The year 1915 is on all thinking Australians' minds (for it brings the centenary of the Gallipoli horror) and so here, as a glimpse of the way we were, is a 1915 photograph of the Gundaroo Public School football team.
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Probably, some of these boys have fathers and brothers away at the front.
We run this poignant picture not just for a wallow in centenary nostalgia, but also because the little school the boys played football for 100 years ago is about to celebrate its 150th birthday.
Anyone and everyone with a Gundaroo connection is invited to an afternoon and evening of activities at the school on Saturday, March 21.
Local politicians will make awe-inspiring cameo appearances. The Gala Lunch commences at midday and then, after musical performances, speeches, cake cutting and tree planting, the day concludes with what sounds like a blessedly hip hop-free Old Style Dance that gallivants on till a demandingly late 9.30pm, that will agitate the local bunyips.
And, of course, all local bunyips and lots of other species would have long since fled from the Gundaroo neighbourhood if the federal capital city had been built there.
The Gundaroo site was still, peripherally, in the running when early in January 1909, surveyor Charles Scrivener sallied forth to cast a surveyor's eye over Yass-Canberra. Scrivener did give Gundaroo a professional ogling but decided that the site lacked "essentials". Instead, he chose pastoral Canberra on the banks of the Molonglo.
Organisers of the 150th birthday jamboree have done some probing of the school's history and have found the school always struggling to have enough pupils to justify its existence in the eyes of the powers that be.
Early in the 1870s, the town decided to withhold the teacher's salary until he had recruited 15 pupils.
Teacher Mr A. J. Slatterie (teacher from January 1871 to October 1872) took on this challenge and seems to have met it but, alas, failing to rise to the challenge of finding a wife, was eventually dismissed because there was no Mrs Slatterie to give the local girls lessons in sewing.
The Gundaroo organisers have unearthed a 1915 head office Rules For Women Teachers.
"You will not marry during the term of your contract. You will not keep company with men. You must be home between the hours of 8pm and 6am, unless attending school functions. You may not loiter in any of the town's ice-cream bars; you may not dress in bright colours; and you must wear at least two petticoats."
That's the way we were in 1915 and the way we are in Canberra in 2015 it seems to this columnist, a keen student of these things, we are living in almost post-gardening times.
We mention this because the latest, revised edition (the fifth) of the influential Australian Plants for Canberra region gardens has just arrived on our desk with a thunk. It "thunks" because it is a big (and a beautiful) book of several hundred photographs of native species and of detailed advice about coaxing the best from them.
The authors and publishers (movers and shakers of the Australian Native Plants Society) asked me to launch the book (I begged them, in vain, to find someone of importance, like Tony Abbott). In my shy address, I suggested that theirs is, really, a rather plucky book. It is like a very lovely edition of the bible published for a society in which there are very few Christians. It is native plant pearl cast before Floriade-besotted swine.
Fewer and fewer new homes have gardens at all [the McMansions take up all of the block) and fewer folk have the time to be true gardeners. On top of this, the promise of the 1970s that Australian gardeners might be getting over their phobic ignorance of their continent's flora, doesn't seem to have been fulfilled. In plant nurseries, native stock is a fraction of what's on sale. Native plants are famously bird-attracting but to haunt plant nurseries is to watch people (in their ignorance reading plant labels with the word "prostrate" on them and pronouncing the word "prostate") buying bird-repelling exotics to take home to plant in their sterile and uneventful "easy care" gardens.
And from the point of view of a hotly ideological person like myself, I chided my audience of native plant enthusiasts, one wonders why the book doesn't contain a little sermon evangelising about why we should all be doing at least some of our gardening with these plants instead of with exotic horrors. Is it only because they're pretty? Surely it's more than that.
Core of my heart, my country. An Australian garden, as well as being for the attracting of Australian creatures, is an expression of the best kind of quiet patriotism. It says of its creators that they are well adjusted, now, to this unique continent, that they see the unique beauty in its flora and want to have it at their doorsteps.
Honest love of Australia takes all sorts of closely related forms. The same Australia-loving part of us that has been horrified by the creation of Australian knights and dames, by our being too timid to become a republic, is the part of us that knows, instinctively, that an Australian garden without an Australian wattle (or a banksia, or a grevillea, or a correa) is unAustralian, backward, boring and wicked.
Australian Plants for Canberra region gardens will cost $30 when, soon, it goes on sale in discerning bookshops. One of those will be the one at the Australian National Botanic Gardens.
