More of My Canberra Story

I've written before about the first house my family lived in when we arrived in Canberra. It was a house tied to my father's employment, and we were there for about three years.

After those three years we had risen to the top of the Government housing list and we were offered a new house in one of the (then) outer suburbs of Belconnen. Mum and Dad didn't want us to change schools yet again, so they agitated for a house that would allow us to stay at the same school.

The house we were eventually offered was an ex air force house which had been relocated from the country town of Tocumwal in the late 1940s as a rapid response to a serious housing shortage. About 200 houses had been relocated, many of them to O'Connor.

The Tocumwal Houses in O'Connor 

During World War 2 the American and Australian governments had jointly funded a major aircraft base for the US Army Air Corps at Tocumwal on the New South Wales-Victorian border. Barracks accommodating nearly 4000 personnel were built, designed externally to look like civilian houses to give the appearance from the air of an ordinary township and so avoid detection. 

The huts were made of weatherboard up to window sill height, and had fibro (fibreboard) sheeting between timber windows, and no ceilings or internal linings. The roofs were corrugated iron. After the war they were dismantled and transported by road to Canberra.

When they arrived in Canberra they were refitted as houses with a bathroom and separate indoor toilet, and the walls and ceilings were lined with fibreboard. Our house was a three bedroom house and originally had a cast iron wood burning range in the kitchen, and no other heating apart from a small wood stove in the lounge room. It was on a large block of land (¼ acre was common back then) and had an excellent climbing tree (a silver birch) in the front garden.

I have highlighted 1 Tate Street, our home for about 6 years

They were never the most desirable of houses, and there were objections that the relocated buildings were ‘sub-standard houses’ which would lower the value of houses in the surrounding suburbs. As time went on people put faux brick cladding on the houses, built in the verandahs and generally altered the appearance to make them more acceptable.

Then, in 1985 - nine years after we moved house yet again - the house we had lived in was burnt out, demolished, and replaced with a very large brick house. I doubt if anyone mourned its loss.

The newspaper article about the house burning down

Which makes it ironic that the area - and specifically the houses - were added to the Australian Capital Territory Heritage Register in 1998 and the ACT Heritage Register under the Heritage Act of 2004.