A community dedicated to remembering and preserving the stories of Canberrans has written its last chapter after more than two decades.
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But the legacy of the Canberra Stories Group will live on through its publications, records and photographs.
One of these recorded tales is of former Manuka Pool manager John Taverner’s first encounter with Don Bradman as a 10 or 11-year-old boy in the early 1960s.
‘‘‘The Don’ had come out of retirement to play for the Prime Minister’s XI at Manuka Oval,’’ founding member Mary Hutchinson said.
‘‘[Mr Taverner] went to the match, not quite sure who ‘the Don’ was, saw him hit two stupendous balls and then get bowled out on the third,’’ she said. ‘‘After the game, to his amazement, the crowd started digging up the pitch for a souvenir of where the great man had stood. He thought about the situation for a while after he got home and then in the early evening went back to the oval, climbed the fence, got into the scoreboard and found the Don’s nameplate. ‘‘Back at home his father nailed it to the shed and as John said, ‘The rest of that summer everyone used to come to my place to be ‘the Don’. They stood under the plate and faced the balls’’.
Canberra Stories Group will launch its final project this week – the digitisation of images held in the private collections of contributors who have made their photographs available for publication and exhibition – as it celebrates two decades of collecting, writing and publishing.
Former Arts Council of the ACT and ACT Library Service community literature officers, Ms Hutchinson and her former colleague, Annie Bolitho, became aware of an interest in documenting the experiences of long-term residents who moved to Canberra from the 1920s.
The group was born from a community festival at Manuka Pool after an informal group tasked with contributing to a publication decided to continue their work on Canberra’s social history.
“We saw there was a great interest in telling and starting to document the stories of Canberra that looked like they were about to disappear,” Ms Hutchinson said.
“People often think of Canberra as just its national capital identity, [but] there are many stories of Australians who came to the place to build a city that are often ignored...since that time there has been a lot more happen in the way of telling the story of Canberra and in a way Canberra Stories Group was a pioneer.’’
Much of the organisation’s focus has been on collaborating with a wide number of contributors to produce eight publications on the region’s social history.
The group has also used its knowledge and networks to assist with other projects, including the development of the Kingston historical storyboards along Wentworth Avenue near the foreshore.
Digitising private photographs, the Canberra Stories Group’s last hurrah, would ensure this kind of history lived on.
The project and the group’s records will go to the ACT Heritage Library.