page_title: History of the Australian Capital Territory
section_title: 20th century development outside of Canberra
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Australian Capital Territory / 20th century development outside of Canberra
caption_attribution_description: English: View of 70m (230 ft.) spacecraft communication antenna at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex, located outside Canberra, Australia. It is one of the three complexes which comprise NASA's Deep Space Network. The other complexes are located in Goldstone, California, and Madrid, Spain. This is a parabolic antenna with Cassegrain feed. It operates on X band (8 - 12&#160;GHz) with extremely high gain of about 70&#160;dBi. The incoming microwaves bounce off the large dish and are focused on the small white convex secondary reflector, which reflects them into the feed horn at the center of the dish. The receiver uses extremely low noise amplifiers such as cryogenically cooled masers or parametric amplifiers to detect the faint signals from spacecraft in the outer reaches of the Solar System. The three flags in foreground are those of the nations hosting the three Deep Space Network sites.
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: A significant priority for the establishment of Canberra was the construction of water storage facilities. Cotter Dam was the first dam built on the Cotter River; construction on this 18.5 m (60.7 ft) concrete gravity dam started in 1912 and finished in 1915. Its height was raised to 31 m (101.7 ft) in 1951. Chlorination of Canberra's water began at Cotter Dam in 1955; operations were moved to the Mount Stromlo Water Treatment Plant in June 1967.
  Two additional dams were built on the Cotter: the Bendora Dam, a double-curvature, concrete-arch structure, was completed in 1961; and the Corin Dam, an earth and rock-fill embankment dam, was built in 1968. In 1979 Googong Dam was built on the Queanbeyan River in New South Wales.
  Transport into and out of the ACT was an early development priority. In 1931 the Federal Highway linking the ACT to Goulburn was completed, and in 1936 an airfield was constructed at Duntroon. On 13 August 1940 Australia's chief military officer and three senior ministers in the Menzies Government, James Fairbairn, Geoffrey Street and Henry Somer Gullett, were killed when their plane crashed on the southern approach to Canberra.
  A 6.5 km (4.0 mi)  branch from the Bombala railway line was built from Queanbeyan to Canberra station in 1914 and extended to Civic in June 1921, but the bridge over the Molonglo River was washed away in 1922 and never rebuilt. Plans to build a railway to Yass were abandoned. A 1067 mm gauge construction railway was built in 1923 between the Yarralumla brickworks and the provisional Parliament House. It was later extended to Civic, but the whole line was closed in May 1927.  A railway connecting Canberra to Jervis Bay was planned, but never constructed. Several facilities were built in Jervis Bay including the Royal Australian Naval College (HMAS Creswell) erected in 1913, the Jervis Bay Air Base Range, and a Botanic Gardens.
  The native forest of the ACT was composed almost wholly of eucalypt species and provided a resource for fuel and domestic purposes, especially during the economic boom following World War II. By the early 1960s, logging had depleted the eucalypt, and concern about water quality in the Cotter River catchment led to the forests being closed. Interest in forestry had begun in 1915, when T. C. G. Weston had commenced trials of a number of species including Pinus radiata on the slopes of Mount Stromlo. Plantation forestry began in earnest in 1926 with 2 km² (0.8 sq mi) planted annually around Uriarra and Pierce's Creek.
  By 1938 the area planted yearly was 4 km² (1.5 sq mi), with the favourable benefit of reducing erosion in the Cotter catchment. In 1967 the Australian Government approved a plan for a total 160 km² (61.8 sq mi) of plantation in the ACT, which was achieved in 1970. The ease of access to the plantations has made them popular recreation areas for Canberrans. Throughout the 20th century, significant areas of plantation forest were periodically lost to bushfires, with major fires occurring in 1939, 1952, 1979, 1983, 2001 and 2003.
  In 1936 about 8.1 km² (3.1 sq mi) of forest was set aside to create the Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, and in 1939 a koala enclose was built by the Institute of Anatomy. The government acquired land to establish a national park and fauna reserve in 1962, expanding it to 36.3 km² (14.0 sq mi) and later, to its current size of 54.5 km² (21.0 sq mi). In 1969 the first wildlife displays were created, and the park was officially gazetted in 1971. In 1984 the Namadgi National Park was declared. It is 1,061 km² (409.7 sq mi) and takes up approximately 46% of the ACT's land.
  In 1911, Mount Stromlo was assessed as a possible site for a Commonwealth Solar Observatory, and it became the location of the facility in 1924. It was operated as a Commonwealth government facility until 1957, when it was transferred to the Australian National University (ANU). From 1944 to 1968 it was also the site of the national time-keeping service. By the early 1980s, Mount Stromlo, together with the ANU's Siding Spring observatory, was producing Australia's
caption: The Tidbinbilla tracking station opened in 1965
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