Page 999 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 2013
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of the land on which Canberra was built. We have the original inhabitants of this land as we celebrate our 100th birthday—those people whose connection to this place goes back tens of thousands of years.
As Aunty Agnes reminded us through her welcome to country address, imagine what a difference it could have made if we had been able to have had the understanding we now have of the traditional owners of Australia and their connection to their land. In her usual unassuming, respectful but forceful way, Aunty Agnes made this point, and 100 years on the Governor-General, the Prime Minister and dignitaries listened and understood.
On our centenary birthday, we salute our forefathers, the early pioneers, who carved out an existence on the limestone plains in the 1800s, and those public leaders who understood the need for a neutral nation’s capital and who chose this place as the site for that capital to be built. There were those whose thoughts for the design of the city were guided by idealism fused with practicality—a city built around Griffin’s centrepiece, the magnificent Lake Burley Griffin, a beautifully planned city protected by the mountains and the bush.
There were the tradesmen who came here in the early 1920s, who lived in workers camps as they put up our first govie houses, and the shopkeepers who started our first businesses in Kingston, Manuka and Civic—the beginnings of the thriving business sector we see today which continues to drive the economy of the future. Throughout the 1950s migrants from across the globe arrived here to work on projects like the Snowy Mountains scheme, and later moved here to construct our national institutions and homes, lay our roads, and plant our trees and gardens.
From our earliest days, Canberra has been a multicultural city where people from many different countries and cultures, and from different religious beliefs, are united and strengthened by the place we all call home.
Then there are the thousands of public servants and young families who came from Melbourne in the 60s and 70s to carve out a new life, in new suburbs in a growing city. They are the people that lived in our new suburbs, worked in new local shops, and sent their children to Canberra’s newest schools.
It was a time when we saw Canberra gain recognition, both nationally and internationally, as a university city and a city which demonstrated leadership in scientific endeavours. CSIRO, whose beginnings stretch back to our earliest years—founded in 1926—and the John Curtin School of Medical Research, founded in 1948, expanded in the second half of our first century to be among the world’s great scientific research organisations.
Our own ANU Mt Stromlo Observatory saw us play a key role in one of the world’s most significant historical events—like in June 1969 when our own Honeysuckle Creek Tracking Station provided the world with those first grainy pictures of the Apollo 11 moon walk. It was a proud moment for this city and our scientific community, and one which represents how much we have achieved and hints at what else is yet to be in our next 100 years.
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