Kevin Gill is approaching eight decades in Canberra, and after watching the city transform around him, he still believes it is worth every bit of his affection. Photo: Supplied.
At just three months old, Kevin Gill made his first journey to Canberra in 1947 – sharing the flight with former prime minister Billy Hughes.
At some point during the journey, Hughes briefly took the baby in his arms. There was just one problem: Kevin’s father Joe couldn’t stand the politician.
Years later, Joe reminded his son that he had missed a golden opportunity.
“You never piddled all over that Dirty Digger, ” Kevin recalls his father telling him.
Kevin was born in Queensland after his mother returned to her family for the birth, although he likes to point out that his Canberra credentials began even earlier.
“I was conceived in Canberra,” he said.
At almost 80, Kevin is a true Canberran and a natural storyteller, with almost every memory accompanied by a joke.
But behind the humour is a window into a Canberra that has largely disappeared – a working-class town where bread, milk, fruit and even ice came to the door, houses were rarely locked and Lake Burley Griffin was still just a river.
His father was among the workers who helped keep Canberra running. “The difference between my father and everybody else’s father was that he wasn’t a public servant,” Kevin said.
“He was a cook, a cleaner, a tip manager, and a street supervisor of the shopping centre cleaning.”
Joe had been brought to Australia by the Salvation Army in the 1920s and came to Canberra before World War II. He worked as a cook at The Causeway Mess, a single workingman’s hostel and later served in the Army, including in New Guinea. It was during the war years that he met Kevin’s mother.
“If World War II hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have happened,” Kevin said.
The family eventually settled in Griffith, then a far cry from the expensive inner-south suburb it is today.
“It was more lower and upper working class, lower middle-class,” Kevin said.
Life wasn’t easy. When Joe became a supervisor of street cleaners, he started work at midnight. With no family car, he would leave Narrabundah about 11:30 pm and ride a fixed-wheel pushbike to Civic – even through Canberra’s winters.
“We used to put warm sand on the handlebars of his bike, to try to keep his hands warm while he was riding,” Kevin said.
One freezing night, Joe decided he had endured enough. “He threw his bike over the bridge into the river, went and bought a car,” Kevin said.
Growing up in the national capital, however, meant the extraordinary sometimes intruded into an otherwise ordinary childhood.
Kevin was about 8 years old and homesick in the family’s government duplex on Frome Street in Griffith when his mother gave him a rather unusual warning.
“Mum said, ‘Don’t be alarmed if some men come in and climb up on a ladder into the roof.’”
The family lived in one half of the two-bedroom duplex. Their neighbours on the other side were Russians who worked as cooks at the Soviet Embassy.
It was the Cold War, and Kevin remembers mysterious men arriving at the house, climbing into the roof space and apparently keeping watch on the neighbours.
“As these men came in in the morning, [they] made recordings or notes or whatever, I don’t know,” he said.
They returned over a short period. “We weren’t supposed to know or tell anyone about it,” Kevin said.
Whatever they were looking for, Kevin never heard of them finding it. “The Russians were cooks in the embassy,” he said. “They didn’t find anything against them.”
His father even took him by bicycle to Albert Hall, where Kevin remembers catching a glimpse of the proceedings associated with the period’s anti-communist fervour.
“We stuck our head in the door, and it was about catching the communists,” he recalled.
His education offered a different glimpse of the emerging Canberra.
Kevin attended Telopea Infant School, the newly opened Griffith Primary School and, from 1960, Telopea Park High School. There, children from working-class families mixed with students from Deakin, Red Hill and Forrest, as well as the children of diplomats and newly arrived migrants.
“It’s the first time I’d met anybody of Asian background at my high school; first time I ever met anybody who was born in Poland, Finland, Germany,” he said.
There was one cultural difference a teenage Kevin particularly appreciated. “They had a much more interesting lunch than us,” he joked.
In February 1966, Kevin joined the Public Service Board – just in time for Australia to abandon pounds, shillings and pence. He received one pay packet in pounds before the switch to dollars and cents on 14 February.
The new currency had almost been called the “royal”, a proposal from the Menzies government that proved deeply unpopular.
“Here’s 500 royals to buy that car … and the people didn’t like it,” Kevin said.
A year later, his life took a much more serious turn.
Kevin was 20 when he was called up for National Service in October 1967. After initially working in Canberra during his Army service, he sought a transfer and was sent to South Vietnam in May 1969, where he spent about five months.
Kevin later entered Canberra politics himself, serving in the ACT House of Assembly before self-government and becoming campaign manager for Labor’s Ros Kelly.
He remembers a Canberra where decisions affecting residents were largely made by federal politicians and bureaucrats rather than locally elected representatives.
“After self-government, it was the people we elected to make the decisions on and run Canberra,” he said.
Canberra, he argues, became better for having to make its own decisions – even the unpopular ones.
Politics also gave him a front-row seat to another change.
Kevin remembers Canberra electing women to prominent positions when that was still far less common elsewhere.
Ros Kelly, Susan Ryan and Margaret Reid were among its federal representatives, while Rosemary Follett became the ACT’s first chief minister.
“One of the things Canberra is notable for is electing women politicians when that wasn’t happening elsewhere,” he said.
Not all of Kevin’s milestones involve politics, war or spies.
There were cracker nights in May, when children went home early, built bonfires and set off firecrackers and skyrockets in backyards and vacant blocks.
“We would all go home for half a day … finish off our bonfires, have dinner, set fire to the bonfire and let off firecrackers,” he recalled. The practice was banned decades later for safety reasons.
Next, like many old Canberrans, he remembers the creation of Lake Burley Griffin.
Soil dug out during the works was offered free to householders for their gardens. The Gills happily accepted a load to top-dress their lawn.
“It killed our lawn because there was mud,” Kevin laughed. “That was another bureaucratic idea that was a dud.”
He has also watched Canberra overcome its reputation as a boring government town.
The arrival and success of the Canberra Raiders and later the Brumbies helped, he believes.
“The rest of Australia could see that, hey, we were good at other things and not just a government town, especially when we won the competitions,” he said.
“We were normal.” And when outsiders complained about “Canberra” and its politicians, Kevin had a ready response.
“I used to say, ‘Well, you’re complaining about the people you’ve elected and sent here, not the Canberrans!’” Family has kept him firmly connected to the city too. His two children, Tiina and Timo, and his grandchildren have made their lives here.
Kevin also rates Canberra’s health system highly. He remembers friends’ parents retiring to the South Coast, only to return within a few years because they found the services in Canberra better.
Kevin has now watched Canberra change for almost eight decades – from fibro houses, unlocked doors and cracker nights to self-government, national institutions, apartments and, to his mild disappointment, traffic jams.
The country-town feel may have faded, but he has no desire to turn the clock back.
And perhaps that’s the thread running through Kevin’s stories: he can laugh at Canberra’s mistakes, remember the Canberra that disappeared and still believe the city got better along the way. Not bad for a baby whose father’s only disappointment was that he failed his first political assignment.
Have you lived in Canberra for more than 50 years? We’d love to hear your story. Email us at nalvi@region.com.au.
