T
here are always local agitations for a better road from Canberra to the sea, especially when, as recently, terrible accidents happen along the present inadequate ribbon of tarmacadam of the Kings Highway. There are always shenanigans about which governments should pay which proportion of the cost of that better highway.
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But this history-conscious column notes that these sorts of agitations are not new. In 1926, in editions of that plucky, pioneering new weekly The Canberra Times (published every Thursday), there are occasional tantalising references to the efforts of an evocatively named Canberra-To-The-Sea-League.
Everything to do with Canberrans' forced separation from the sea (for the federal capital city had to be built somewhere far inland with a frosty, ''bracing'' climate), their ingrained Australian hankerings for the seaside and their lemming-like journeys to it is fascinating.
Meanwhile, the league remains a little shadowy. What drove it? What became of it? At first sight Canberra-To-The-Sea sounds excitingly like an ideological rallying cry for a movement that wants to move the city to the coast after all, to right the wrong of beginning it where there are no beaches. But no, that's not it.
On October 7, 1926 the Times reported, ''A deputation from the Canberra-To-The-Sea-League will wait on the federal ministers at Canberra on Monday next, to urge on the federal government the advisability of constructing a good road from Canberra to the coast, via Hoskins' Town [sic] and Braidwood to Moruya and Bateman's Bay.''
But that audience seems to have resulted in a rebuff for the league. The following week's Times reported ''CANBERRA-TO-THE-SEA. A number of Braidwood residents visited Canberra this week to wait on the acting prime minister [Dr. Earle Page]. The deputation … asked him to grant a sum of money to enable the formation of a road from Canberra to Braidwood. This road, they urged, would give direct connection between Canberra and the seaside resort at Bateman's Bay, thus giving Canberra residents an easy outlet to the sea.''
The deputation told Page that Jack Lang, the Labor premier of NSW, had promised to contribute 50 per cent towards the cost of the road if only the federal government would do likewise. But Page, a conservative and an ideological opponent of Lang, was sceptical about Lang's trustworthiness. Why would Lang fork out half the cost, Page interrogated, when he (Lang) had recently rejected the federal government's generous offer to contribute £1 on top of every 15 shillings NSW spent on roads?
What an interesting route to the coast this one would have been, apparently sidestepping the hamlet of Bungendore, dooming it to inertia but transforming Hoskinstown, today almost the sleepiest spot on earth, into a throbbing, pausing place for coast-going Canberrans.
