Senior curator Virginia Rigney with Dawn Waterhouse at Canberra Museum and Gallery in 2020. Photo: Jodie Cunningham.
Canberra has lost one of its great ladies, and a link to the city’s earliest origins, following Dawn Waterhouse’s death this week at the grand age of 102.
Dawn, who spent her entire life in Canberra and whose childhood home was Calthorope’s House, was a true Canberran in every sense – passionately committed to the city she loved and an integral part of its history.
Cheerfully gracious and sharp until her final years, Dawn was wonderful company, always well dressed and full of tales that vividly illustrated the capital’s life story as well as her own.
She was born in Queanbeyan to stock and station agent Harry Calthorpe and his wife Della and moved to 24 Mugga Way as a toddler. The family home was designed by architects Oakley and Parkes, who were also commissioned to create The Lodge.
These were the days when a few thousand people lived in the national capital, when you rode a bike to the Cotter and sweated your way back uphill to town, or cantered across the paddocks to take tea with a friend.
As a child, Dawn remembered walking from Mugga Way to Mt Ainslie and Black Mountain for family picnics along dusty roads, during the long years when Canberra was a close-knit country town.
“In the 1930s it was rumoured that the city would be abandoned and the public servants returned to Melbourne or Sydney,” Dawn said when I interviewed her in 2020, at the opening of a CMAG exhibition documenting the city’s history.
At the time a visiting journalist had described Canberra as “an unhappy combination of small-town atmosphere, stuffy suburban attitudes and imposed bureaucratic snobbery”, but for Dawn and her contemporaries pre-war Canberra was a paradise where children roamed freely.
She recalled the drama of galloping her horse across the paddock to visit the Edisons at Woden. The horse propped at the Deakin anticline (just behind the shops), and, Dawn said, “if I’d gone over the horse’s head I would have been killed!”
Dawn’s father had his offices in Queanbeyan and Civic, where she watched the Sydney and Melbourne buildings being erected. While the Melbourne Building had banks, a post office, solicitors, accountants, architects, dentists, the Sydney side was infinitely more thrilling.
“We had two of everything: chemists, greengrocers, butchers, jewellers and clothes, hardware and Verity Hewitt’s wonderful bookshop where she let you just browse. She’d drive a sulky into town and put her baby’s pram in the shop window, so all the little girls would go in to see the baby,” Dawn says.
The Blue Moon cafe was also there, almost the only place in Canberra to buy pies and cakes, a meal and a milkshake or a coffee.
Dawn was present at the opening of Parliament House and the Manuka Pool, where her father bought the family a season ticket for 12/6d, to their great delight. After her mother’s death in 1979, Dawn’s childhood home itself became a museum, a time capsule of genteel life in early Canberra.
Rumour had it that Mrs Calthorpe had intended to renovate the house post-war, but the construction of the Commonwealth Club made it easier to entertain there instead. So Calthorpe’s remained intact, a striking house museum with a pretty garden and an air raid shelter in the back yard.
The Canberra Museum and Gallery’s collection includes a painting by Esther Patterson, rediscovered by Dawn and depicting Canberra in the post war period. At the front of a vibrant, sun-filled Civic Square two women stand, one in yellow and one in a red and white skirt, accompanied by a child with a doll’s pram. They are Dawn, her friend, and her daughter Jill and although Dawn said there were never so many people around in those days, it evoked the warmth of the city’s heart.
Esther Paterson’s Civic Square Canberra 1947, on loan from Dawn Waterhouse. Dawn and her fried are at front right. Image: Supplied.
Educated at Telopea Park school and then Canberra Girls’ Grammar, Dawn married CSIRO scientist Doug Waterhouse in 1944, He was an entomologist and the inventor of Aerogard, and she also worked as a laboratory assistant at the agency before their marriage.
They had four children, Jill, Doug, Jonathon and Gowrie and Dawn remained closely involved in community events throughout her life.
Dawn was a vital source of contemporaneous evidence about the capital’s past for Canberra’s museums, galleries and historians. She volunteered with the Red Cross, the Canberra and District Historical Society, the Blood Bank and was a member of the first Children’s Medical Research Institute (CMRI) committee.
She was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for her service to community history and in 2018, her name was added to the ACT Honour Walk.
