Page 1824 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009
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threatening because of my previous experience, and also living in the village of Balgownie when I first moved to Australia from England.
I do trust that we will be able to work with the villages that we are very lucky to have within the borders of Canberra to help them to continue to have the lifestyle that they wish to have and to attract many visitors to their villages.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (3.57): Canberra and the ACT are often used synonymously when in actual fact, as we are aware, the ACT includes not just Canberra but a whole range of rural landholders, communities and villages. The ACT has many people who face the same regional and rural challenges, indeed opportunities, as those across the border in southern New South Wales.
The Ginninderra electorate includes two residential areas outside the district of Belconnen. One is the Gungahlin suburb of Nicholls and the other is the village of Hall. Hall has a proud history. The village takes its name from Henry Hall, one of the first landholders in the area. He purchased land in 1833 in what was then the Ginninderra shire. His homestead was named Charnwood and he owned land which included the suburbs where Dunlop, Fraser, Charnwood and Flynn are now built.
Hall was founded in 1882 and to this day continues to provide an invaluable role to the rural landholders surrounding the village as a retail and social centre. Unlike most of the ACT, Hall does not depend on government sector jobs. It is a dynamic community with self-starting, small businesses and enterprises that create opportunities for the younger generation.
It is worth looking at the history of the Hall primary school as a tribute to the pioneering dedication of those early settlers in the community and the ongoing dedication to unity of the community today. In a letter to the editor on 5 July 2006, Tony Morris recalls a story from the opening of the school. He recalls how the Hall and District Progress Association in 1906 volunteered to build the building and sought a teacher from the New South Wales government. The letter said:
If we obtain your permission to do so, we will proceed to build—
the school—
at once, as we can assure you we feel very strongly the wrong our children are suffering by existing circumstances—
without a school—
and we are quite determined to remedy it in some way.
The New South Wales government agreed, but the ACT government did not, and before the school closure was announced in 2006 it was the longest continually operating school in the ACT. Whilst the community will remained, the bureaucratic won’t prevailed, and the school was closed in 2006 as part of that horror budget the government said we had to have.
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