The push to have the Royal National Park inscribed on the World Heritage List has been going on for five years and has won widespread support among conservation groups and the local community.
It is now profoundly disturbing to learn the state government may be going slow in processing the nomination because it plans to put a motorway extension through the park. The timing could not be worse - the way is open for nomination for the Royal as it never has been before.
The motorway extension proposal is for the F6 that connects Sydney and Wollongong. If it went ahead it could remove some 60 hectares from Royal National Park that was inscribed on the National Heritage List in July 2006.
This could harm its chances of nomination for World Heritage status because it would suggest to the World Heritage Committee the area is not securely protected.
The park falls within the boundaries of Wollongong City Council and Sutherland Shire Council - both have pledged their unanimous support for the World Heritage nomination.
As a park close to the city, heavily used by locals and tourists, the Royal's primary claim for World Heritage status is not its wilderness qualities, but its importance in the history of conservation.
The Royal, reserved in April 1879, was the first protected area in the world to be set aside for what was, then, the new land use designation of "national park".
In the US the term, as at Yellowstone in 1872, was used differently, to indicate that a park was under federal, not state, jurisdiction.
In the 1870s the public park movement made an enormous leap from reserves in the urban environment such as Parramatta, Hyde and Moore Parks in Sydney and Central Park in New York into the natural environments of Royal and Yellowstone.
This was the beginning of the national parks systems now found in every country around the world and it is surely important that the significance of this major step in protected area history be recognised at the global level.
Inscription of a site on the World Heritage List enables the whole world to share in recognising an area has "Outstanding Universal Value", as UNESCO puts it, and for all people down the ages to have the opportunity of protecting it and learning from it.
Only last month, a major obstacle to World Heritage listing of the Royal National Park was removed. Until then, surprisingly, the theme of "an area of importance in world protected area history" was not recognised by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.
On July 9, at its 41st meeting in Krakow, Poland, the committee decided to inscribe the English Lake District on the World Heritage List. In so doing it gave international recognition to the role this area had played in the development of the conservation movement and the concept of protected areas.
This has unlocked the gate for the listing of other areas that have played an important role in the establishment of extensive systems of national parks and wilderness areas worldwide.
Now the gate is open, the state government must seize the opportunity to walk the Royal through it.
It must no longer delay World Heritage nomination particularly if the reason is to smooth the way for a motorway that could close off this option forever.
- Geoff Mosley is the author of The First National Park: A Natural for World Heritage published by the Sutherland Shire Environment Centre
