page_title: History of the Australian Capital Territory
section_title: 21st century
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Australian Capital Territory / 21st century
caption_attribution_description: w:Mount Stromlo Observatory: burnt out remains of telescope. I took this picture on uni trip. Taken by Enoch Lau on 30 September 2004. As a courtesy, please let me know if you alter this image or this image description page. Original filename was 100_3367.JPG.
context_page_description: The history of the Australian Capital Territory as a separate administrative division began in 1911, when it was transferred from New South Wales to the Australian federal government. The territory contains Australia's capital city Canberra and various smaller settlements. Until 1989, it also administered the Jervis Bay Territory, a small coastal region.
  Indigenous Australians have lived in the present-day ACT for at least 20,000 years. The area formed the traditional lands of the Ngambri people and several other linguistic groups. It was incorporated into the Colony of New South Wales with British settlement in 1788, but no white person reached the area until Joseph Wild in 1820. In 1824, Joshua Moore built a homestead named Canberry, whose name was derived from a local Aboriginal language; its meaning is disputed. Further homesteads and stations were established over the course of the 19th century. These were initially large properties used for sheep and cattle grazing, but they were later broken up and subdivided into smaller farms and urban settlements. The oldest gazetted settlement in the ACT is Tharwa, which was proclaimed in 1862.
context_section_description: The first years of the 21st century saw a period of extended drought in the ACT region, accompanied by several bushfires that caused widespread devastation. Over the 2001 Christmas period, five separate bushfires burnt over 16 km² (6.2 sq mi) of forest in the ACT, including millions of dollars' worth of plantation pine forest.
  The drought conditions continued during the following years,  and in 2003 the ACT burned again. The 2003 bushfires damaged around 70% of the ACT's area, including 99% of the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve and significant areas of government-owned pine plantation. Four people were killed and 67 rural houses were destroyed, including 16 houses at Uriarra, 12 at Pierces Creek; 414 houses in the outer suburbs of Canberra were razed.
  More than 200 other houses were damaged, and numerous buildings of historical significance were lost, including the Mount Franklin Chalet, which was built in 1937–38 for the Canberra Alpine Club and was the first club-built ski lodge in mainland Australia, and many others in the Namadgi National Park. Nil Desperandum and Rock Valley Homestead, the two historic houses at Tidbinbilla, were destroyed. Most buildings of the Mount Stromlo Observatory, operated by the Australian National University, were destroyed, including the observatory's Oddie telescope and its dome, which had been built in 1911 and was the first federal building in the ACT.
  On 7 December 2013, the ACT same-sex marriage act came into effect, making the ACT the first legislature in Australia to allow same-sex marriages. On 12 December 2013, the High Court of Australia unanimously held this law to be invalid for inconsistency with the federal Marriage Act 1961.  However, all parties to the case had agreed and the Court accepted that the federal parliament's power to make laws with respect to "marriage", Constitution s 51(21), extends to same-sex marriage. There can now be uniform federal law for marriages of any kind.
caption: Remains of a telescope dome at Mount Stromlo Observatory after the 2003 Canberra bushfires
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