The Australian National University has decided not to return the land vacated by the pro-Palestine camp to its previous state because the $60,000 cost would be too high "due to current financial considerations".
The university is left with two patches of damaged lawn after the protesters vacated the first site in the centre of the campus for a second, less prominent one a hundred metres away. They have now left that one, too.
But the ANU authorities have decided not to restore the turf to its former condition.
"We can confirm the lawns at Kambri and University Avenue were damaged by the encampment," an ANU statement said.
"The cost to remediate the areas to their pre-encampment state is estimated to be around $60,000. Due to current financial considerations the university will not be proceeding with these works at this stage. Our landscape and conservation team are doing as much as they can to maintain the grass for the time being."
The university's "current financial considerations" include a rising deficit of spending over income.
The shortfall was $132 million in 2023 compared with the $105 million the ANU had originally budgeted for.
In the face of this climbing deficit, it put in new controls to tighten spending on staff recruitment - and now the halting of work on returning the lawns to their original, pre-protest state.
The remnants of the original protest group disbanded the second camp on August 17.
They didn't answer requests for information from The Canberra Times but the student paper reported that students on the Monday: "Would have passed by an empty space outside the A.D Hope Building where the protesters had been established after moving from Kambri Lawns.
"This marked the end of the encampment's 110-day presence on campus, making it the longest-running Gaza solidarity encampment in the country."
The protesters told the publication they had been subject to "countless intimidation and repression tactics by the ANU's leadership team". This included refusing to let them put lights on in their tents.
"According to the group, 'This decision is completely arbitrary, and has made it completely untenable for our protest movement to continue in the form of an encampment'," the student publication said.
The protesters moved from their original site when the university promised to consider changing its policy on owning shares in arms companies.
This the university did but not to the satisfaction of the protesters.
Its ruling council decided to exclude only manufacturers of particular controversial weapons and not companies making weapons for Israeli use.
Its new policy is to steer clear of shares in makers of "anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, chemical weapons, biological weapons and nuclear weapons outside of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) and/or civilian small arms".
"Their announcement was a lie that we will not accept - we will not stop protesting," a statement from Students for Palestine Canberra said.
"The ANU would like us to believe that they have listened to our demands," one of the prominent protesters, Nick Reich, said.
"They would like us to think that we have won so that we stop fighting, allowing them to maintain their stake in weapons companies abetting genocide. Well we don't buy it, and we won't stop."
