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This website was created in May 2009.
The content below is from the site's 2009 - 2011 archived pages.
The new site's owner is no longer accepting articles for canberrahistorygroup.com. 

The Canberra History Group's Aim

 

  

The first time I visited Canberra was when I was sent to bring a client up to date on the newest rollout from Salesforce: Their Community Cloud, that allows businesses and organizations to connect employees, customers, and partners all in one (branded) space. The possibilities are endless and I had been dispatched to Australia's capital city, Canberra as part of a Salesforce Community Cloud consulting team. For 21,000 years the Canberra region has been home to the Ngunnawal people. Evidence of their long occupation exists in archeological evidence at numerous places throughout the Australian Capital Territory (ACT). Aside from working with my client to make sure we were following the best proper strategy, development and implementation of Salesforce Communities, I spent all my free time learning more about the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Namadgi National Park. I had requested a two week vacation after I finished my Salesforce consulting and implementation specifically to visit the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and the Namadgi National Park. I wanted to discover more about the park's Aboriginal heritage, as well as experience its wonderful bird life, get several days of fishing, and enjoy some bush walks, which I was told ,would afford me many incredible scenic views. In addition I spent several sight seeing days in Canberra which has it's own fascinating as the content below shows.

 

Convicts - Canberra and District

 

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More Background On CanberraHistoryGroup.com

 

CanberraHistoryGroup.com is a historical website devoted to a side of Australia’s national capital that can easily be overshadowed by Parliament House, national monuments, government institutions, and the story of Canberra as a planned city. Rather than concentrating primarily on the political institutions for which Canberra is internationally known, the website explores the people, settlements, families, workers, convicts, camps, buildings, and landscapes that existed before and during the transformation of the Limestone Plains into the Australian capital.

The website dates from May 2009 and preserves material from the Canberra History Group and the related Canberra History Web. Its original purpose was community-oriented: to collect and make accessible local, family, and general history, particularly unusual information that might otherwise be difficult to locate. The group described itself as a relatively small collection of researchers and compilers, with an interest in material derived from archival research, family knowledge, personal experience, and memories of people who had lived in the Canberra district.

Today, CanberraHistoryGroup.com is especially interesting as a historical artifact in its own right. The current website explains that its material comes from archived 2009–2011 pages and that the present owner is no longer accepting new articles. In effect, it preserves a snapshot of an earlier community-history project while also preserving information about much older periods in Canberra’s development.

Who Was Behind the Canberra History Group?

One of the names most closely associated with the original website is Patricia “Trish” Frei. The introductory material was signed “Trish Frei for The Canberra History Group,” indicating her role in presenting the group and its objectives to visitors. The site was not conceived as the online presence of a large museum, university department, government agency, or commercial publisher. Instead, it reflected the work of local historical researchers and contributors.

Another particularly important contributor was Canberra historian Ann Gugler. Her association gives the historical material on the site additional context because Gugler conducted extensive research into Canberra’s construction era, vanished settlements, workers’ camps, and Westlake.

The ACT Heritage Library maintains an Ann Gugler Collection covering material dated from 1912 to 1991. Its biographical information records that Gugler came to Canberra with her parents in 1940 and lived at Westlake from 1941 until 1959. After qualifying as a teacher, she taught in Canberra high schools from 1958 until retiring in 1992. Her research subsequently resulted in numerous books about the construction of Canberra, its early residents, camps, settlements, and buildings.

Among her publications were The Builders of Canberra, 1909–1920, Westlake – One of the Vanished Suburbs of Canberra, The Builders of Canberra: Where They Lived 1913–1959, Canberra’s Construction Camps, Early Houses and Selected Documents, and A Story of Capital Hill. She also transcribed early electoral rolls and created historical material concerning Stirling Park and Westlake.

This background helps explain why CanberraHistoryGroup.com contains unusually detailed material about workers’ settlements and parts of Canberra that disappeared as the modern city developed.

The Geographic Area Covered by the Website

Despite its name, CanberraHistoryGroup.com was never restricted to the modern urban boundaries of Canberra.

The historical group defined “the District” broadly, incorporating the Australian Capital Territory as well as communities and countryside extending toward Queanbeyan, Bungendore, Lake George and Captain’s Flat, north toward Gundaroo, and south toward Bredbo. Its convict research similarly encompasses the Limestone Plains and surrounding districts where early landholders employed assigned convicts and other workers.

That broad approach is important because nineteenth-century Canberra cannot be understood simply by imposing the boundaries of the modern capital onto the historical landscape. Records might identify residents as living at Limestone Plains, Goulburn Plains, Canbury, Queanbeyan, Maneroo or other geographical descriptions whose meanings changed over time.

CanberraHistoryGroup.com attempts to interpret those historical labels rather than assuming that nineteenth-century records correspond neatly to twenty-first-century boundaries.

Canberra Before Canberra

One of the central themes of the website is that Canberra had a history long before 1913.

The site uses the inscription on the grave of Sarah Webb at St John’s churchyard in Reid — “For here have we no continuing city...” — as a particularly appropriate historical motif. Webb died in 1845, decades before Federation and long before anyone could have imagined that the rural district around her would become Australia’s purpose-built national capital.

This perspective changes the way Canberra’s story is told.

Instead of beginning with Walter Burley Griffin’s city plan, Parliament House or the official naming of Canberra, the website looks backward toward the Limestone Plains, pioneer families, pastoral properties, Indigenous connections to the landscape, convicts and rural communities.

It then follows the enormous transition that occurred after the Commonwealth selected the district for its capital.

The result is less a history of government than a history of place.

Convicts of Canberra and the Limestone Plains

One of CanberraHistoryGroup.com’s most distinctive areas is its convict research.

The website sought to identify convicts who lived or worked in Canberra and surrounding districts, including assigned servants associated with important early landholders. It recognized that determining whether a particular convict belonged to the Canberra story could be complicated by inconsistent geographical terminology in colonial records.

For example, records from the period could use “Goulburn Plains” broadly enough to encompass places such as Burra, Bywong, Canbury, Gundaroo, Limestone Plains, Molonglo, Murrumbateman, Yass and other localities. The website therefore attempted to evaluate individuals according to employers, properties, tickets of leave, pardons, passports, certificates and other evidence rather than relying solely upon a modern place name.

Prominent early landholders such as Robert Campbell of Duntroon and John Palmer of Ginninderra appear in this research context.

For genealogists, this was potentially one of the site’s most useful functions. A family researcher who discovered that an ancestor had been transported to New South Wales might not immediately associate that person with Canberra. The Canberra History Group attempted to bridge that gap by bringing together evidence concerning convicts who passed through, worked in, or became connected with the district.

The group also encouraged descendants to contribute information about convict ancestors, making the project collaborative rather than purely documentary.

Westlake and Canberra’s Vanished Communities

Perhaps the richest theme running through CanberraHistoryGroup.com is Westlake.

Westlake occupied land that today is associated largely with Stirling Park in Yarralumla. During Canberra’s construction period, however, it formed part of a much larger landscape of temporary and semi-permanent accommodation for the people actually building the capital.

Ann Gugler was particularly qualified to document it because she had lived there herself.

Independent documentation from the ACT Heritage Library confirms her extensive research into Westlake and the construction camps. Her archival collection contains documents about camp tenants, labourers, housing, sewerage, recreation, sanitation, wages, community organizations, cottages, government correspondence and other aspects of everyday life.

Her 1997 book Westlake – One of the Vanished ‘Suburbs’ of Canberra runs to more than 400 pages, illustrating how substantial this field of local research became.

A separate oral-history project, Sunken Stories of Old Acton, recorded Gugler explaining that her family moved into number 27 Westlake in 1941. She described Westlake as a temporary settlement whose first construction-workers’ cottages were erected in 1924. The settlement contained 61 houses and remained part of the broader Acton area for decades.

Westlake was far from insignificant. Material produced for a Canberra centenary workers’ heritage tour notes that its population was about 700 in 1925, making it one of Canberra’s largest population centres at the time. Residents included workers involved with such major projects as the Hotel Canberra, provisional Parliament House and the main sewer infrastructure.

That is precisely the type of history CanberraHistoryGroup.com was designed to preserve.

Stirling Park: Layers of History in One Place

The website also highlights Stirling Park because its history illustrates the extraordinary number of historical layers that can occupy one relatively small area.

The Canberra & District Historical Society catalogue documents Ann Gugler’s detailed study A History of Stirling Park. Its subject indexing alone demonstrates the complexity of the site, linking it with Gura Bung Dhaura, Westlake, early labour camps, Aboriginal history, the Molonglo River, early land grants, Canberra’s sewer infrastructure, construction settlements and later diplomatic development.

This makes Stirling Park much more than urban open space.

It connects the Indigenous landscape, nineteenth-century rural occupation, early twentieth-century construction communities, the creation of the federal capital and the later development of Yarralumla.

CanberraHistoryGroup.com helped bring these layers together for readers who might otherwise pass through the modern landscape without realizing what once stood there.

The Workers Who Built Canberra

The construction workers are among the most important characters in the website’s version of Canberra history.

After the Commonwealth began acquiring land for the federal capital, the landscape changed dramatically. Surveyors, labourers, tradesmen and government employees arrived. Before monumental government buildings could function, Canberra required basic infrastructure: roads, water, sewerage, electricity, accommodation and administrative facilities.

Workers often initially lived in tents, humpies, barracks, hostels or temporary settlements.

These were not peripheral to Canberra’s creation. They were essential to it.

Ann Gugler’s research provides independent evidence of the scale of this forgotten Canberra. In describing her book The Builders of Canberra, she stated that she had documented more than 70 camps and settlement sites from the construction period. Her research drew upon personal stories, archival records, newspapers, census material and electoral rolls.

CanberraHistoryGroup.com therefore offers an important counterbalance to architectural histories centered on planners and prominent politicians. Walter Burley Griffin, Charles Scrivener and federal officials remain important, but so do the hundreds of workers and families whose labour transformed plans on paper into an operating city.

Inquests, Obituaries and Court Cases

Another unusual feature of the historical site was its collection of inquests, obituaries, court cases and miscellaneous discoveries.

Such records can appear minor when viewed individually, but they are extremely useful for social history.

An obituary may reveal where a family lived, occupations, relatives and community connections. An inquest can document working conditions, transportation, accidents, buildings and witnesses. Court reports may preserve disputes and personal relationships that appear nowhere else.

For genealogists and local historians, these fragments can fill gaps left by official narratives.

The Canberra History Group specifically viewed these records as a way to provide insight into people who had once lived in the district, reinforcing its emphasis on ordinary residents rather than exclusively famous Australians.

Photographs and the Changing Canberra Landscape

Photography was another important part of the original website.

The group assembled historical and more recent images showing different areas of Canberra. Particularly notable were photographs connected with the devastating 2003 Canberra bushfires, including Mt Stromlo, Narrabundah Hill and Duffy.

The group’s logo had a poignant connection to that disaster. It depicted the Wood family hut at Paddy’s River near Tidbinbilla, photographed in 1999. The hut was subsequently lost in the 2003 firestorm.

That example demonstrates why local photographic archives matter. A photograph taken simply to record an old building can suddenly become the primary visual evidence for something that no longer exists.

The site also juxtaposed views of Canberra at different periods, including the Limestone Plains before the creation of Lake Burley Griffin and later views from Mt Ainslie showing the Australian War Memorial, Anzac Parade, Parliament House and the developed capital.

These comparisons make Canberra’s transformation unusually tangible.

Aboriginal Heritage and the Broader Historical Landscape

The Canberra region’s history did not begin with European pastoral settlement, convicts or the federal capital.

CanberraHistoryGroup.com acknowledged the Aboriginal significance of areas it discussed, particularly around Stirling Park and Westlake. That aspect is important because the construction of Canberra occurred on a landscape that already possessed cultural meaning extending far beyond the comparatively brief history of the national capital.

The site’s local-history approach therefore has the potential to connect several historical layers: Indigenous occupation and cultural landscapes, pastoral settlement, convict labour, nineteenth-century families, Federation, construction workers and modern Canberra.

The material is best understood as community historical research from its period rather than as a substitute for current Indigenous scholarship or consultation. Nevertheless, its recognition that places such as Stirling Park possess histories predating both Westlake and Canberra is significant.

Publications and Serious Local Research

CanberraHistoryGroup.com was not merely a collection of casual reminiscences. Contributors produced books, articles, transcriptions and research projects that have become part of the wider body of Canberra historical material.

Ann Gugler’s work is a strong example.

Her publications and archival material are catalogued by the ACT Heritage Library and Canberra & District Historical Society, while ACT Government heritage documentation has also cited her research into the early workers’ settlements. Government heritage research notes that Gugler produced multiple publications and interconnected websites concerning the camps and early Canberra settlements, while also acknowledging that later investigation can refine or challenge particular historical site identifications.

That latter point is valuable. Local history is not static. Oral memories, maps, archaeological evidence, archival records and later scholarship sometimes disagree. A website such as CanberraHistoryGroup.com is therefore valuable not because every historical conclusion must be treated as permanently settled, but because it preserves evidence, interpretations and local knowledge that subsequent researchers can test and develop.

Audience and Popularity

The natural audience for CanberraHistoryGroup.com includes local historians, genealogists, descendants of Canberra district families, researchers studying convicts, students of Australian history, heritage advocates and people interested in the development of Canberra.

Its subject matter is specialized rather than mass-market.

There is no reliable publicly available evidence showing that CanberraHistoryGroup.com itself achieved the visitor numbers associated with a major tourism or media website, and it would be misleading to assign it a particular traffic level without historical analytics. Its significance is better measured through the usefulness and specificity of its content.

The wider historical work represented on the site clearly reached beyond the website itself. Ann Gugler’s research is preserved by the ACT Heritage Library, catalogued by the Canberra & District Historical Society, referenced in ACT Government heritage material, and used in public-history projects and heritage tours.

That provides a stronger indication of historical influence than an unsupported claim about website traffic.

Awards, Reviews and Media Recognition

No major formal award specifically for CanberraHistoryGroup.com could be reliably verified from the available historical sources.

Likewise, there does not appear to be a substantial body of conventional consumer reviews of the website. This is unsurprising. CanberraHistoryGroup.com was a specialist community-history resource rather than a restaurant, attraction or commercial service for which review platforms would be especially relevant.

Recognition is more visible through institutional preservation and citation of the underlying research.

For example, the ACT Heritage Library maintains Gugler’s manuscript collection, the Canberra & District Historical Society catalogues her publications and articles, and ACT Government heritage documentation discusses her research. The National Trust’s historical material also records her work on Canberra’s construction communities.

Her research continued to appear in Canberra historical publications long after the original website period. A 2022 issue of Canberra History News, for example, included historical material supplied by Gugler concerning Westlake Hall.

This continuing institutional use is a meaningful form of recognition for a local historian.

Cultural and Social Significance

The cultural importance of CanberraHistoryGroup.com lies largely in the history it chose to emphasize.

National capitals naturally generate histories about prime ministers, parliaments, architects, government departments and national institutions. CanberraHistoryGroup.com shifts the viewpoint downward to the ground level.

Who lived here before the capital?

Who worked on the roads?

Where did construction workers sleep?

What happened to their settlements?

Which convicts worked for the district’s landholders?

What did the Limestone Plains look like before Lake Burley Griffin?

Which communities disappeared beneath later suburbs, diplomatic precincts, parks and government development?

Those questions produce a very different Canberra.

They reveal a city whose creation involved disruption as well as achievement: pastoral properties resumed by government, temporary settlements established and dismantled, landscapes transformed, families relocated, and communities such as Westlake eventually disappearing from the modern map.

The website also demonstrates the importance of community historians. Much of what survives about ordinary people is preserved because someone collects photographs, interviews older residents, transcribes electoral rolls, searches newspapers, examines government files and records stories before the people who remember them are gone.

CanberraHistoryGroup.com as a Historical Website Today

The present significance of CanberraHistoryGroup.com differs from its original role.

When the Canberra History Group was actively inviting participation, the website functioned as a developing community-history project. Visitors were encouraged to contribute information, write about convict ancestors, submit historical articles and participate through its guestbook.

The current site states that articles are no longer being accepted and identifies its material as coming from the archived 2009–2011 website.

Consequently, CanberraHistoryGroup.com can now be viewed on two historical levels.

The first is the history it documents: nineteenth-century Limestone Plains, convicts, pioneer families, Canberra’s construction period, Westlake, workers’ camps and the growth of the capital.

The second is the history of digital local-history publishing itself. It preserves an example of how dedicated local researchers used the early web to make specialized historical material available to audiences far beyond libraries and historical-society meetings.

That second function becomes increasingly important as older independent websites disappear.

Why CanberraHistoryGroup.com Remains Worth Exploring

CanberraHistoryGroup.com is most useful for readers who want to look beyond Canberra’s familiar national image.

It reveals that beneath the carefully planned avenues, parliamentary buildings, embassies and monuments lies a much older and messier human landscape.

There were Indigenous cultural landscapes, pastoral holdings, convicts, pioneers, surveyors, labourers, tents, timber huts, sewer camps, construction settlements and families living in communities that no longer appear on modern maps.

Westlake is perhaps the clearest example. Once home to hundreds of people, it largely vanished from Canberra’s everyday geography. Yet through photographs, memories, archival research and the work of historians such as Ann Gugler, its residents have not vanished from the historical record.

That is ultimately what makes CanberraHistoryGroup.com significant.

It is not simply a website about Australia’s capital. It is a record of the effort to preserve the Canberra that existed before the monumental capital — and the communities of ordinary people whose lives made the modern city possible.

 

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