All options are on the table for Kiama Council for the Blue Haven nursing home site at Havilah Place which is being demolished six years after it was closed down.

Demolition started last week on the site which was previously the home to Kiama’s first retirement village for four decades from 1979 onwards.

Kiama Mayor Cameron McDonald said Council was open to ideas about how the area should be used once the derelict buildings are removed over the next two months.

Council will form a finance and major projects committee to spearhead the process of working out what to do with the community asset.

“Basically it’s an open book,” he said.

“That committee is an acknowledgement that Council is not the expert on all things and the scope of work for that committee will be to look at all our catalyst sites owned by Council and understand where they might be in the next 20-30 years as well.

The old State Quarry at Kiama.

“Sites in desperate need of repair, such as this Havilah one, the existing Terralong Street site, the Council Chambers themselves and some of the other sites we’ve got, including the Minnamurra Depot.

“There has been many people in the community saying what should happen with that Havilah Place site and nothing is off the table as far as Council is concerned.

“It will become a part of a larger jigsaw puzzle as to how our community assets might look into the future.”

Council is revisiting the Kiama Sporting Complex masterplan after gauging community feedback to come up with a preferred plan for its redevelopment following responses about the initial three options.

The future of the Havilah Place site will also play into how the Sporting Complex could end up.

There have been calls for the demolished Blue Haven complex to be converted into affordable housing, more retirement homes, sporting facilities, retail and commercial space, or even parkland.

After the committee is formed, Council will proceed with the community consultation process before working out what will happen with the subdivision of the site.

The nursing home after opening in 1979.

Blue Haven Terralong will not be affected by the redevelopment of the abandoned section of the old retirement village and Kiama Community Garden will also remain as is.

Long-time Kiama local Nick Hartgerink wrote the book, literally, on Blue Haven: The First 40 Years, which was released in 2019.

“It was a great facility in its time, but it reached its use by day,” he said.

“The whole process started because around 1970 the Kiama Hospital was full of elderly residents and there was nowhere for them to go and they would have had to go to nursing homes 30, 50, even 100km away in Sydney because there was nowhere to accommodate them anywhere in the Illawarra.

Thus the Kiama and District Retirement Village Committee was born on 19 November, 1970 with Kiama Mayor Paul Saphin elected president.

They raised money and the retirement village was set to get the green light in 1975 but the government funding was cut off due to the nationwide financial uncertainty surrounding the turbulent final days of Gough Whitlam’s time as Prime Minister.

Eventually, Malcolm Fraser’s government reopened the purse strings and the retirement village was built and finally opened in 1979.

As Hartgerink wrote in his book, “long-serving Kiama doctor, Jon Phipps, remembers that he and his medical colleagues were forced to use Kiama District Hospital as a de facto nursing home.

“Kiama Hospital had a lot of long-term patients who were kept there because they needed to be looked after full-time.

“They were beyond rehabilitation and too sick to live at home, but there were no nursing homes nearby to send them to.

“Sometimes we sent them to nursing homes as far away as Sydney, but that was very hard for them and their families. So we tried to look after them in Kiama Hospital.

“That was a real problem because they were taking up the beds, but what else could we do?”

The land for the site was initially home to the State Rail Quarry from the 1870s where blue metal was mined with a tramline down Terralong Street taking the stone to ships in Kiama Harbour to be loaded up to be taken to Sydney.

By the 1970s, the disused quarry land was owned by local businessman Tony Freedman, who generously donated an acre to Council as the site for the nursing home before more land was purchased from him for the sports complex.