Victoria Barracks in Paddington has been military ground since 1840. Convicts and tradesmen cut the Hawkesbury sandstone.
Soldiers marched out those gates for Sudan, two world wars, and every conflict that followed. RSL NSW still calls it the spiritual home of the Australian Army.
For nearly two centuries it has been a living precinct, not a museum piece parked behind a fence.
In February the Albanese government answered a long-delayed Defence estate audit by putting 67 sites on the block. The three Victoria Barracks — Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane — sit at the centre of the list, along with Spectacle Island, part of HMAS Penguin at Middle Head, golf courses, rifle ranges and islands.
Gross receipts were first put at around $3 billion; after relocation, remediation and heritage costs the net figure is closer to $1.8 billion, with claimed annual savings of $100 million. Sydney’s 12.5-hectare Paddington site alone has been valued in the high hundreds of millions. The money, ministers say, will go back into capability.
Defence Minister Richard Marles has been blunt. Defence is not a heritage organisation. Every dollar spent on old buildings competes with submarines and missiles.
Most soldiers, he notes, have never set foot in the Sydney barracks; the infantry is in Townsville, Darwin and Brisbane. On Sunday he sharpened the point: it is not his priority to manage “the oldest wine cellar in Australia.”
A few former generals “liked hanging out there.” The site should be “liberated” for Sydneysiders. Heritage laws, he insists, already protect the fabric. Public access can be expanded once Defence walks away.
That language landed like a slap. Nearly 95,000 people have signed Senator James Paterson’s petition.
NSW Premier Chris Minns, a Labor colleague, has called the barracks the Army’s spiritual home and wants it kept. Labor MP Marjorie O’Neill wrote that history should not be balanced on a spreadsheet.
Veterans, heritage groups, the National Trust, local residents, Coalition MPs and some Greens have formed an unusual alliance. They argue the barracks is still operational — Headquarters Forces Command, cadets, reserves — and that selling it for a one-off sum that barely registers against the cost of a single frigate is accounting, not strategy.
The government’s case is not invented. Many sites are under-used. Maintenance of Victoria Barracks Sydney is projected at nearly $195 million over a decade.
Defence Plaza offices in the CBDs sit half empty. Australia’s strategic weight has shifted north. Relocating staff two kilometres into a tower looks tidy on a spreadsheet. Marles is right that heritage listing already constrains demolition, and that a closed military precinct is not the same as a public park or a living museum.
Yet place is not only floor space. Melbourne’s barracks housed the War Cabinet in 1939; the first meeting after war was declared took place in a bluestone room that most Australians have never seen.
Brisbane’s Petrie Terrace precinct is one of the city’s heritage jewels.
These are not interchangeable warehouses. They are the physical record of how a small colonial force became a national army.
Once the title leaves the Commonwealth, even with covenants, the incentive structure changes. Developers, councils and future treasurers will weigh apartments against parade grounds.
Housing researchers have already floated a thousand dwellings on the Paddington site. They will all be priced in the millions.
RSL NSW president, Brigadier Vince Williams (retd), has been the most direct. After reports that staff would be cleared out of Paddington, he said the League was “appalled.”
Victoria Barracks is “not surplus real estate.” It is “the spiritual home of the Australian Army,” an operational site “of immense strategic, military and cultural significance.” Once sold, “it is gone forever. There is no buying it back.”
A spreadsheet can price the land. “It cannot put a value on 178 years of service, sacrifice, history, and national memory.” He told members to rise up and write to every federal MP.
RSL Australia national president Peter Tinley AM, said: “These aren’t empty paddocks on a spreadsheet — they’re places where Australians learned to soldier, where bonds of mateship were forged, and where generations prepared to defend this nation.”
The government needed to “tap the brakes.” “Once these sites are gone, they’re gone forever.” He called for a Senate inquiry.
Retired Major-General Mick Ryan called selling the three Victoria Barracks “a terrible mistake” and a “cheap money grab” instead of properly funding the force.
Retired Brigadier Ian Langford said Sydney’s barracks is “the cornerstone of the Army’s soul and Australia’s story.” The sale would “barely register as a rounding error” against the real capability bill.
That is the veterans’ case: the government is flogging living military ground for a one-off cheque and sneering at the people who used it.
The deeper charge circulating among veterans is not merely fiscal. It is that a government facing genuine capability gaps has chosen the easiest assets — the ones with the highest land values and the loudest sentimental attachment — and then dismissed the people who object as nostalgic or self-interested. Sovereignty, in this telling, is not only submarines. It is whether a nation keeps the ground its soldiers actually used, or treats it as surplus inventory.
Public access and heritage protection can be expanded without a fire sale. Ownership can stay public. Staff can be modernised without emptying the oldest continuous barracks in the country.
The argument now is whether Australia still values its military, or whether sovereignty and tradition, like seemingly everything else in the country, is up for sale.
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