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While
Laurie Fitzhardinge was left to find his own way across the paddocks,
Larry Lake and Pauline Fanning (nee Dixon) were met at the station by
Kenneth Binns. With a staff of 25, it was not difficult for Binns to keep
a paternal eye on the young recruits:
I
didn’t think of Binns as being aloof and I probably had some contact,
or more contact than a person would nowadays have with the head of the
institution. In fact, he prided himself, especially with younger people
who were away from home in being in loco parentis’ and he became quite
hurt and offended if you didn’t discuss your personal problems with him.
If you did you got quite sympathetic treatment but if you behaved otherwise
you didn’t get very sympathetic treatment.
Pauline
Fanning Oral History, 1988
The
1927 opening of Parliament House also signalled the birth of a capital
city. In the 1930s, Canberra consisted of less than a dozen suburbs collected
around three shopping centres: Civic, Kingston and Manuka. The city had
one cinema, The Capitol, at Manuka. For most of the 1930s, Canberra was
served by the Blue Moon Café and three Greek cafés. Beyond
the nascent city, cleared paddocks gave way to mountainous bush.
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