A 2013 review of ethnographic, linguistic and historical sources relating to traditional Aboriginal associations to Country for the broader ACT region, concluded that,
the Canberra area before European settlement would have had highly complex systems of associations with the land found elsewhere in Australia but that those systems broke down early in the colonial historical piece. It is clear that the combined effects of massive demographic stress, alienation from country, forced adjustments and necessary engagements with European settlers led to an early breakdown of original relationships to land and landed identity.9
2.2 ANU Campus Heritage Study
In 2012 a heritage study of the ANU campus consulted the Representative Aboriginal Organisations (RAOs)
on the cultural significance of the campus and wider areas along the Molonglo River corridor (Lake Burley Griffin), Sullivans Creek corridor and Black Mountain. Although the NFSA boundary is outside the ANU campus area it is immediately adjacent
and intimately connected with the natural and Aboriginal cultural landscape.10
The following observations about the ANU campus and surrounding area were made by the individual representatives from the ACT’s
RAOs and included in the heritage study. Most observations were made independently between the groups, indicating a generally held common understanding of the place. Some observations have been paraphrased and abbreviated due to the sensitive nature of the material provided
by some of the representatives.
The meanings and values associated with the material have not been changed. Parts of the ANU campus with cultural significance include:
The biodiversity corridor along Sullivans Creek and into Acton Ridge is important. It reflects the fact that Sullivans Creek was an important water course and resource zone that will have contributed to the attractiveness of the place as a meeting area. The conservation of this zone is considered important.
The whole of the campus is significant due to the high usage of the area by Aboriginal people prior to the arrival of Europeans. It was part of a well-used zone for meetings and trading and was located in close proximity to important ceremonial areas, including the corroboree site near the entrance to the Botanic Gardens. The intensity of use of the area is attested to by the historical observations about the number of campfires along Sullivans Creek.
Despite its recent modification, Sullivans Creek itself is identified as a feature that embodies the significance of the campus as a meeting place as well as a resource-rich zone. The conservation of this feature is important. The rehabilitation of the northern section of this waterway for natural water filtering is also considered to be an important proposal.
Acton Ridge is part of a track that connected a series of important landmarks: Mount Rogers, Black Mountain and Capital Hill—the latter being a sacred site.
Surrounding features with associative cultural significance:
Black Mountain is an important landscape feature with connections to other landscape features.
– In particular the connection between Mount Rogers, Black Mountain and Capital Hill is very important.
– Black Mountain with Mount Ainslie formed a pair of landmarks also used for navigation and landscape recognition. They were seen as being representative of women’s breasts.
More than one corroboree site was identified during this process: one where the entrance to the Botanic Gardens now stands (noted above), one just to the south of Black Mountain Drive and one further to the south, now submerged under the lake. None of these are directly affected by works on campus.
Black Mountain was part of a longer and more substantial walking/tracking route up the east coast of Australia. Now parts of that walking track have been incorporated into the ‘National Trail’.
Archaeological evidence has shown that the Molonglo River, Ginninderra Creek and Murrumbidgee River corridors were important Indigenous resource zones that attracted a considerable level of hunter-gatherer occupation. The importance of these zones has been demonstrated by archaeological surveys where several hundred Aboriginal sites including open camps sites, stone quarries, scarred trees and ceremonial sites have been recorded. The proliferation of stone artefact sites, their geographical locations and densities have indicated that human activities were focused on the gentle slopes, spurs and alluvial flats bordering the riverine corridors where access to water and food sources were readily available. The NFSA site, is located in such an area on high ground above the former Molonglo River and would have been a focal area of subsistence activities and movement for several millennia.
10 Godden Mackay Logan, 2012, ANU Heritage Study Acton Campus, vol 1, Report prepared for The Australian National University.
An archaeological assessment of the Murrumbidgee River Corridor within the ACT was undertaken in the early 1980s.11 The general survey findings indicated that there were Aboriginal sites throughout the Murrumbidgee corridor environment, with both riverine and non-riverine oriented economic activities being reflected. However, the survey showed a strong positive association between the concentrations of sites with distance from water sources. Higher concentrations of sites were common in close proximity to water sources (for example the Murrumbidgee and Molonglo Rivers). Such an association is indicative of a high economic exploitation of resources within river valleys and permanent water sources.
2.3 The National Film and Sound Archive site
In 1919, on a visit to the site of the new Australian Capital, Henry Percival Moss, the Commonwealth Chief Electrical Engineer, found a stone axe head in the vicinity ‘quite close to the Acton offices. In 1925 an examination of the surface
of a ‘sandy ridge’ between Old Parliament House and the Molonglo River resulted in the discovery and collection of several stone scrapers and points. At around the same time another axe head was located during the laying out of the laws in front of Old Parliament House. During 1929 and 1930 and succeeding years Moss made several surveys of the City and Acton areas. He identified particular areas of focal occupation along the Molonglo corridor:
The site of the Institute of Anatomy and the peninsula running from it around to Lenox Crossing near the Acton offices.
The long sandy spur running down from Black Mountain towards the Forestry School.
The western slopes of Mount Russell or Mount Pleasant at Duntroon and possibly the eastern slopes also, which have been built over since 1911.
An area between Duntroon and Scott’s Crossing on the north bank of the Molonglo.
An area between Scott’s Crossing and Lennox Crossing including the area around Provisional Parliament
House (now the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House).12
Moss continues:
[In 1931 and 1932 the area bounded by the Institute of Anatomy and Sullivan’s Creek and the Hospital yielded a large grinding stone and two pounding stones. This grinding stone is well adapted for resting on a man’s knees while he sharpens the edge of an axe or other tool.
One or two chips were also found and during the same period Mr. Kinsella, of Sydney, found a fine axe-head in the same locality.13
Moss collected over 300 stone artefacts in the area now defined as Acton and Canberra City, some of which were first exhibited in the Institute of Anatomy and then later formed the Moss collection of stone artefacts at the National Museum of Australia. Moss concludes that:
While much material was collected on ridges exposed to the four winds of heaven as well as the blasting heat of summer and the freezing cold of winter, a considerable amount was recovered from depths ranging from two or three to six feet [0.6 or 0.9 to 1.8 metres] below the surface and had thus been protected against weathering.14
2.4 Identified Indigenous sites in the vicinity of the National Film and Sound Archive buildings
Sullivans Creek 1: a corroboree site recorded in the Canberra Archaeological Society database from information provided by Bluett in 1954. The site is listed as destroyed, but location data indicates that it was close to the lower reaches of Sullivans Creek.
Institute of Anatomy Site: a hatchet found in 1934 by Kinsela. The location of this artefact was recorded as 100m west of the Institute of Anatomy, near Sullivans Creek. The details of the location are unknown, but it is considered to have been destroyed.15
Sites on the eastern side of Black Mountain:
BM1: Isolated artefact recorded in 1985 (no description details) located just off Black Mountain Drive.
BM2: Artefact scatter comprising three artefacts also recorded in 1985 (no description details). Located on a small terrace on a ridge running down the eastern side of Black Mountain towards the southern end of Sullivans Creek.
BM3: Isolated artefact recorded in 1985 (no description details) but located nearby on the same ridge as BM2.
BM4: Artefact scatter and Potential Archaeological Deposit (PAD) recorded in 1985.
Comprises 19 artefacts, including quartz, quartzite, and chert pieces. Artefact types include two cores and the rest flakes.
BM5: Scarred tree of probable Aboriginal origin in 1995.38 Located up the northern side of Black Mountain to the west of CSIRO.
11 Barz, R.K & Winston-Gregson 1981 Murrumbidgee River Corridor. An Archaeological Survey for the NCDC, National Capital Development Commission, Canberra (unpublished report ACT Heritage Library).
12 H.P. Moss, ‘Evidences of Stone Age occupation of the Australian Capital Territory’, Report of the Twenty-Fourth Meeting of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, 1939, pp. 163-166.
13 Ibid, p. 164.
14 Ibid, p. 165.
15 Godden Mackay Logan, 2012.
BMF9: Isolated artefact recoded in 2003.39 No description details provided. Located to the west
of BM5.16
Vicinity of the International Sculpture Park and Old Canberra House:
Black chert core recorded in 2018
– well worked, 38.5 x 29.5 x 19.5
with 20% remaining.
Silcrete flake recorded in 2018
– retouched edge.
Both these artefacts were located at the base of a slope which has undergone extensive erosion of the topsoil.17
ANU Campus:
5 scarred trees situated throughout the campus.
2.5 First Settlement to Federal City
The land on which the Institute of Anatomy was eventually built formed part of the first European settlement of the Canberra district. In late 1823, stockmen employed by Joshua John Moore, a clerk to the Judge-Advocate in Sydney, arrived in the district with a herd of cattle and occupied a tract of land between Mount Ainslie, Black Mountain and the Molonglo River. The stockmen erected huts and stockyards on the land, specifically on the site of what later became the Royal Canberra Hospital. In October 1824, Moore obtained a ticket of occupation for the land and just over two years later took up an option to purchase an estate amounting to 1,000 acres. During the 1830s, Moore had a cottage erected on the property – also on the later site of the hospital – even though he did not reside there.
The economic depression of the early 1840s seriously damaged Moore’s financial position, forcing him to sell his ‘Canberry’ property in 1843. The purchaser was Lieutenant Arthur Jeffreys, an officer of the Royal Navy who married one of the daughters of Robert Campbell of Duntroon. Jeffreys named the property ‘Acton’ and, although he and his descendants did not live there, the Jeffreys family was to retain ownership of the land for almost eighty years. Arthur Jeffreys himself leased the cottage on the property to the Church of England, which used the building as its local rectory. This arrangement continued until 1873 when the Church erected a new rectory building. The Jeffreys family then leased the property to Arthur Brassey who used the property as a grazing run. Brassey remained in occupation right up until the Commonwealth resumed the land for the federal capital in 1911, giving Brassey the dubious distinction of becoming the first grazier to be displaced by the government’s acquisition of the Federal Capital Territory. The resumption was contested by the Jeffreys family, but the dispute was settled in November 1912.18
Preparations, meanwhile, were being made for the establishment of the new federal capital. In May 1912, Walter Burley Griffin’s scheme had been chosen as the winner of the design competition for the proposed city. In Griffin’s design, the site on which the Institute of Anatomy would later be built lay on the eastern extremity of the area designated for the city’s university. Although the original plan showed a building on the site, the proposed structure was merely an unnamed component of the university complex.
The subsequent departmental plan for the city, drawn up after criticisms of Griffin’s design, moved the site of the university eastward, placing the future location of the Institute of Anatomy near the city’s hospital. In the event, this plan was overturned by Griffin’s modification of his original design. This ‘preliminary’ plan restored the university quarter of the city to its original location and displayed McCoy Circuit in much its present shape and location. This plan, which became the working design for the city, showed the centre of McCoy Circuit occupied by an unnamed building which again formed part of the university group.19
2.6 A National Museum of Australian Zoology
The driving force behind the establishment of the Australian Institute of Anatomy was Dr (later Professor Sir) William Colin MacKenzie, known as Colin. MacKenzie had been born of Scottish immigrant parents at Kilmore north of Melbourne in 1877. He later studied medicine at the University of Melbourne, graduating in 1898. A year after his graduation, he became the senior resident medical officer at the Children’s Hospital in Melbourne, a position he was to hold for two years. It was probably during this time that he first developed the interest in childhood diseases that would later play a significant part in the setting up of the Institute of Anatomy. Leaving the Children’s Hospital at the end of 1901, MacKenzie entered private practice as a general practitioner and, at the same time, obtained an appointment as an honorary demonstrator in anatomy at the University of Melbourne.20
17 Brett Chalmers,2018. ANU Aboriginal heritage Assessment Sullivans Creek & Heritage Trail, report prepared for ANU Heritage.
18 L.F. Fitzhardinge, ‘Old Canberra and district 1820-1910’, in H.L. White (ed.), Canberra: A Nation’s Capital, Canberra, ANZAAS, 1954, pp. 16, 29; L.F. Fitzhardinge, Old Canberra and the Search for a Capital, Canberra, CDHS, 1975, pp. 4-5; Lyall Gillespie, Canberra 1820-1913, Canberra, AGPS, 1991, pp. 8-9, 17, 21, 39, 266.
19 Gillespie, Canberra 1820-1913, pp. 278, 280, 289-90, plates 19, 24, 25; facsimile of Walter Burley Griffin’s design for federal capital, 1911, Clareville Press, Torrens, ACT.
20 Anon., ‘MacKenzie, Sir William Colin’, Australian Encyclopaedia, Sydney, Angus and Robertson, 1958, vol. 5, pp. 434-5; Monica MacCallum, ‘MacKenzie, Sir William Colin’, Australian Dictionary of Biography [hereafter ADB], vol. 10, p. 306.
Figure 2: Professor Sir Colin MacKenzie by William B. McInnes, 1928–1938 (National Museum of Australia)
According to MacKenzie’s own testimony, the origins of the Institute of Anatomy lay in the epidemic of infantile paralysis that afflicted Melbourne in 1908. Infantile paralysis was the classical form of poliomyelitis in which the virus invaded the spinal cord and caused weakness, paralysis and wasting of muscles, often with resulting deformity.; During a visit to Britain and the Continent in 1903–4, MacKenzie had studied orthopaedics, the treatment of deformities arising from disease or injury of the bones and joints. With the outbreak of the 1908 poliomyelitis epidemic, MacKenzie found his orthopaedic skills in demand from patients who wanted effective treatment. Basing his work on methods he had learned both in Australia and overseas, he gradually evolved his own unique technique for treating the disease. The treatment involved making use of the patient’s remaining muscle power to promote movement and minimise deformity.21
In the course of his clinical work, MacKenzie began to develop his own idiosyncratic theories about the scientific basis of muscle function and pathology. In his view, the pathological changes to tissue seen in such diseases as poliomyelitis could not be understood by comparison with tissue samples taken from humans who were apparently undiseased. This was because the human race, according to MacKenzie, had been physically corrupted ‘over centuries’ by alcohol, syphilis and other poisons, to such an extent that one could not reliably obtain from any one individual a sample of normal, pristine tissue. In like manner, valid comparisons could not be made with so-called ‘normal’ tissue from commonly-used laboratory animals – dogs, rabbits and guinea pigs – because they had been so denaturalised by domestication. MacKenzie believed instead that the complexities of the human body, and especially muscle function, could only be properly understood by studying the relevant anatomical parts in their simplest and purest form. Such parts were only to be found among the native Australian mammals which had lived in a natural, unpolluted environment for millions of years. As MacKenzie saw it, these mammals were the ‘key animals of the world’ in their potential for playing a crucial role in the solution of human muscle problems. From these somewhat esoteric beliefs, the Institute of Anatomy was later to acquire its distinctive architectural embellishments of figures of Australian fauna.22
As MacKenzie also believed that the native Australian mammals were doomed to extinction within a very short time, he began to assemble from 1912 a massive collection of dissected specimens of these animals. When war broke out in 1914, according to his own account, he realised that his collection could be of benefit to the treatment and rehabilitation of wounded soldiers. At the instigation of the distinguished Scottish anatomist, Sir Arthur Keith, MacKenzie decided to transfer his vast and unique collection to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in England. The material was despatched overseas in 80 tins and eight tanks. MacKenzie himself proceeded to England in 1915, where he remained for approximately three years. During this time, he helped Keith catalogue specimens of war wounds and assisted in the editing and publication of textbooks on surgical anatomy and muscle function.23
On his return to Melbourne in 1918, MacKenzie was determined to carry on with his orthopaedic work and with collecting specimens of native Australian mammals. As there was no space available for him at the University of Melbourne, he purchased an eleven-room house at 612 St Kilda Road and rapidly began to fill it with his dissected specimens. Soon afterwards, in 1920, he obtained at a peppercorn rental from the Victorian government. This was a lease on an 80-acre tract of land at Badger Creek, Healesville, where he established a reserve for, as he put it, ‘live specimens’. The reserve is still in existence. MacKenzie formally registered the St Kilda Road property and the Badger Creek reserve under the title of ‘The Australian Institute of Anatomical Research’.24
21 Professor Sir W. Colin MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume of the History of Australian Institute of Anatomy, Canberra’, c. 1930, Commonwealth Record Series [hereafter CRS] A2644, item 70; MacCallum, ADB, vol. 10, p. 306; A.J. Proust, ‘Sir Colin MacKenzie and the Institute of Anatomy’, Medical Journal of Australia [hereafter MJA], 4 July 1994, pp. 60-1.
22 MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume …’, c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70; Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works [hereafter PWC], ‘Report together with Minutes of Evidence relating to the Proposed Construction of Buildings and Formation of Reservation at Canberra for the National Museum of Australian Zoology’, 1927, p. iii.
23 MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume …’, c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70; PWC, ‘Report … relating to the Proposed Construction of … the National Museum of Australian Zoology’, 1927, p. iii; Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 5, p. 435.
24 MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume …’, c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70; PWC, ‘Report … relating to the Proposed Construction of … the National Museum of Australian Zoology’, 1927, p. iii; Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 5, p. 435; MacCallum, ADB, vol. 10, p. 307.
In the ensuing years, MacKenzie received offers for his collection of dissections from overseas museums, including at least one substantial offer from an American institution. He refused, hoping instead that the Australian government would acquire his collection for the nation. It appears that, during the early 1920s, MacKenzie pressed the government to take this course of action, possibly using the overseas offers as a lever on the federal authorities. Whatever the case, by late 1922 the government had agreed, at least privately, to acquire the collection; the decision was announced prematurely in the British Medical Journal in January 1923. The Australian government duly announced its intentions in March, stating that it deplored the fact ‘that the Commonwealth had no central museum of specimens of its own’ and ‘that it would be wise before already rare specimens became extinct to secure specimens of them for such a collection …’ MacKenzie formally donated his collection to the nation, by way of the Minister for Home and Territories, Senator George Pearce, in June 1923.25
The donation came with conditions. Under the terms of the agreement with MacKenzie (dated August 1924), the Commonwealth undertook to erect buildings and enclosures in Canberra to house his collection of animals, both live and dead. For this purpose, it agreed to reserve one or more sites in the new federal capital. For the first three years from the date of the agreement – that is, until August 1927 – MacKenzie agreed to maintain the collections in Melbourne at his own expense; thereafter, all costs were to be met by the federal government. MacKenzie himself was to be appointed Director of the proposed museum, with the title of ‘Professor of Comparative Anatomy’ and an annual salary of
£600. He took up the appointment on 1 January 1924, preceding by eight months the formal signing of the agreement with the Commonwealth. On his becoming Director of the museum, MacKenzie was compelled to relinquish his lucrative orthopaedic practice in Melbourne.26
It seems quite certain that, in making the agreement with MacKenzie, the federal government did not fully comprehend or foresee what it was committing itself to. Clearly, the government expected that, by the end of the three-year period stipulated in the agreement, it would have buildings ready in Canberra for MacKenzie to occupy, although this was not actually what the agreement specified.27
Unfortunately, MacKenzie also interpreted the agreement in this way, a fact that later led to friction between himself and the government. As it was, the government was not well-placed in the period 1924-27 to erect a major museum building in Canberra or, for that matter, anywhere else. With its commitment to transferring the seat of power to the new federal territory, the government was already heavily engaged in a major building program in Canberra, notably the construction of Parliament House. Funds and labour were not readily available for the building of the proposed museum. The scale of the project, moreover, was rather greater than it first appeared, involving not just the construction of a museum building, but the erection of residences for MacKenzie and his staff who were to accompany him from Melbourne. In addition, it included the laying out of a sizeable reserve for his live specimens, complete with animal houses, enclosures and ponds of various kinds. The whole project promised to be quite an expensive undertaking.
It may be asked why the government decided to take on a task of this magnitude at such an inconvenient time. Certainly, the threatened loss overseas of a unique and irreplaceable collection of specimens of Australian fauna was a powerful motivating factor in the government’s initially agreeing to acquire and house MacKenzie’s collection. Indeed, the original title of the proposed institution, the ‘National Museum of Australian Zoology’, was probably a reflection of the government’s primary assessment of the collection’s value as a comprehensive assemblage of specimens of Australia’s native animals, as distinct from the collection’s supposed value to research on human health problems.
Beyond that assessment, however, the government had other considerations in mind. For one thing, it wanted to make Canberra not just the country’s administrative capital, but also the national centre for Australian culture, education and science. Virtually at the same time as he agreed on the Commonwealth’s behalf to acquire MacKenzie’s collection, Senator Pearce secured Cabinet approval for the building, at a cost of about £13,000 per annum, of an observatory on Mount Stromlo. The government was already committed to the establishment of a national library in Canberra and, rather more vaguely, to the eventual foundation of a university. With institutions of this character destined for Canberra, it was singularly appropriate that the national capital should also house the nation’s foremost collection of specimens of native animals. As the British Medical Journal pointed out in hailing the government’s decision to establish a museum of Australian zoology, ‘the new Commonwealth Capital at Canberra … will then become the world’s centre for the study of
25 Australian Encyclopaedia, vol. 5, p. 435; MacCallum, ADB, vol. 10, p. 307; minute, MacKenzie to Acting Prime Minister, 5 November 1930; and MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume …’, c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70; British Medical Journal, 17 January 1923; information from Monica MacCallum, Dept of the History and Philosophy of Science, University of Melbourne.
26 ‘Zoological Museum Agreement Act 1924’, CRS A6269, item E1/30/51; MacKenzie, ‘Brief Resume …’, c. 1930, CRS A2644, item 70.
27 Memo, Home and Territories Dept, ‘Article in Melbourne “Age” of 22/7/27, regarding the delay in constructing the buildings for the National Museum of Australian Zoology at Canberra’, 25 February 1927, CRS A431, item 59/450.
Australian fauna.’28
The other main consideration that the government had in mind was the collection’s potential research value in helping to improve the health of Australia’s people. The nation’s health was of unusual concern to the Australian government and to community leaders in this period. This concern was in large measure born of an acute awareness of Australia’s small population and hence of the continent’s vulnerability to foreign invasion. There was a very widespread belief that national security depended on the maintenance of a high standard of health and fitness in the nation’s small population. During the war years, the nation had been shocked by revelations of the extent to which syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases were rampant in the community, and by the generally poor standard of national health revealed in the rejection rate for army recruits.
It was partly as a result of these concerns that the Commonwealth government, in March 1921, had established a federal Department of Health under Dr J.H.L. Cumpston, an individual who was later to have a major influence on the Institute of Anatomy. In 1924, the government also set up a Royal Commission to inquire into the state of the nation’s health. In the meantime, Walter Massy Greene, the Minister for Defence, had added the new health portfolio to his responsibilities, a remarkable combination of ministries that has only ever been repeated once in Australia’s history, and by Sir Neville Howse later in the same decade. The combination was an expression at the highest administrative level of the relationship the government of the day saw between the nation’s health and its security.29
In this climate of anxiety about the health of the Australian people, MacKenzie’s belief in his collection’s value to the understanding and treatment of diseases that particularly affected children was especially welcome. Thus, it is probably highly significant that the person to whom MacKenzie made the offer of his material was Senator Pearce. Pearce had been Minister for Defence for the duration of the war and, much more than most, would have appreciated the need to improve the nation’s health for security reasons. The potential for Mackenzie’s collection to serve this purpose would have not have escaped his attention.
2.7 Sites and Plans
Some time after the Act creating the National Museum of Australian Zoology received formal assent and in October 1924, MacKenzie visited Canberra to select sites for the museum and for the reserve for his live specimens. For the museum, he fixed upon a semicircular plot of land of about 5.75 acres in extent, situated close to the reserve for the city’s proposed university. The choice of location was not accidental: it was envisaged that the zoological museum would eventually form part of the university campus. The selection of a site for a reserve for MacKenzie’s live animals proved a little more problematic, but eventually MacKenzie settled on an 80-acre site about three kilometres west of the city at Westridge on the southern side of the Molonglo. All interested parties had concurred in the selection of both sites by mid-1925, though C.S. Daley, then Acting Secretary of the Federal Capital Commission [FCC], pointed out that Griffin had specified a site for zoological gardens for the city on the northern side of the Molonglo, near proposed
botanical gardens, an aquarium and various museums and galleries. The Commission, nevertheless, had no real objection to MacKenzie establishing another zoo for his own research purposes.30