New signage has been installed at either end of Poppyfield Street in Dickson. Photo: Kathy Leslie, Canberra Notice Board Group, Facebook.
New signage is going up at either end of a major street in Dickson, marking the end of a long process to come up with a new name for it.
The stretch between Badham Street and Cowper Street in Dickson – home to the late The Garden florist, Hudsons of Dickson cafe and a Discount Chemist, among other businesses – is in the process of transitioning to Poppyfield Street.
An eagle-eyed passerby recently spotted the new street sign and shared her confusion with the Canberra Notice Board Group on Facebook.
“Wondering when/why this happened?,” she wrote.
It turns out the new name is a nod to a significant point in the Inner North suburb’s history. A high point, you could say.
Many know the area of Dickson – as we know it today – was once an aerodrome and the site of Canberra’s first air fatality (here’s a previous story we wrote about that).
But from 1940 to 1962, a portion was also leased to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) as the “Dickson Experiment Station”.
It’s job? Growing opium, among other things.
To the mind of Canberra’s architect, Walter Burley Griffin, Dickson was originally meant to be the city’s industrial area. But by 1945, these businesses were transferred to Fyshwick instead.
Dickson’s first residential houses didn’t come along until 1958, so a 25-year lease was signed with the chief of CSIRO’s Plant Industry Division, Dr Bertram Dickson (his surname a perfect coincidence – the suburb actually gets it name from Sir James Dickson, a Queensland advocate for Federation who lived from 1832 to 1901).
Dickson Shops in the 1960s. Photo: National Archives of Australia.
The station covered 640 acres, comprising the eastern third and northern edge of Dickson and the whole of today’s suburb of Downer (and a small part of what is now Watson).
By the time World War II had broken out, the Australian Government realised it was far too reliant on other countries for medical supplies.
A Medical Equipment Control Committee (MECC) was set up to manage rationing and production of these supplies, which originally included intravenous syringes and industrial chemicals.
But in October 1940, when Germans bombed a massive stockpile of morphine in London, this and other opium-based medications were added to the list.
“We must have morphia and we must have it quickly,” the MECC’s head reportedly urged our federal government.
An aerial view from Mount Ainslie looking northwest along Hawdon Street to the Dickson Experiment Station 1953. Photo: Libraries ACT.
By 1943, 28 poppy plantations had been established across every Australian state and territory except Western Australia, churning out enough opium to meet the nation’s projected need of 160 kg of morphine a year.
Some farms, including one in Picton, NSW, used immigrant labour from the UK. Others, such as one based at an internment camp in Hay in the Riverina, put Italian, German and Japanese prisoners of war to work.
As the name implies, the Dickson Experiment Station was more about research.
For instance, CSIRO’s chemists developed a secret – then patented – way to transform raw opium plants directly into morphine here in the ACT. This was then scaled up by a Melbourne-based pharmaceutical firm with the first supplies delivered to Victorian doctors by mid-1942.
It grew other crops too, such as rubber and pyrethrum, with staffing provided by the Australian Women’s Land Army, a group formed to combat rising labour shortages in the farming sector.
However, it was an expensive process. At £10 per kg, Australian morphine cost four times the price of pre-war imports. Together with poor yields and failing crops, the scheme was wound up by late 1944.
MECC deemed the whole project a failure, but Dickson continued to experiment with high morphine-yield poppies for years after the war ended.
By May 1951, however, plans for new roads, schools and a shopping centre were afoot and CSIRO’s work was gradually transferred to the Ginninderra Experiment Station in Belconnen.
The first building constructed on the footprint of the Dickson plantation was a motel on the corner of Northbourne Avenue and Antill Street, near where the WATSO building stands today.
The ACT Government said the new name for Dickson Place came about as part of an “extensive” consultation process through the online YourSay site.
“The name Poppyfield Street was proposed by the Dickson Residents Association following this consultation and was endorsed by the ACT Place Names Advisory Committee,” a spokesperson told Region.
Property and business owners were notified of the change in June 2024, and the naming is now “in the process of being formalised”.
Dickson Place, near The Garden store (now closed). Photo: Screenshot, Google Maps.
It’s not the only change to come out of this consultation.
The road often referred to as Dickson Place, but technically unnamed – the one running from Badham Street into the shopping centre/precinct – will be named Hanna Enders Lane after the co-founder and president of the Dickson Neighbourhood Centre.
Meanwhile, the road entering the shopping centre from Cowper Street, opposite the Dickson Swimming Pool, will be named Joan Kellett Way in commemoration of a long-time Dickson resident, volunteer and education and swimming advocate.
The public place directly in front of the Dickson Library, currently un-named, will be named Taglietti Square in honour of the library’s designer, famed Italian architect Enrico Taglietti.
The government said these new names were “intended to make it easier for people to find their way around”.
We’re certainly not going to forget “Poppyfield” in a hurry.
