Rebuilding Canberra's spirit
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 2: Dreams of Land
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Jack Waterford
Download the complete article PDF
Jack Waterford's biography and other articles by this writer
Our fires start in the ranges to the south and west of Canberra. It's fairly open flat country, farm and forest land to the immediate south-west, but beyond the Murrumbidgee, one is in the ragged Brindabella ranges. As hot air from the plains runs into the Great Divide, there is often spectacular lightning The hills and mountains run south towards Kosciuszko, occasionally opening into plains but more usually thick-scrubbed or forested and very inaccessible, with steep mountain sides, creeks and gullies, the source of Canberra's primary and pure water supply. It is dangerous country when the prevailing westerlies are picking up heat as they blow across the continent. Canberra is on the west of the Great Divide and unlike the other capitals, its weather is not moderated by the sea. Humidity is low, the number of sunshine hours the highest of any city in the country.
Only 60 years ago, there were sheep grazing within 200 metres of the old Parliament House. A well-known wit described the city as a good sheep station spoiled. We once had bush flies as bad as in any country town because of the proximity of sheep and cattle. Over the past 40 years, however, the grazing industry has retreated from the west, the south, the east and the north, these areas being progressively taken over by suburbs – to the north by rural slums. The CSIRO used areas around Canberra not only to trial its dung-beetle program but also to breed superflies – sterile Spitfires against the potent Tiger Moths. We retain our blowies, of course; indeed, they are the harbingers of spring. But the retreat of the bush fly is a measure of how one artificial form of nature – the suburb – has taken over another – the paddock.
The great proportion of the population lives in parts of urban Canberra unbuilt and unimagined only 50 years ago. Old Canberra, the city of Walter Burley Griffin – the garden city, the lake and all of the national regalia instantly familiar to most Australians – sits on the Limestone Plains. From Griffin's conception until about 1955, progress in developing the plan had been slow: the town had only 10,000 inhabitants, split into different settlements by the Molonglo River, its flood plains used for golf and a racecourse. Then Robert Menzies, as much as Griffin the true father of Canberra, decided that a real national capital should be built; its growth fuelled by the compulsory transfer of government departments previously headquartered in Melbourne and Sydney. He established the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) and gave it extraordinary powers to plan and develop the city, which soon began growing in population at about 10 per cent a year.
The first fruits of the NCDC's work were filling out the Limestone Plains, damming the river and creating Lake Burley Griffin. But the public servants kept coming and so the NCDC moved on to create settlements in new areas – in the Woden Valley, south of old Canberra, in the Weston Creek area, between the Woden Valley and Mount Stromlo, and in Belconnen, behind Black Mountain, on the land a New South Wales governor had granted to Charles Sturt after his discovery of the River Darling 130 years before.
IT WAS THE GOLDEN AGE OF PLANNING. The NCDC decided that each new large settlement would be a town in its own right, having a central business area with office blocks and workplaces, mostly for government departments, and a major shopping centre. There would be smaller shopping centres in the suburbs. Canberra would have no single central business district: work and shopping would be close to home.
When it was needed, there would be a state primary school, and often a Catholic school, in every suburb, as well as a small supermarket, a butcher, a chemist, a newsagent, a petrol station – and probably a doctor's surgery and a milk bar. Towards the end of the 1960s, Canberra had more than 100,000 inhabitants, mostly living in such suburbs; within another seven years it had more than 200,000.
The town of Weston Creek, and its suburbs, sat perfectly within the NCDC model. Duffy, Holder, Weston, Rivett, Stirling, Warramanga and Fisher were neat little suburbs with primary, secondary and tertiary streets, all kerbed, guttered, sewered and powered long before the first resident moved in. There were primary schools and ovals, green corridors through suburbs and around the whole area. The theme of the street names in Duffy was Australian dams and reservoirs: Blowering Street, Burdekin Street, Burrinjuck Crescent, Eildon Place, Jindabyne Street and Eucumbene Drive. Fisher's theme was Australian mines and mining towns, Holder's was surveyors. Rivett celebrated Australian flora, Stirling, West Australian pioneers, Warramanga, Aboriginal tribes and in Weston, streets were named after Australian artists.
To the west of Duffy, almost up to Chapman and just across Eucumbene Drive, which connected with the road to the Cotter River, was a major pine plantation. Another marked Duffy's northern perimeter. To the north-west was the Stromlo Observatory, hidden from the increasingly encroaching glow of suburban lights by thick pine trees. These hundreds of hectares of ordered pines, with a cushiony floor, had walking tracks and, over to the north, great mountain-bike and jogging tracks. Commercial pine plantations do not lend themselves to abundant fauna or flora, but they are cool and peaceful.
The suburbs of Weston were not ordinary Australian suburbs. Each was planned before a single house was built. Each was built on bare clay, and few of the inhabitants knew a single person in the suburb before they arrived. They were nearly all young and they came from one of the greatest social mixes ever to be found in Australia.
It stemmed from the forced migration to Canberra of public servants. When compulsory transfers began, the young and the bold were keen to come. Canberra was where the power was, and where the promotion opportunities were. It was the centre. Middle-aged public servants, long established in, say, Melbourne, with children already settled in schools and with their networks of friends, were less keen to move. Many didn't, finding other jobs instead. Those who did got very cheap housing loans or were allocated government housing that they would be allowed, ultimately, to buy, again at concessional rates. Up to 50 per cent of the houses in most suburbs were "guvvies". Perhaps 20 per cent today still belong to the government and a high proportion still have their original occupants. Most of the privately owned ones have been much extended, to the point, sometimes, where there is scarcely an original external wall.
The typical arrival in Canberra was under 25 and unmarried, ineligible at first for an allocated house. Canberra was dotted with hostels and single-bedroom flats, and pubs in which these new arrivals congregated, met others like themselves, and students from Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Hobart and Perth, got drunk, fell in love and got married. Then they either bid for or bought vacant blocks of land over the counter, or bought from a spec builder, or waited a not-so-long time on the government housing list, then went out into these "boondock" suburbs as young pioneers.
THESE DAYS, WESTON IS ALMOST AN INNER SUBURB. But then, it was on the edge of nowhere. The streets were marked out, guttered and sewered, but the land, after the development work, was largely untreed, the barest clay. Everyone was new. Most had no relatives nearby and if they wanted to establish relationships with people of older generations, it would be in old Canberra, not the perimeter.
One met one's neighbours turning clay into lawn or through one of Canberra's quaint rituals – such as collecting 50 free trees or shrubs from the government nurseries. There were 40 million trees planted inside the city limits between 1960 and 1985 – three-quarters of them inside suburban blocks. But it took years before the suburbs seemed green instead of brown when viewed from the top of Black Mountain. And only then could one suddenly observe that summers seemed milder by three degrees and winter warmer by about the same because of the blanket of trees and bushes.
Suburban politics, such as it was, began, as it so often did, with discontent. Despite the promises, services tended to come more slowly than promised. Canberra was the first city in Australia to average a car per family, but those cars were often being taken to work, stranding the mums. Bus services were poor, particularly in the new suburbs. The transition from caravans selling milk and newspapers to the building of the shopping centres seemed to take ages. As did the building of the schools. The gatherings to agitate for these led to the creation of suburban communities.
A part of the process, nervously shepherded by the NCDC and the ACT social agencies, involved encouraging the development of clubs, teams and other bits of community infrastructure. Land was cheap for not-for-profit groups and areas developed ethnic clubs, sporting clubs and facilities, baby health centres and an array of facilities organised around child care, schools and community service.
In the beginning, these played an important role in the politic; progressively, however, they have tended to become larger, more impersonal and less immediately relevant to the lives of the residents. Families established wider links and became more focused on their own quarter acres, and as, in any event, a new service economy and easier transport made localness less relevant. The area now has several enormous clubs, each with more than 10,000 members, but geography aside, these are primarily businesses subsidising cheap food and alcohol from gambling revenue, not places where like-minded people who know each other congregate. The people of the suburbs of Weston Creek, like people in suburbs all around Australia, increasingly meet the wider world from their front door, they do not move into that world through ever-widening ripples of kin, kith and neighbours, local shopkeepers and tradespeople, workmates and team-mates.