Illustrious
Higgins
Higgins was gazetted as a suburb on 6 June 1968.
The suburb is
named after Henry Bournes (H.B.) Higgins (1851-1929), politician and
judge, famous for his ruling which established the principle of a basic
wage.
Due to H.B.'s
legacy, streets in Higgins are named after Judges. Find out who your
street is named after on the ACT
Planning website.
Higgins is
10.5km from the Canberra GPO and 12.2km from Parliament House (as the
cockatoo flies). It has the honour of being one of the most affordable
suburbs in Canberra, with a mean property price in 2008 of $385,000. It
possibly also has the highest density of government housing of any
Canberra suburb...although this is yet to be confirmed. Celebrities
that choose to call Higgins their home include Hugh Jackman, Tony
Barber and Max Bygraves. It is also rumoured that Nicole, Keith and Sunday are currently looking to invest in the suburb.
Higgins
Houses - synonymous with comfort and dignity
The
suburb of Higgins holds a special place in the history of the
development of the nation’s capital. Mid-last
century, the
Australian Government was desperately trying to woo its public servants
from Melbourne and Sydney to Canberra with the promise of sparkling
new brick-veneer homeS.
Thus, from the mid sixties to
the mid seventies, with the transfer of public
servants, and the accompanying construction workers, retailers, postal
and police workers (combined with the inevitable high birth rate that
goes with relocating all those people to a strange land with no TV) the
population of Canberra burgeoned from about 70,000 to
200,000.
Unfortunately there weren’t enough houses in the sheep
paddock
that was early Canberra, so lots had to be built and fast.
Materials and labour were hard to come by. Whilst sheep are
pretty clever, they don’t make very good plumbers.
So, the National Capital Development Commission was set up to oversee
the task of building houses for all, and to develop our
nation’s
capital ‘as a place in which to live in comfort and
dignity’.
The epitome of comfort and dignity, Higgins has its fair share of the
12000 or so ‘government houses’ the NCDC built
during this
time. Money was tight, but economies of scale were achieved
by
repeating the same handful of designs throughout the suburb, and making
bulk purchases of materials. To avoid the embarrassment of
all
houses looking the same, slightly different coloured bricks were used,
and designs were mirror-imaged or even rotated on the block.
In the early seventies, the standards of workmanship in the govvie
house started to be questioned. There were suspicions too
many
corners had been cut when problems arose, such as fuses blowing when
two appliances were turned on at a time. In response, new improved
designs were introduced offering luxury living with separate shower
recesses and even separate shower rooms, concrete floors in wet areas,
oil and gas heaters, double carports and….even some two
storey
houses!
As money for building new houses ran out, houses were offered for sale
to their tenants. The NCDC then used that money to build more
houses. Once sold, these much revered houses became
affectionately known as ‘ex-govvies’.
Sadly, towards the mid seventies, once Canberra’s population
had
grown large enough to pull together its own rugby team, the
Government’s focus shifted. Falling into line with
the rest
of Australia, they introduced means testing so that public housing was
targeted to those in need. (Up until then you just had to
work in
the ACT, and put your name on a waiting list). The hay-day of
the
celebrated govvie house was over.
Today, Higgins contains perhaps the highest density of unmodified
ex-govvie houses of that period, due to the high level of cultural
awareness of Higgins residents. As such, it stands as a proud testament
to the govvie house legacy, and its contribution to the unique suburban
atmosphere of our nation’s capital.
|
