Roger Smith

NewActon resident with memories of Old Acton
Interview: December, 2013

“My name is Roger Smith. I was born in England and came to Australia as a ten-pound migrant with my family in early 1951. We came straight to Canberra because it was the 'Capital City of Australia', but it had only about 40,000 people then, and the railway station was the same as it is now. It was quite a shock to the system. We arrived and said ‘my goodness, where on earth have we come to?’ But we did have a house to come to which was good. My father came to be head gardener of Government House, so we had a house in Yarralumla. Westridge was still there at the time, the brickworks were still operating, and they were still building weatherboard houses in Yarralumla. Deakin wasn’t there - Yarralumla was it. That was as far as you could go in that direction, except along the Cotter Road.

I went to Canberra High School and did all my high school studies there in the original building, where the School of Art is now. We go to the little café there now and it's still pretty much the same, however the surrounds have changed a lot. There was a football field where the School of Music is now, and there were sports grounds for the High School where the covered multi-storey car park close to the School of Music is. We used to play tennis there, and play football on the oval. I remember the old Canberra House, which was - when I arrived - the British High Commission. And then, later on, it became the Canberra Club. It's been through a few different incarnations. In Civic, there were only the two old original buildings, East Row and West Row.

The lake was not there until 1964, so the trip to and from school each day was over the old two-lane trestle Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. The Molonglo River, however, provided a great source of adventure and recreation to kids of the City in those days.”