Friday's column was devoted to a reverent description of the early morning (6.30am) Anzac Day Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commemoration Ceremony on the slopes of Mount Ainslie. There is a discreet little memorial there (just a simple plaque fixed to some lichen-covered rocks) acknowledging the sacrifice and service of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians. Several readers who thought they knew every inch of Canberra have told us they didn't know this memorial existed and they're readily forgiven since it is in an obscure, under-signposted and bushy place (the habitat of echidnas and kangaroos and, on warmer days than chilly Anzac Day, snakes) and because the Anzac Day service there is seldom if ever reported. This columnist may be the first Canberra Times reporter ever to attend it.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
Pam Walker, seeing Friday's piece (which by the way was available on Thursday, Anzac Day itself, for those who are embracing this paper's dashing 21st-century website) has enlightened us about the history of the memorial.
''It was the idea of an extraordinary lady, the late Honor Thwaites who lived on neighbouring Cobby Street [in Campbell] and who began the weed-clearing and establishment of the Remembrance Nature Park [RNP] behind the Australian War Memorial with a small group of neighbours including my husband and me in about 1986.
''The RNP was in fact her initiative to counter the gazetted [proposed building of] line of houses on the bush side of Cobby Street, which she felt was totally at odds with the sweep of bushland which ought to remain around the War Memorial itself. She won that battle and got the houses degazetted (with a lot of lobbying and getting a number of the great and the good on her side - she was very persuasive). Then she set about organising to make at least that limited area of Mt Ainslie more accessible to people visiting the War Memorial by making tracks through it, leading to the summit of a small hill, now crowned with a seat and called 'Honor's View'.
''Our group met every month for weed-clearing and so on and Honor went on to suggest that we designate a particularly beautiful and secluded spot as the site for a small plaque to honour Aboriginal members of the military … it must have been established by about 1988, the year of the Bicentennial. There was a very simple ceremony at the time to inaugurate the plaque … certainly [with] ACT government and planning people, representatives from the armed forces and, of course, members of the Aboriginal community. I'm sure some of the local wildlife [much in evidence there this Anzac Day with a mob of kangaroos bounding past us] attended as well.''
When a bunny abundance ran the capital ragged
Our sweet city's misguided critics gibber about Canberra being a good sheep station, spoiled. But with more wit and with a better knowledge of history they might accuse that Canberra is in fact a great rabbit warren spoiled. There were millions, perhaps billions of rabbits here when in 1911 the federal government took over this place as the Federal territory.
In a new book Charles Robert Scrivener: The Surveyor Who Sited Australia's National Capital Twice to be launched any day now author Terry Birtles has this lovely eyewitness (and nose-witness too) report from the editor of the Sydney journal Building who in 1912 had just been to Canberra.
''The heat of the day is oppressive, and the smell of poisoned rabbits which hung over the atmosphere did not make the prospect more cheerful. Australia's capital site is simply honeycombed with their warrens. They had already built their Federal City, and in the evening dusk crowded in their myriads upon their piazzas.''
And while on rabbits and the infant Canberra, 100 years ago almost to the day the Sydney weekly The Bulletin published, on its cover, an illustration of a gentleman standing in a very barren Australian wilderness (there are dead trees and birds half eagle/half vulture cruise the skies waiting for something edible to drop dead of thirst) watching two rabbits. What is going on?
The God-forsaken place is Canberra, the site chosen, to the horror of the pro-Dalgety Bulletin, for the federal capital city. The Bulletin had always argued, using site-defaming cartoons like this one, that the Canberra site was a desert and that the Cotter River was a puny creek that couldn't support a city.
The gentleman watching the rabbits is the English government agricultural commissioner and famous adventure novelist H.Rider Haggard (epics like King Solomon's Mines, the Viking romance Eric Brighteyesand Montezuma's Daughter). He was visiting Australia at this time 100 years ago and went to see the Canberra site.
Afterwards, at a dinner at Yass, he reported ''We were conducted to the exact spot upon which will stand the Parliament House of Australia. It was occupied by two rabbits. (Laughter.) I saw them both. (Laughter.)''
This illustration is the weekly's exploitation of the eminent visitor's report; another chance to have a dig at the alleged awfulness of the vermin-infested site (The Bulletin, like the aforementioned Scrivener, thought a Dalgety site would be better).
But as we now know a beauteous city has arisen here, even if the relatives of the two rabbits Rider Haggard saw are still among us in bunny abundance.
