Everything about our Great War soldiers is grabbing our attentions at the moment. And so it it with exquisite timing that ArchivesACT points us to its researches into our territory's soldier settlers.
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Canberra's rabbits are in the news today ("Lakeside rabbits hop out of control" Canberra Times, 9 April) and were in the news, being talked about in federal parliament, in June 1918.
In the House of Representatives the Member for Eden-Monaro, Mr Austin Chapman asked Mr Patrick Glynn, Minister for Home and Territories, "Is it a fact that thousands of acres in the Federal Territory are at present unoccupied, except by rabbits?"
Chapman went on to ask if this land might be taken away from bunnies and allocated to soldiers returning from the Great War, to enable them to have homes and farms?
Mr Glynn made optimistic noises and then in 1920 things really got humming after the Commonwealth Government had acquired 3642 hectares of rabbit-infested federal territory land for soldier settlement.
ArchivesACT has created, for us to play with online, a map of the ACT dappled with coloured shapes representing some of the many often odd-shaped parcels of land leased to soldiers. With a click on a place you bring up a biography of a soldier settler and maps and sometimes photographs telling you the unique story of him and of his block. Canberrans who love this city and who dote on its history will find hours of fun in all this.
Having given Tuggeranong some of the best years of our life we clicked on the Tuggeranong Valley. There we came across returned soldier Darcy Thompson. He became ensconced on a block where once upon a time the federal government had planned to establish the arsenal (the storage place for the munitions of the nation's forces).
It is amusing to think today, given the power of modern, Canberran NIMBYism, of what would happen now if the idea of an ACT arsenal was revived! Modern Canberrans, like the superNIMBYs of the Yarralumla Residents Association, cannot even bear the thought of having the middle classes move into their neighbourhoods, let alone mountains of dynamite. But of course when the arsenal was dreamed of (our map was printed in 1917) there were no householders' backyards for a Tuggers arsenal to be in.
As ArchivesACT explains "In 1916, the Commonwealth compulsorily acquired Tuggeranong, a property owned by the Cunningham family, for the purpose of building an arsenal at Pine Island in the Tuggeranong Valley. After the war the arsenal idea was abandoned and the site was included in the Jerrabomberra-Tuggeranong Soldier Settlement Subdivision, becoming Lanyon Block 4A".
The literally battle-scarred Darcy Thompson was allocated this riverside block, next to the Murrumbidgee.
ArchivesACT reports that, born in 1895, he'd grown up in the Nanima area, between Gundaroo and Murrumbateman, NSW. He enlisted in the AIF in September 1916 and arrived in France in August 1917. A month later, near Ypres in Belgium, he received shrapnel wounds to the face, arms and hand. Eventually, he returned to Australia on the SS Kashmir, a name we will hear again in a moment. He was discharged on July 26, 1919.
He applied in February 1920 for a Soldier Settlement block. Applicants with some experience of bucolic things had the edge, and Thompson said that he'd been farming and grazing all his life, that he had some capital and had 400 sheep. The movers and shakers seem to have been impressed because they gave him Lanyon Block 4A, his first choice. He signed a 25-year lease beginning on April 5, 1920. He was to keep the block until April 1945.
Lanyon Block 4A was next to the Murrumbidgee River but the river frontage was excluded from his lease. But in June 1921 Thompson was granted the right to graze his merino sheep at and around Lanyon Block 20 embracing that favourite playground, the Pine Island public reserve.
Thompson was unusual in that unlike other Soldier Settlers in the Tuggeranong Valley, absentee Soldier Settlers, he lived on his block. He built a house which he named Kashmir after the ship he returned to Australia in after the war.
The property was resumed in 1972 to make way for the development of Tuggeranong and Darcy Thompson died in Canberra on November 6 that year.
ArchivesACT's soldier settler post is at http://www.archives.act.gov.au/repatandrabbits
Scurrying back from Tuggeranong and into the inner city, we come to Lake Burley Griffin's Springbank Island, the subject of Tuesday's column.
Today there is an archaeological dig going on there, and as we arrived at its wharf on Tuesday morning the biggest host of Welcome Swallows (as in our picture by John Bundock) we have ever seen, lived up to the species' name by welcoming us.
Today's there's archaeology going on there but once upon a time, readers reminisce, their memories jogged by Tuesday's discussion of the island, there was a ripper rock concert held there, rather in the spirit of Woodstock.
Callers' memories are vague because, one confided, as was the case at Woodstock, "if you were there then in a sense you weren't there, if you know what I mean". As it happens, as a flower child of those times, (when trees were tangerine and girls had kaleidoscope eyes) we knew exactly what we think he meant.
But with Springbank temporarily in the news again we invite any readers who can remember, through the Fog Of Pleasure, when the concert was and what they did there, to let us know. It sounded like an event of folkloric importance.
