In January 1973 I stood in the driveway of my then fiancé's parents' house crying my eyes out as T set off for his new job with the Australian Customs Service in Canberra. In those days the government was daring and innovative. Computers were the new thing and a recruitment drive had been held to choose suitable bright young people to man the brave new world of information technology. T had already shown his aptitude as a computer programmer in a couple of workplaces and was snapped up.
I wrongly thought I wouldn't see him again because he would be seduced by Canberra and find someone he preferred to me at his new home, Lawley House. Devotedly (bless him) T drove up every weekend to Sydney until we married in the September of that year except for two weekends when I visited Canberra.
In those days public servants flooded in from all over Australia. It was an exception to find a born and bred Canberran. There were a whole lot of hostels which provided accommodation for the large influx. T lived at Lawley House for about two months until he could no longer stand the restrictions imposed by the management. As well he had made some friends who also didn't like hostel living and a group decided to rent a house together in Weetangera.
I had been to Canberra by train for a day years before with my parents. All I remember was that work was being done on the still empty lake which was full of bulldozers. There wasn't much else to see that I could remember. The next time I came to Canberra was when I was about 15, on a day trip from the coast. I have a photo of me in front of the War Memorial. Again I can't remember much about the visit.
I did come to visit T when he was at Lawley House. Members of the opposite sex were forbidden to visit the rooms of the residents - sitting in the communal area was alright until about 9pm. We broke the rules big time! I stayed the night! Shock! Horror! I held on but finally had to use the loo. T had to peer out, check that the coast was clear before I dashed out. It was all very furtive and exciting. Doesn't that sound archaic now! That's how it was in those days. If we went on holiday together I wore a 'wedding' ring or it was possible that we wouldn't have been allowed to stay at a hotel.
We married on 1st September 1973 which was the middle weekend of the school holidays. It was my first year of teaching. As T had just started work in the Public Service he couldn't take any time off so our 'honeymoon' was the drive from Sydney to Canberra. He had organised a fully furnished flat for us in a long grey building in Mawson called 'The Wall of China' by the locals thanks to its lack of architectural merit. I hadn't seen it at all but as T carried me over the threshold carrying a basket containing bread and salt (good omens according to my mother) I was as happy as could be. We unpacked the piles of wedding presents from the car and set up our little home together.
In those days you could see the twinkling lights of the tiny Woden town centre from our balcony at night and during the day you could see waving golden grasslands filled with birds from the bedroom. Those grasslands are now filled with town houses and an aged care village.
I started teaching at Pearce Primary School the next week. It was a beautiful new school. When I first walked into the building to introduce myself I felt like I had arrived in heaven. Everything was shiny and new. I had been teaching in an old inner city school in Sydney where the paste was full of rat droppings, the windows were opaque because of pollution from the nearby factories and where my chair went through the floor one day when I leant back due to the dry rot. At Pearce School many of the staff were about my age and I immediately made lots of friends.
In those days you really had to make your own fun in Canberra. I can remember having to catch the bus back to Sydney on a Sunday night from Garema place in the city and you could have fired multiple cannons down the main street and not hit anyone. It was VERY quiet and dark. Compare that to the vibrant city life these days!
In the 70s we had masses of dinner parties where we would actually get dressed up. We also went to enormous trouble when providing the meal, aperitifs such as brandy Alexanders and whiskey sours were favourites followed by multiple courses with accompanying wines concluding with a selection of liqueurs.
After a while 'progressive dinners' became all the rage. Great crowds of us would go to someone's house for entree, someone else's for main course and move again for dessert. This entailed piling into cars and driving around in an increasingly intoxicated state to get to the various locations where the next course was being served. There were no breathalysers in those days. Usually Sundays were a quiet recovery day.
T and I shopped at 'Southlands', a new shopping centre close by and outraged some friends with our extravagance. We would spend up to $20 EVERY WEEK on our groceries which included luxury items such as fillet steak, strawberries and avocados.
We had bought a townhouse in Holder in 1974 when house prices started to rise. It cost $19,500 and we had to borrow money for the deposit from T's father and then go to the bank manager cap in hand to get a loan for the rest. We had mission brown tiles laid in the entrance and beige shag pile carpet laid in the living rooms. The furniture we bought was brown, beige and orange and throughout Canberra other young couples embraced the same colours. We bucked the trend a bit by having white bench tops - lime green, bright yellow or orange were much flasher and very popular.
We bought a catamaran and sailed on the lake and watched as new public buildings grew up around it's shore. We felt proud of our city when we showed off the new buildings and beautiful surrounds to interstate visitors.
In 1975 I started teaching in another new school, Holder, which was very close to our new home. One day T and I went for a drive along Namatjira Drive to where the bitumen ended at the top of Fisher. We could see down to the Tuggeranong Valley. A small section of Kambah had just started being built but the valley was a sea of green fields, grazing cattle and sheep and the odd farmhouse.
Another favourite activity at the time was to go on picnics en masse. Popular destinations such as the Cotter dam, Kambah Pool or Lanyon homestead were quite long drives down dirt roads. Every so often we would go to the coast dragging the catamaran and join up with friends who had similar interests.
As time went by we added two to the population of Canberra. We built a house in Kambah on 'mortgage hill' in the Tuggeranong Valley which was called 'nappy valley' at the time.
Having children did somewhat curtail our social activities but our street was full of young children so we would have the occasional street party or street cricket matches. The kids would roam as a mob and have marvellous adventures around the neighbourhood. Everyone would be looking out for everyone else and there was a sense of freedom that I don't think was still around in larger cities such as Sydney anymore.
Our girls eventually went to the Grammar School and we toyed with the idea of moving closer to the school for a while. I mean it did take almost half an hour to get there!!
Canberra has grown. When we moved to Kambah friends from Belconnen (north of the lake) would say they needed to pack a lunch to get to our place! Now we are very close to the physical centre of the city, Canberra has spread out so much. I guess it would take about an hour to get from the southern most suburb to the northern most now. How fabulous is that. Sometimes that is how long it takes just to get three suburbs away in Sydney, if there is a traffic jam.
We love Canberra. The public institutions such as the National Art Gallery, the National Museum, the National Library, the War Memorial, the National Archive, the Canberra Museum and Gallery, not forgetting Parliament House are places of interest which hold contents of significance for all Australians. We regularly visit and enjoy the experiences offered.
We love the four distinct seasons this area of the country has, each bringing with it visual delights. We love that our backyard is filled with wild birds that visit to be hand fed. We love the fact that cattle graze just beyond our fence line and that kangaroos occasionally bounce down our street or have a munch on our lawn.
We love the fact that Canberra is a sophisticated city where we can enjoy quality theatre or concerts, dine in world class establishments or just go for a walk around the lake enjoying nature.
These days you could participate in several organised activities every day, if you had the energy. Canberra is a vital, interesting city which most Australians know little about.
The sense of community, I feel, is what sets Canberra apart from other large cities. We've had a few bushfires in the years since T and I moved here but it was the devastating bushfire of 2003 that really showed the heart of our city. We lost about 500 houses and lost 4 precious residents. Just about everyone knew someone who had had suffered some loss. People collected money, donated clothing, furniture, gave time and effort to help those who had lost so much. We stood shoulder to shoulder and became one. Although it was horrific it unified us as a real community and I felt proud to be a Canberran. I still am.
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