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A 19th-century quarantine station through which thousands of convicts and free settlers passed is to be turned into a 90-bed hotel, restaurant and conference centre, to the dismay of heritage campaigners.
For nearly 150 years, from 1828 until the 1970s, ships suspected of carrying disease were placed in quarantine at North Head, which guards the entrance to Sydney harbour.
Almost 600 people died from smallpox, scarlet fever, influenza or cholera and lie buried on the site, an attractive cluster of colonial wooden buildings overlooking a bay near the popular beachside district of Manly.
Heritage experts say the quarantine station is the equivalent of New York's Ellis Island, through which tens of thousands of immigrants passed in search of a better life in the United States.
After more than a decade of controversy, the New South Wales Government has approved the A$17 million ($19.5 million) hotel development.
"The Government shouldn't be privatising our heritage," said local MP David Barr. "This area should be preserved as a historical and wildlife reserve with full access for the public."
The site is home to two of the state's rarest animals - long-nosed bandicoots (a small marsupial) and fairy penguins.
The development company, Mawland Group, will run tours of the quarantine station, taking visitors through replica cabins and assigning them identities of passengers. There will also be "ghost tours" led by a clairvoyant.
Campaigners said the plans will turn the quarantine station into a theme park. "It has an element of Disneyland about it," said Doug Sewell, of Friends of the Quarantine Station.
But the developers say their plans will inject new life into the area. "There'll be more public access than there is presently," said Max Player, the director of Mawland Group.
"We won't put up any new buildings and we won't knock down any old ones, we'll just adapt what is there."
The site's 67 historic buildings offer insights into the racial and class attitudes of 19th-century Australia. Passengers were divided into first, second and third class sections and "Asiatics" - mostly Chinese labourers recruited to Australia's goldfields - were segregated from white immigrants.
Work on the project is due to start shortly and the hotel is due to open in early 2008.
