As reported in this paper's reliable news pages and in this unreliable column, one of them, in spite of being of heritage importance, is to be demolished. It is a Mr Fluffy house.

Canberra historian Jennifer Horsfield has been reminded by these Tocumwal mentions of how the Australian National University's exalted Professor Marcus Oliphant "made himself locally unpopular in 1953".

She points to how he wrote to The Canberra Times complaining that the view from his grand home high on a hillside was spoilt by his having to look down on the Tocumwal cottages that had been erected in the suburbs of O'Connor and Turner.

What was upsetting Oliphant was what he could see of the new, bare, God-forsaken looking O'Connor of our circa 1952 picture.

Horsfield points to how "two loyal Canberrans, Jim Fraser (the territory's second member elected to the House of Representatives) and William McLaren, Secretary to the Department of the Interior, both wrote letters in reply, with a stinging rebuff of Oliphant's comments".

Alerted by her, we have time-travelled back to the Canberra of May 1953 to look at this imbroglio. Jim Fraser's letter of rebuff turns out to be a kind of masterpiece of rebuffery.

We had been all set, alerted to the row, to find Oliphant a pioneering Canberra FWW (First World Whinger). But, in fact, his long letter to the Times is about much more than just how "the outlook from my house across O'Connor becomes increasingly depressing every day". He alleges that the ghastliness of what he can see is typical of the mindlessness of Canberra planners. He emerges as really rather green, grieving over arborophobic planners' destructions of irreplaceable "veteran and stately trees".

"All existing schemes of development are characterised by a ruthless destruction of every living tree to make room for regimented hutments of substandard wooden houses.

"The villages of painted wooden houses will prove a costly investment. No one with any taste will care to live there when better suburbs are developed and these areas will inevitably become the dumping grounds for those who care nothing for their surroundings. It will not be long before citizens of Canberra are ashamed to let visitors see these slums..."

And Oliphant, an atomic scientist, convinced of the likelihood of nuclear war, had a special, very Cold War criticism of these arrangements of painted, wooden houses.

"The [capital city] of a country is potentially a target for ... weapons of total destruction. The close-packed areas of wooden houses, painted with inflammable paint, seem expressly designed to burst into flames if such attacks are made upon Canberra, roasting the inhabitants alive in a tornado-like inferno rivalling those of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."

The admirable Jim Fraser, a Labor man in the days when being Labor meant something (it meant you had a sincere place in your heart and soul for the plights of the working classes and an innate contempt for haughty toffs), leapt to compose a rebuff. It was published two days after Oliphant's letter.

"It may be that the outlook from Professor Oliphant's hillside home in O'Connor becomes, as he complains, 'increasingly depressing'. But what is the outlook of many hundreds in this community who are waiting, often in most uncomfortable and depressing circumstances, for the homes which can be provided quickly and at something like a reasonable rent only by application of some methods of standardisation [as represented by the 200 almost identical Tocumwal homes]?

"Should these people continue to wait, in tents and caravans under the gum trees on Mount Ainslie and Black Mountain, and in garages and 'hutments' elsewhere, for the construction of the more extensive, and expensive, homes the professor commends?"

Fraser seethed at Oliphant's reference to "dumping grounds for those who care nothing for their surroundings".

"I remind him that some of the meanest homes, externally, in Canberra are the most beautifully kept and neatly furnished real homes of Canberra families, be they ever so humble and be they in Westlake, Causeway or Acton.

"The magnificent home of Professor Marcus Oliphant occupies a splendid site on a hillside north of Black Mountain. It is a home of approximately 33 squares ... it cost something in the vicinity of £17,000.

"This money was provided by the Australian taxpayers, some of whom are the people who have been happy to move into the 'painted wooden homes' Professor Oliphant abhors."

As for the vision of the inhabitants of the painted wooden homes being roasted alive in a tornado-like inferno, Fraser fancied that "surely the main target of any force attacking Canberra would be the atom-smashing plant established [especially for Professor Oliphant] at the National University at Acton".

"Perhaps this equipment, for the general safety of the people of Canberra, should have been housed in some remote gorge in the mountains."

Readers will get some sense of what Oliphant was on about from our aerial photograph. That 1952 bailiwick does look bare and forlorn, and so suspiciously treeless that Oliphant was probably correct in accusing there'd been a "ruthless destruction" of any trees in the way of the straight lines the planners had drawn. But then, of course, all new Canberra neighbourhoods look bare and forlorn until their trees and gardens get a wriggle on. What would Oliphant, looking down now from his magnificent mansion, think of the view today? Would it, instead of depressing him, elate him?