. With the money coming in, the felling of 170 trees (“It looks like a wasteland,” says John Hudson) will be compensated by planting 230 more.
But local Greens councillor Michael Osbourne says the numbers don’t add up. He describes the $57m revenue figure as a “back-of-the-envelope” calculation because organisers have not yet released their working behind the sum. In 2010, a NSW auditor general’s report found the state government overstated the economic benefits of the Homebush Supercars race, and underestimated the costs.
Supporters of the #V8Supercars and local residents clash #newcastle @newcastleherald pic.twitter.com/FJ9MtkqQJU
— Marina Neil (@MarinasMarina) February 2, 2017
Speaking in NSW parliament in February, Greens MLC David Shoebridge said Supercars had abandoned Homebush because it had become “an economic drain on the local precinct”. Newcastle was chosen after the race was considered and rejected by Gosford for being too disruptive.
The Greens were the only councillors to vote against the race, but sceptical residents quote the auditor general’s report with regularity. Newcastle East has been a hard suburb to convince.
‘We’ve always been second in line’
The tourist brochures call it “the birthplace of the city”, a hotspot of early industry and home to Australia’s oldest continuously running school. Residents like Read are fiercely protective of its history, and say the special legislation passed to enable the race has thrown out standard heritage and environmental protection clauses.
Supercars has complied with all legally required planning and environmental assessments (including approval under section 60 of the Heritage Act) but has been granted some immunities through legislation.
Section 26 of the Motor Racing (Sydney and Newcastle) Act exempts the race from certain assessment requirements under the Environmental Planning and Assessment Act. Section 28 allows authorised people to work around the Local Government Act.
Osbourne says the legislation means “none of the normal conditions apply”. Hudson says it reminds him of Monty Python: “They are complying with regulations. But the regulations say they don’t have to comply with regulations.”
Osbourne says it’s another example of the state government overriding the local council, after an earlier regulation reform carved out the Newcastle port and gave its management to the state.
Read sees that as another example of Newcastle’s poor treatment at the hands of a Sydney-centric state. A power dynamic built into the city from the start.
“Newcastle is where all the bad people from Sydney were sent,” she says. “They had three tasks: mine coal, cut down cedar and burn shells for lime, and all the products went to Sydney. We’ve always been second in line – there’s a bit of a chip on the shoulder there.
“Our heritage isn’t seen as being as important as Sydney. We’re seen as a provincial place. In a lot of ways it seems the NSW government has not moved far from the Rum Corps in the olden days. They ride roughshod over legislation put in place to protect people.”
Too much for Homebush, but OK for Newcastle
The Newcastle Act, formerly known as the Homebush Motor Racing Act, was designed for Sydney but amended to apply to Newcastle in March 2017 when the race shifted up the coast.
“The state government thought the impact of this race on Homebush was too great, but it’s OK for Newcastle,” Osbourne says.
For Saul, the race represents an extraordinary health risk. He’s written a joint letter (sent to Supercars, Destination NSW and SafeWork NSW) with 70 local medical professionals – from ear, nose and throat specialists to GPs.
“The noise levels we are looking at are 95 decibels in people’s living rooms, which is the pain threshold”, he says. “Within about 15 minutes we expect exposure at these levels to cause some kind of damage to hearing.
“It causes a sort of stress response in the human body. You’re closer to the track than spectators are. This is a part of Newcastle that was built before there were cars, so people’s homes open right onto the street. They’re closer than where you’d allow a marshal or a pitstop.”
Sound modelling commissioned by the residents says the noise could reach 107 dB by the front door. Maps of the area suggest the sound would still hover at about 70 dB 100 metres away.
“It’s not like this is a bicycle race that promotes health,” Saul says. “There is no upside to it.”
With the emphasis on heritage homes and beachfronts, residents say they are being branded elitists for opposing the race, Nimbys who can’t stand the vulgarity of the V8.
“It’s forcing the community into two groups, and it’s not a nice position to be in,” Grigor says.
Ryan says elitism is “one of the few ways that people have been able to pick on us”.
“It’s not an elitists’ area. Ten or 20 years ago it had a reputation as a bit rough, run down, dirty. There are three aged care facilities in the East end and a large social housing facility. A lot of the original residents still live there and are working class.
“We’ve been quite conscious of saying we don’t have a problem with racing, it just doesn’t belong in a residential area. My husband is a racer from a long time ago. He’s interested in the race, just not a race that’s right outside his door.”
‘Noise is our paramount concern’
Supercars says the distance between the racetrack and residents’ homes is standard, and has been replicated elsewhere with little complaint.
“Adelaide and the Gold Coast tracks have some residents within similar distance to the circuit and no concerns have been raised by those residents. On the Gold Coast, there are significantly more residents who live within the precinct – some 9,000 –than in Newcastle.”
However, a local Adelaide residents’ newsletter shows some residents did complain to Supercars from as early as March 2014, calling the race’s occupation of a local park “a cancer”.
Supercars is yet to see a campaign as concerted as Newcastle’s, but is confident that noise levels will not cause the harm predicted by Saul.
“[Noise] is our paramount concern. Supercars has been working closely with highly qualified acoustic engineers ... and all branches of government to develop a plan to manage any noise impacts.”
Wild west of development
With three months to go, two things seem certain – the campaign will continue, and the cars are still coming.
The arrival of the race has left an exceptionally bitter taste in the mouth of residents. For them it is not a nuisance that goes away, but a ring-road that circles homes, that will bring the cars back, for good or ill, every year for five more years.
“It would be all right if it was good for the community, but it’s not,” says Keran Davis. “It’s good for private enterprise and that’s it.”
“There’s a general feeling that Newcastle is up for grabs,” says Cecily Grace. “This is the wild west of development. “I always feel sorry for people living through Westconnex but at least they’re getting a road or a light rail out of it. We’re getting a three-day race.”
For the protesting residents and councillors, the race rolls together a number of lingering resentments into one issue: the sale of the port, the slow skyline creep of developers, the debate over what kind of place the city wants to be.
“I love Newcastle,” says Hudson. “I came as a migrant from heavily industrialised Middlesbrough [in the UK] and I made Newcastle my home. I love it. I love the laidback, big, overgrown country town that it was. I’m not against progress but it seems Sydney wants it to be high rises everywhere, glass boxes.
“My missus always says they could make a beautiful botanical gardens here. More people would come to Newcastle if we had a nice art gallery and a botanical gardens – people don’t go to Italy to see high rises and motor races. But what do we get? The Supercars.”
