Suburb #7 Gilmore

We were not intending to go to Gilmore but were unable to find food for sale in the centre of all things (i.e.Fadden), hence, we had a lovely late brunch at the Rose Cottage in Gilmore and decided to check out the suburb while we were there.

Gilmore, still in Tuggers, is named after poet (see below) and journalist Dame Mary Gilmore (aka the lady on the $10 note) - and hence the streets in the suburb are also named after female journalists.

My garden was a wilderness
Of weeds that mimicked woes;
And then love came, and at a touch
Each weed became a rose.

 

Rose Cottage turned out to be the highlight of our Gilmore visit really. It is rather like Old Canberra Inn. Built in 1870s. It is a lovely cafe/pub/nursery and surrounded  by lovely roses (funny that). Long way to go for a beer from Braddon, but certainly worth a visit for a milkshake :)

Gilmore seemed quite similar to Fadden except they haven't even tried to maintain any local shops. It is also much flatter with less fancy houses. It had lots of basketball hoops everywhere, a house with a weird fence and a house with a tire in the front yard - and the Canberra classic of a shopping trolley dumped in a park.

  

And just because not including a photo with a basketball hoop wouldn't be right...  

Suburb # 6 Fadden

I selected Fadden via a random point at the Canberra map without looking. Fadden is the first Tuggeranong suburb (i.e. South of Canberra) that we have visited as part of this adventure - somewhere I rarely venture and had no idea what to expect.

Fadden is named after Sir Arthur "Artie" Fadden who was Prime Minister of Australia in 1941 - but for less than two months, so I am not sure why he gets a suburb.  Apparently Fadden joked that he was like the Flood, as he had "reigned for 40 days and 40 nights".

Still I suppose there were are still another three ex PMs that had shorter terms in office, and to be fair he was also the Treasurer for sometime (establishing the reserve bank) and leader of the Country party. Plus I believe if you add up the periods he was A/g PM for Menzies they make up 2+ years!

Fadden is certainly not a bustling metropolis. It is another suburb that has completely destroyed my conception of the key role of "local shops" in Canberra. "Fadden Centre" it may be called but central or in fact at all open or exciting, no. At least they have a chiropractor though...

Fadden struck me as very quiet, dry and full of hills - so hilly that the street signs are sometimes halfway up the hill above the road. It also has some ridiculously large (and do doubt expensive) houses up on the ridges. This (i.e. houses made of "ticky tacky") and the kids smoking dope in the local park led Jay and I to name this place Agrestic (Weeds watchers will understand). Perhaps we weren't that far off the mark either from the looks.

Again I found this place rather a photo challenge, but the views of the mountains really are quite lovely and there is a nice park in the middle of the suburb with a great playground for kids - although the locals seem to use it to fish in the pond (weird?) and pretend they are in a Weeds episode.

 

 

Suburb #5 Beard

I will make an assumption here that none of you reading this have ever been to Beard and in fact you may not have even heard of it - so where is it? Well if you drive from Oaks Estate back towards Canberra Avenue/Fyshwick you will come to the new suburb of Beard with a very un-Canberraesque suburb name sign. And possibly a man with a beard as well....
 

Beard is not really a suburb yet - it started its modern life as "Fyshwick East Industrial Estate" in 2009, but became Beard later that year (though they still use the other name as well). In an earlier life, this was mainly a pastoral area, but then between the 40s and 70s it was the site of an abbatoir. Wow don't you just want to go there right now!

The suburb is aparently named after an "industrious" ex-convict called Timothy Beard (oh dear I think Dave must be on the ACT planning committee). It has streets named after minerals. Spongolite St is my favourite :) How cool an address would be 1 Spongolite St, Beard..if it was somewhere else...It looks like they wanted to develop a housing estate called Griffin Green here, but not sure whether this is progressing, and it will probably stay an industrial area I would imagine.

Lets just say that meeting my photo categories in this suburb was a little challenging, as Beard is  basically characterised by an absence of anything and some industrial buildings. I think I got there in the end though despite Jay doubting my ability to find anything beautiful here. I really hope they don't cut down the tree when they develop this suburb or they are in trouble.

Suburb #4 Oaks Estate

I was looking forward to visiting Oaks Estate, as Jay and I had previously been on an adventure out there as it used to be one of the only places in ACT that you could buy Aquavit (a Scandinavian spirit that will shock you into reality). I had thought it was really pretty and would be a nice place to live but at the time Jay thought I was a bit nuts (I guess he wasn't that enamoured with a view of Queanbeyan railway station)...so when I saw this article in the Canberra times about it being a potential new property hot spot I was interested to see whether it had changed much. But anyway...

Oaks Estate is (as suggested above) is right next to Queanbeyan and is somewhere where you can stand with one foot in NSW and one in ACT as demonstrated by Jay below in such a low-key way.

Oaks Estate takes its name from "The Oaks" an old farming estate dating back to the 1830s. It is still there but unfortunately you can't see as it as it is private property. There is an interesting local community website if you are interested that can tell you all about the historical features of the suburb. As this website notes, as The Oaks was basically ignored by the federal capital authority as it wasn't part of the "plan" for Canberra - luckily there is quite a lot of heritage left. You can see the heritage listed bus shelter (if you are weird like me and that interest you) and also "Robertson's House" which was built in 1912-13 by construction workers out of all sorts of weird and wonderful materials.

I think Gillespie park with the gazebo is really pretty. The local community vegie garden is also pretty impressive. If  you can ignore the slightly bad smell, a walk down along the Molonglo or Queanbeyan rivers is quite pretty. It looks like a project has started to clean up this river area which would be fantastic.

The bottle shop has currently sold out of Aquavit unfortunately, but the staff are lovely and still have an interesting collection of wine and spirits.

I had to include this additional photo plus because I thought it was cute, and I think confirms my original impression that this would be a nice place to live (assuming you had a car).

And just an extra photo showing the view over to NSW...

Suburb # 3 Narrabundah

I was quite looking forward to visiting this suburb. I had some fond memories of visiting a good friend here in my early days in Canberra. She rented a very large house up on the hill that had an amazing tiered garden. It also had a very strange lower level with miniature size rooms that looked like they were specially built to keep people captive in the basement. It was a bit creepy (eventually they even included a fake gimp in one room to freak out visitors).

This suburb is also the home of the infamous Narrabundah college which I had never seen but has seemed to haunt me throughout my life at a slight distance. But I digress...

Narrabundah is the Ngunnawal word for bird of prey. I didn't see any of these birds either...except in the form of sculpture as you will see below. The streets are named after indigenous people or explorers.

I have to admit that I was quite disappointed by the first half of our visit to Narrabundah - and it wasn't just because there was no-where the get GF breakfast at the shops except the IGA.
I had expected this area to be a little more swish. However, the shops look like they have seen much better days - despite a few fancyish restaurants, which would no doubt be open in the evening (including an Indian restaurant that could be a possibility for chilli night). It all seemed a bit depressed. The junkie walking around desperate for his next fix didn't help the atmosphere.

Nevertheless, as we explored further - including where I used to go with my old friends to walk her dogs - we found some beautiful views of Canberra and some more leafy streets with lots of bush capital character. The significant indigenous influence in the suburb was very noticeable with lots of aboriginal artwork and flags. The diversity of religious places in Narrabundah was also intriguing - with everything from a Russian orthodox church to a buddhist centre. In addition, there there were more baseball fields...but that seems to be some weird Canberra craze that I was hitherto unaware of as they are everywhere we visit, so I guess I can't call that unexpected anymore.

Overall, interesting although not what I expected - as Jay would say "a suburb of contrasts".

An extra photo just cause I thought this was funny...you need to picture this behind a pretty substantial wire fence in a church courtyard.

 Plus this photo because I think it would be a nice place to ponder first world problems.

Suburb # 2 - Aranda

Next stop Aranda also in Belconnen - in fact the first suburb in belco. Further below you can see below a photo of Jay in front of the plaque from 1966 at Aranda Playing fields which tells you just that [By the way fellow adventurers when Wikipedia tells you this is "near" the suspension bridge across Belconnen Way don't take it too literally like a lawyer and a statistician delirious in 35 degree heat. Look at the picture instead for the location - bush bashing is not required to find it].

So apparently Aranda is named after a Aboriginal tribe previously known as Arunta which means White Cockatoo. I didn't see any, but if I was a cockatoo I think I would be quite happy living here - in fact, I almost would as a person - and that means a lot for a person who always insists on living in the inner city (or inner town perhaps for canberra), and is a little scared of actual suburbia.

Its a very beautiful leafy suburb which is what I imagine suburbs in the "bush capital" should actually look like. Its also not flat which always gets lots of plus points from me.  If you drive to the top of the suburb its really quite high up and has a gorgeous view. There is a bush reserve that runs straight down the middle of the suburb as well - where I found some beautiful bush daisy type things [I will rely on planty people like Mary to tell me what they really are].

What was unexpected, though makes sense, was that the local shops in Aranda are no more. For me, there is nothing more Canberran than the "local shops" sign and some rather underwhelming local shops (one of my first memories of moving to Canberra is my mum and I trying to locate the most illustrious Braddon shops and being convinced we had "missed them"). Makes sense given the huge shopping centre in the next suburb...but nevertheless unexpected. So were the baseball players....but not the view behind them (although I rarely see the tower from this side!).

  And well just an extra photo of the bridge from Aranda over Belconnen Way because I like it (when not driving under it to work) and its not really in Aranda...well one side is :) 

Suburb #1 - Hawker

So first off we picked Hawker - not really sure why, mainly because I wanted to try breakfast at Rocksalt I think. 

 

Hawker is part of belco - i.e. north west Canberra. It is named after a South Australian Member of Parliament called Charles Hawker, who died aged 44 when his plane crashed into Mount Dandenong in 1938. I had never heard of this guy before but it sounds like he really lived his life and travelled extensively despite being left seriously disabled after fighting in WWI. He was the Minister for Markets but resigned when parliament refused to reduce parliamentary salaries during the depression.

All the streets in Hawker are names after NT pastoral stations...this certainly seemed appropriate today as it was very very very dry and hot today in Hawker (34 degrees urgh). Still I definitely found some unexpected things (unexpected for me at least!) - plus a second hand book shop woot! Was reminded that we definitely do live in the "bush capital" when the suburb literally just ended at the end of a dead end street.

 

Suburban journey

With everyone doing all these 365 grateful type projects, it made me realise just how grateful I am that I had the opportunity to move to and live in Canberra.

While most Australians consider it a "waste of a good sheep paddock", and think its dull and boring and full of roundabouts (ok so that last bit is true), I feel very very lucky to live here. This city, which I believe is oddly much more accepting than its much larger sisters Sydney and Melbourne, enabled me to meet my partner, gave me a job that forced me to become a better person in many ways and constantly challenges me no matter how much I sometimes complain about it, and allowed me to create my own new "canberra family" of kindred spirits....plus it has pretty cherry blossoms in spring and bright beautiful days even in the middle of winter :)

My defacto father-in-law is also constantly telling me I should see more of Australia.I never want to stop travelling the world, but he has a point. Its a bit odd when I have probably seen more of Singapore than Tuggeranong.

So, anyway, as a result, this year I want to do something different with this blog. I will still be filling it with pictures of Canberra, but this year I will be trying to visit every single suburb in Canberra and see if I can have some new and unexpected adventures in my own back yard.

In each of the 100+ suburbs, if I can, I want to take at least one photo of: something old, something new, something very canberran, something unexpected and something beautiful. Others might find this weird or lame - but hey its for me and not for you. And the lovely Mr Annabel has kindly agreed to come along for the ride...