There are some famous, even some household names on the list sent to Gang-gang of 22 of ''Queanbeyan's great achievers'' to be recognised in the Honour Walk that's to be opened on Friday in the city's new Crawford Street Precinct.
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But there on the list, sandwiched between the thick crusty slices of familiar names like those of David Campese and Ricky Stuart are folk, like the Reverend Alberto Dias Soares, some of us have never heard before.
A little research finds that Soares (1830-1909), of Portuguese stock, was the minister at Queanbeyan's Christ Church from 1857-77. He seems to have been joint-designer of the surviving and really rather lovely Christ Church (and he was architect of a plethora of religious buildings in these parts). He arrived in Queanbeyan in 1857 and rolled up his sleeves and building commenced, and lo, the first service came to pass (and your columnist uses those words advisedly) on October 7, 1860.
He was too a talented water-colour artist and engraver (he really seems to have earned his guernsey on the Honour Walk) and here is a print the National Library of Australia has among its treasures of his own painting, done in the 1860s, of his own Christ Church. Look how very bucolic that Queanbeyan was, and look how truthfully the artist has captured the scragginess of the gum tree in the foreground, at a time when lots of artists in the antipodes (Soares was a migrant from England) beautified scruffy Australian trees to look like the presentable oaks and elms of home.
Meanwhile, we continue to duel, in a gentlemanly fashion, with Queanbeyan's Mayor Tim Overall over his imaginative attempts to claim the author Miles Franklin as a daughter of Queanbeyan. Alas, Your Worship, here comes another setback for you!
To recap - Overall wants Franklin for his for-the-time-being really rather threadbare Queanbeyan Cultural Hall of Fame. Its star, unless Overall really can pocket Miles Franklin, is going to have to be George Lazenby, the tallest man ever to play James Bond. But as reported Yass's claim to her has always seemed more substantial and now it turns out that even Queanbeyan used to think so. In the Local and General column of the Queanbeyan Age of September 26, 1911, we find the item ''Miss Miles Franklin, the Yass authoress, [Gang-gang's emphasis] and the writer of My Brilliant Career, is at present in London.''
