Whole community benefits from Crown land deal: Orange indigenous leader Jamie Newman

Chairperson of the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council Jamie Newman said the opportunities offered by the transfer, under which the LALC has been allocated a total of 86 hectares of land, would be shared across the board in a spirit of cooperation.

"For too many years before where we are now, we were having land claims on blocks of land that had no benefit to us," Mr Newman said yesterday.

"That was that era. The era has changed."

Under the landmark deal, of which Orange is the first of eight NSW councils to benefit, Orange City Council was allocated 398 hectares of land.

The difference in the allocations is that while OCC land is classified community and cannot be developed commercially, the LALC can sell its parcels to benefit indigenous programs.

Orange mayor Reg Kidd said the deal, which helped cut red tape, was a good thing for the whole community.

"One of the things with crown land is half the time, no-one knows who owns it," he said. "The council can't do anything with it, the state doesn't do anything with it.

"It's putting the responsibility on council for community use, we can put a community facility on it and get through the processes quickly."

Mr Newman said the LALC had gone into the Crown Land transfer negotiations knowing what it needed for its community development, economically, financially and culturally.

The Sale Street-Warrendine corner of the velodrome will become a home for its Orange United sporting club.

"They run multiple levels of sport. That will be a good ground for them to take advantage of there," Mr Newman said.

"We can run our festivals there, like NAIDOC Week, we can have gatherings there, we want to do some renovations there, naturally, to make it a more functional ground for the club's rugby league teams.

"Doing up the velodrome. One of the conditions is that we maintain it but we wouldn't just leave it as it is, we want it to be functional for our kids, take our kids there to learn to ride bikes."

Enhancing the velodrome block's significance to the LALC is its recent deal to lease the former netball clubhouse in Anson Street from OCC, although this is not part of the Crown Land transfer.

"That's a collaborative deal with council," Mr Newman said

"[We will] fund it to get it upgraded, use it as a community gathering centre, do some financial counselling with some of our community, some life-skills with some of our community, when coming to the AMS maybe is too far out of reach for people.

"It's a central location so if the kids are playing sport you could have the older family members in that facility.

"We're taking advantage of the facility, saying what is our need here?"

The LALC will also take control of a portion of the old nine-hole golf course at Bloomfield and the driving range nearby with OCC getting the eastern side near Jack Braham Park. Mr Newman said the LALC would support council's $25m sporting development.

"For that land that we've been given, there is going to be usage," he added.

"We wont be just sitting there paying rates without any benefit to the community."

Mr Newman said cultural tourism and teaching opportunities could also be unlocked.

"We want to share with people the whole history of Orange and how that benefits all people. We have a very multicultural community here but I could hazard a guess that a lot of our community don't don't know the true history of the aboriginal population and the occupation here," he said.

"We're in a really perfect position to enhance that now.

"Cultural elements and social elements is what's going to bring us the most economic benefit.

"Housing, business, sporting, educational social ... so the whole community benefits. We wont be just exclusively saying this element's for aboriginal people, it's for the whole community to benefit."

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