Your columnist was a fly on the wall (well, more of a European wasp, really) at a recent gathering at Gungahlin College where students and politicians discussed the enormous range of facilities that Gungahliners don't yet have. For example, there is no swimming pool (nor has the first sod of one been turned yet) and no cinema.
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It struck me later that no one had complained about Gungahlin not having any tennis courts.
Tennis is in eclipse in Australia (young people no longer want to log off their computers and go out into the uneventful outdoors), especially in Canberra.
Today, tennis courts probably rank 999th on young Gungahliners' wish lists.
How Australia and Canberra have changed. Tennis courts (with little hut-pavilions attached for shade and for people to drink tea, eat cake and flirt in) were once thought essential to civilisation. They civilised pioneering places. In early Canberra, my reading suggests, this little city may well have had the highest ratio of tennis courts to people of anywhere else in Christendom, symbolising just how middle-class and British we were (for foreigners and the working classes never played tennis).
Had it been settled and developed in the 1920s, Gungahlin would have got a glut of tennis courts hard on the heels of its roads, sewers and piped water.
Look at the following news item from a Canberra Times of October 1927 during a spell of frenzied growth here. There is a kind of tennis cult going on.
''NINETEEN COURTS FOR TENNIS PLAYERS. Plans have been tentatively adopted by the Federal Capital Commission for the provision of 19 additional tennis courts in the city area. The plans, as they at present stand, provide for a group of six central courts for the purpose of the Canberra Tennis Association and 13 in various suburban areas. The courts for the Association will be situated in the reserve adjoining the oval at Manuka. They will be of the ant-bed type, and will be used primarily for tournament matches and the entertainment of visiting teams. The provision of these courts has been the subject of representations from the Association to the Commission for a considerable period.''
The above photograph was taken at the official opening of those Manuka courts, and notice how the four important chaps about to play a game of celebrity men's doubles - John Latham, Sir Littleton Groom, Dr Earle Page and Sir John Butters - are dressed for tennis in the predominantly white, well-covered way one did take to the courts in those days.
''The courts to be provided in the suburbs,'' the Times story continued, ''will all be constructed of gravel and ant-bed, and a pavilion will be built at each centre. Two courts will be provided at North Ainslie in the crescent east of Canberra Avenue, and a further two courts will also be built at Ainslie in the reserve near the Presbyterian Church site. At Ainslie, an additional court will be provided adjacent to the existing courts, near the children's playground.
''Two courts will be built at South Ainslie in the recreation reserve near the the Methodist Church site.
''On the southern side of the river, two courts will be provided at Eastlake in the section immediately south-east of the Printers' Quarters. Two courts will also be installed at Red Hill in the area near the Blandfordia courts, whilst a further two at Red Hill will be constructed in the reserve south-east of Blandfordia Circle, near the dam.''
Some of these tennis court sites still exist but are now given over to community gardens.
Cabbages grow now where once busy Dunlop Volleys scuffed the whitewash lines painted onto the ant-bed surfaces.
And the young people of today don't know what an ''ant-bed type'' of surface was.
