In 1944, one of the best known public servants in Canberra came up the driveway at a neighbours' house on Flinders Way near Manuka and handed their 14-year-old son a large album of black-and-white photographs.
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Canberra was still a very small place then - everyone knew everyone - but it had come a long way in the three decades since it was named. Journalist Warren Denning in the 1930s had found "strangely but truly there are people living here, living quite ordinary lives ... and they are living and loving and laughing and quarrelling and dying and singing and cursing and betting and eating and sleeping ... just like people anywhere else".
But this was still a unique city, staffed with public servants and families who clearly remembered the early days when the federal capital had neither a butcher's shop nor a barber, but its administrators had plans for accommodating 70,000 residents.
William James "Jack" Mildenhall entrusted the album to a young John Stevenson, the son of Robert and Mary Stevenson. The couple had moved to Queanbeyan in 1925 and the new suburb of Griffith a year later.
No, the album wasn't meant for John's parents, who were themselves highly involved in the city's social and political development. Mildenhall was certain that it was a gift for the young lad.
Inside, the album's pages contained a series of large black-and-white photographs depicting the ceremony to name the city of Canberra. March 12, 1913, lived on in complete clarity on the album's pages, with photographs, too, of the riverways which gave the Canberra region the edge over alternative sites for the new Australian capital.
'The city beautiful'
It was the perfect day's weather. In the days prior, an autumn storm tore across the Limestone Plains and the Melbourne newspapers gleefully hoped the bad run would continue and ruin plans to shift Parliament away from the Victorian capital.
But the sun shone and the rain stayed away when the crowd - some 3000 of them - trooped in from Queanbeyan and surrounds to see Australia's new federal capital named.
"The response of the unexpectedly large crowd - local population and hundreds of VIPs alike," historian David Headon notes, "was so enthusiastic that an hour before the commencement of the ambitious program, at 10.30 in the morning, the purpose-built stand was at capacity and all the best general public vantage points taken. Even the branches of the nearby trees bent under the weight of inquisitive youngsters come in from the region's isolated farms."
The popular Lord and Lady Denman arrived separately. Lady Denman first in a car, then the governor-general Lord Thomas Denman, a short time later on horseback, with a light horse escort. More than 700 troops were part of the ceremonial parade that day, Headon writes.
The real attraction that day was not the performance of laying the three foundation stones - one for Lord Denman, prime minister Andrew Fisher, and home affairs minister King O'Malley - but the naming of the city.
That task fell to Lady Denman, the chain-smoking daughter of an avowed feminist with a well-formed social conscience who had been rabbit shooting on horseback the day before. Trudie was presented with a gold case containing the city's name.
"Can-bra," she said, in her English accent. That famous moment cemented the official pronunciation of the federal capital's new name.
After the show of foundation stone laying and city naming, the invited guests and dignitaries retired to a large tent for lunch and speeches.
Andrew Fisher, hardly a renowned public speaker, said he hoped in the future, the city would be where the best thoughts of Australia would be given expression. "I hope this city will be the seat of learning as well as of politics, and it will also be the home of art," he said.
But, Headon argues, he was upstaged by the governor-general.
"Let us hope ... that here a city may arise where those responsible for the government of this country in the future may seek and find inspiration in its noble buildings, its broad avenues, its shaded parks and sheltered gardens - a city bearing perhaps some resemblance to the city beautiful of our dreams," Lord Denman said.
O'Malley, ever the showman, had presided over the day like a king, The Queanbeyan Age correspondent wrote. He was "monarch of all he surveyed". The photographs show the charismatic minister had been in full flight laying the third foundation stone.
"All subsequent Australian political history will congregate its searchlight on this place where we congregate - a magnetic centre of attraction to the eyes of countless generations still unborn," O'Malley said.
The photographs don't capture the giving of speeches in the luncheon marquee. But in the sunshine outside, atop the platform where the foundation stones were laid, it is easy to detect the optimism required to embark on a new city.
Many of the people in those images would not return from the battlefields of the Great War. Most of the Duntroon cadets who had formed the guard of honour for Lord Denman's arrival were dead by the end of 1918.
The optimism of March 12, 1913, would give way to economic and social hardship that threatened to scupper Canberra. Perhaps the photographs became a reminder of why building a new city on the Limestone Plains mattered.
The hand of the compiler
Jack Mildenhall was transferred to Canberra in January 1920. The trip from the railway station at Yass in a Commonwealth car with his wife and 18-month-old daughter took 4.5 hours, and required Mildenhall to open countless gates on the rough road into Acton. When the Mildenhall family arrived, Jack had to ask the driver whether the smattering of buildings was indeed the federal city. "I was too dumbfounded to make further inquiries and resolved to allow the situation to clarify itself in its own good time," he recalled in 1960.
A year later, Mildenhall wrote to the Department of Works to offer his services as a photographer. Working on his own time - and then as the Federal Capital Commission's official photographer from 1926 - Mildenhall worked to capture the life and work going on in the new capital.
The National Archives now hold more than 7000 glass plates taken by Mildenhall, which include pictures of the construction of Parliament House, the laying of roads, growing suburbs and the people finding their way in a city barely hewn from the plains.
Mary Hutchinson, whose book Developing Images, a compilation of Mildenhall's pictures, was published by the National Archives in 2000, said Mildenhall had "an eye for the everyday and the human aspect of the grand, national project". Mildenhall's pictures showed the new buildings and infrastructure projects of the capital - and the people working to make them.
Mildenhall was demoted as the official photographer after a commercial photographer in Canberra complained in 1935 Mildenhall had a monopoly on the available work. This prompted an inquiry which put a stop to the arrangements with Mildenhall. He continued to take some photographs but was nowhere near as prolific.
The National Museum of Australia's Anne Faris says there is some conjecture about whether Mildenhall took the pictures in the album himself. In 1913, Mildenhall would have been in his early 20s, and six years into a career with the federal public service.
Faris says it's more likely he didn't take the photos himself, but printed them from glass plates he was charged with maintaining during his time at the Federal Capital Commission.
David Headon thinks the pictures were taken by Claude Vautin, a member of Charles Scrivener's surveying party who identified the site for the new capital.
But an album is itself a unique art form whoever took the pictures, Verna Posever Curtis argues in her recent history Photographic Memory: the album in the age of photography. Indeed, "the hand of the compiler is present on every page".
Curator Ian Coates says the sequence of the images gives an impression like a film.
"The difference between reading about, 'Oh, there's an album', and then actually seeing what it is, and seeing the way in which the images in it give you a different insight into what was going on at that time," Coates says.
"The power of those images is so striking. You can see the emotions on people's faces. You can see just the way people are moving. You can see the riverscapes. It brings the past into the present in a way that words don't."
Mildenhall's album, though, raises more questions than it answers. Why was it compiled? Was it one of a series? Why give it a 14-year-old, of all people?
Perhap Mildenhall wanted to make sure a future generation of Canberrans knew the history of his city at a time when political forces were ever ready to mobilise against its construction and completion. After all, Mildenhall had recorded the effort that had already gone into the new capital - why should that be left to waste?
In December, the album given to John Stevenson entered the collection of the National Museum of Australia. Mr Stevenson's widow, Judith Stevenson, said at a small ceremony to mark the occasion that she and her family were excited to have the album join the museum's permanent collection.
"I don't know the reason why [Mildenhall] would come up the driveway with that under his arm and say, 'I'd like John to have this'," Mrs Stevenson said in December.
"I think [John] must have pondered on it at some stage. But Mildenhall and John's dad were great friends and maybe he wanted to hand it on to somebody who he thought would really appreciate it in the future.
"And he did."