While debate has raged over the future of Victoria Barracks, the site has served as the spectacular wedding venue for a senior army officer marrying a state MP, who has spoken out against plans to sell the historic site.
Coogee state Labor MP Marjorie O’Neill has broken ranks to defend Victoria Barracks from being sold off since a Defence audit in February recommended divestment. After marrying Iraq veteran Warwick Young at the site over the weekend, her fight is now more personal than ever.
The MP, who has never before spoken about her relationship with Colonel Young publicly, said the pair connected on both the superficial and the serious since the moment they met at a film screening the army officer and film director was speaking at.
They share a dislike of sauvignon blanc, a taste for Negronis, and a shared Catholic faith alongside “really deep commitments to our families and to public service”.
“Both of us understand that our public role and our obligations to public service come first,” Dr O’Neill told this masthead.
For Warwick, their connection is just as straightforward: “We just get on”.
“All of a sudden you realise ‘so this is how it’s meant to be’,” he said.
“We’re on the same wavelength, we laugh at the same stuff, we think similarly.”
The Coogee MP tearfully said she wished her father, who died on the eve of her election in 2019, could have attended her wedding.
“He would have loved it,” she said.
The pair are one of just a handful of couples to have wedded at the barracks, which was the site which inspired Col Young to enlist after visiting from just age four.
“I wanted to join the army from being there,” he said.
The newlyweds have strong family histories of military service stretching back generations, including Col Young’s great grandfather serving at Gallipoli.
Dr O’Neill said “ADF service has always been something that has sat very close to our family”.
“My father has always made sure that you remember those who made the ultimate sacrifice,” she said.
The MP has been a staunch supporter of the barracks, while her now-husband as an ADF member is unable to comment on the divestment – but can speak in general terms about the site.
Col Young lived at the base while commanding Covid-19 operations, which he said included management of hotel quarantine, the vaccination of remote Indigenous communities, contact tracing, and state and national border checkpoints.
“There’s Headquarters Forces Command, which commands a third of the Australian Army,” he said of the base.
“There is the Battle Lab, there is the Second Health Brigade, there is the Military Legal Training Centre, which trains all the lawyers in the ADF. There’s the Australian Army Band Sydney, there’s the Australian Army Museum, so there’s lots of wonderful things in there.”
Dr O’Neill said those who are in charge of the base “have not actually been able to have a proper public discussion around the real operational usage of this site”.
“Black Hawks have landed here this morning, this is an operational base,” she said.
“There is a strategic advantage to having a big green open space owned and controlled by the ADF within a stone’s throw of the Sydney CBD. Getting rid of that moving that capability to Randwick and Holsworthy (Barracks) weakens our defensive capability.
“When you are talking about critical incidents, every single minute matters.”
Dr O’Neill said the assessment to sell the barracks was done by Defence service delivery team Security and Estate Group, who are administrators and “don’t understand operational work”.
“SEG doesn’t even clean the toilets, they organise who cleans the toilets,” she said.
While the MP said many Defence assets made sense to be divested from, Victoria Barracks were too important to counter-terrorism responses to be sold off.
“The interim report to the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism very explicitly said we actually need to be bolstering our counter-terrorism responses not weakening them,” she said.
“There are all these arguments (that) it should be opened up, absolutely I think that it should be opened up. I completely agree with that. But it can be done in a way where it’s opened up to our communities and it can maintain being a defence asset.”
A Defence spokesperson said the “independent Defence Estate Audit found that many Defence sites’ history and heritage was not accessible to the public”.
“The Government has been clear about its commitment to preserve and enhance public access to historically significant sites and collections, including at Victoria Barracks Sydney,” the spokesperson said.