Third Age
May 2013
When Canberra and I were very young
Canberra and I didn’t grow old together – and in many ways I am sorry about that. I would like to enjoy Canberra’s centenary this year as a resident, my memories going back to the 50s. I was there again in the 70s, with a family, some of the time looking over the city from a grazed-out hill in NSW.
I returned to Adelaide permanently at the end of the 70s, but kept an eye on the bush capital. My best friend lives there and, believe it or not, we snail mail each other three or four times a week, sustaining Australia Post and keeping me up with Canberra’s growth towards maturity. In the 50s Canberra was like a flash boarding school.
In a population of 44,000, there were hordes of young people living away from home in hostels of varying quality. Fresh from Sydney I started off in a timber hut in the heart of Civic, grandly called the YWCA hostel, moved for a while into a hostel with an interesting intake of young migrants, and on to Havelock House, then the hostel of choice for those waiting for a nice, new government flat.
In the Havelock of my day, there were public servants at the beginning of their (in many cases) starry careers, academics, field scientists, a few people from the armed services, a few in the building industry or removalist businesses, a press photographer and one C grade reporter, yours truly, on The Canberra Times, owned by the Shakespeare family.
It was a fairly representative mix of the Canberra at that time. I fell in love with Canberra in the 50s because it lacked menace. Sydney had come up with too many scary situations for a young woman using public transport in the out- of-ordinary working hours of journalism. I did not feel entirely safe at work, and I could not see a future.
Canberra’s pretty, wide streets and gardens gave me the space I needed to work out why I could not see my future as plainly as young men did. Canberra was to help bring about my social and political awakening. I thought of it as a place of cathedrals in paddocks, strange and beautiful. Golden poplars along the bridges before the Lake was there thrilled me. Reporting functions at night before I could drive meant I was dependant on strangers for a lift back to the office, yet I felt safe under those huge starlit skies. We had theatre, music, and a world of big ideas.
I covered the opening of the Australian Academy of Science dome in 1959, and believed that architecture in Canberra would only become more and more exciting. Flying in a Tiger Moth I watched the consecration of All Saints, Ainslie (some of its stone building from a Sydney mortuary train station). Eventful, exciting, always something to do, the High Country close for skiing or bushwalking, a rackety DC 3 to get to Melbourne or Sydney for a weekend… it was a young persons’ city full of life and promise.
For a young female reporter it was experience that I could not easily get in Sydney: courts, police rounds, but also writing about ideas, covering the regular lectures in the Canberra University College and St Mark’s Library, meeting almost every important stranger who arrived at the Nissan-hut airport.A 50s Soviet delegation, Alfred Hitchcock, Kingsley Martin, embassy people… but I didn’t cover politics, or the National Capital Development Commission. They were for the men. Of course I pushed my luck, and was told, with some savagery, that I was encroaching on boys’ territory.
So I packed my bags for Adelaide. But I kept 50s Canberra in my heart. Whenever I see cotoneasters I think with sharp pleasure of the starlit walk home alone around midnight from the ratty old newspaper building in Mort Street, Braddon, picking sprays of the berries for my copper jug; the feeling of small town safety along with the stimulating, ever moving congregation of young people I lived among and who got each other’s jokes; and the high hopes that come with being part of something new and developing. Alas, the architecture did not become more exciting after the science dome, not much of it, anyway.
Canberra may not be as safe as it once was, but it is a place still safe for ideas. Paul Daley, being younger, has had a different experience of Canberra. He has written a small, neat book* about it. His story of its earliest days filled gaps in my knowledge. He is diverted too often by what the rest of Australia (or its media) thinks about Canberra.
You don’t capture a city’s essence by repeating what heedless people say about it – and a great deal of rubbish is written about Canberra. But it took me back and made me wish I was there – and young – again.
*Canberra, by Paul Daley. NewSouth Press, Sydney.
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