Treasures put last week under the protection of the ACT Heritage Register include three delightful scrapbook-like volumes illuminated with paintings of the early ACT, its places and creatures.
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Descriptively titled the The Jefferis and Whelen Historical Documentation of Canberra (a dull name for three vivacious journals), the works record impressions gathered by George Jefferis and John Whelen in and around the Federal Capital Territory between 1926 and 1932.
As well as eyewitness accounts, the journals bristle with hundreds of photographs and other illustrations, including George Jefferis' sometimes primitive but always cheerful and lively watercolours.
The beauty of the journals, the essence of their heritage pricelessness, is that they are an account of early Canberra not, for once, by administrators and public servants but by two common but inquisitive Canberrans. Jefferis and Whelen were employees, porters and waiters, of the Hotel Canberra. They were fascinated by the infant capital and its folk and by the still unspoiled natural environment that surrounded the city's site.
Julia Ryan the president of the Canberra and District Historical Society, custodian of these treasures, says we should think of the three venerable books as works of social history.
Most of the photographs in the books are unique and capture sites that no longer exist and people as they were living during the early years of the Federal Capital Territory. The authors' bush journeys were often rugged excursions undertaken before many marked tracks were formed in the territory.
Historical Society research shows that George Jefferis was born in Canterbury, England. As a youth he attended a charitable school for the poor, and migrated to Australia in 1925. His claims to fame appear to include his being pioneeringly the first man in the Federal Capital Territory to be granted a decree for the dissolution of marriage. He instigated divorce proceedings against his wife in 1934 when she refused to join him in Australia.
John Whelen was born in Cardiff, Wales. He and his mother arrived in Canberra in 1929. He was a waiter and porter at the Hotel Canberra from 1929 to 1941.
By a set of curious chances, the forgotten journals landed in 1986, from a donor in England, in the grateful lap of the Historical Society. This reporter has just been to see them at the society's quaint premises at Curtin Shops.
On their FCT bush travels, the two men covered an estimated 2100 kilometres, with Jefferis especially alert to Nature. As well as his bold, impressionistic watercolours of the bigger creatures he saw, such as what he called "the native porcupine" (echidnas), eagles, lyrebirds and dingos, he made detailed semi-scientific illustrations of exquisite and brilliantly coloured local insects he found on his bush travels. He did some of that collecting, for example, on a memorable and idyllic-sounding ascent of Mount Coree on a sparkling day when "blue and purple bush flowers and wild violets were plentiful".
The books do have some of the qualities of scrapbooks (for example, photographs and maps are pasted in to them) but of very sophisticated, systematic scrapbooks. Julia Ryan thinks the authors/compilers may have hoped that these homemade books would be formally published. Volume One opens quite formally with the authors' sentiment that the works are "Dedicated to the Pioneers of the FCT and their descendants ..." This dedication comes with a snatch of "Banjo" Paterson verse in praise of "the brave old pioneers" who "fought the wilderness" in ways in which Jefferis and Whelen felt it had been fought to prepare the way for Australia's federal capital city.
There are plans to have these delicate treasures (at the society each has its own special, conservation-promoting box) fully digitised and so made available online. Meanwhile where possible the Canberra and District Historical Society will show them off by appointment.
