'I've had a ball': Heather Henderson (nee Menzies) on her 71-year love affair with Canberra

In Heather Henderson's Canberra of 1951, people would stop on Adelaide Avenue and offer the prime minister a lift to work.

"My father used to walk to work at Parliament House from home [The Lodge]," Heather recalls of her father, Sir Robert Menzies.

“There was no security, anybody could come up and talk to him. The population of Canberra was so small, almost everybody knew everybody. But he could walk around Canberra without being pestered."

Sitting in Heather’s home in Yarralumla, listening to her talk about a very young Canberra and watching her remember precious moments with her very famous father - Sir Robert Menzies - is an astounding way to spend a Tuesday morning.

Heather, now in her 90s, is the youngest child and only daughter of Sir Robert and Dame Pattie Menzies. Sir Robert was the longest-serving Prime Minister of Australia, much-loved by the Australian people and popular with Canberrans themselves.

While there are hundreds of tributes and dedications to Sir Robert Menzies nationally, Heather herself is about to have her own namesake built in Canberra.

A brand new development in Dickson by AIT Properties Group and Merrylin Development is named Heather: paying tribute to the Menzies family’s role in shaping Canberra, and a continuation of the family’s legacy in the inner north (the Heather development will be built on the site of Dame Pattie Menzies House on Challis Street).

“I’m very honoured to have the development built in my name,” Heather says.

“I’ve known and loved Canberra for a very long time.”

Heather first met Canberra - “no more than a country town” - in 1939 when her father Robert became the 12th Prime Minister of Australia. She remembers the day he was elected.

“The head mistress came into the dormitory [at boarding school in Melbourne], saying that he'd been made prime minister,” Heather says.

“Well, none of us had the faintest idea what that meant, but we thought it was obligatory to jump up and down and shout ‘Hooray, hooray'."

Sir Robert’s initial tenure ended in 1941 but he was re-elected Prime Minister in 1949 and stayed in the position for 16 years.

The Lodge officially became Heather’s home in 1951 (older brothers Ken and Ian were grown men “living their own lives” at that point).

The Lodge was “like many other houses at the time” Heather says, and she distinctly remembers bus loads of tourists pulling up on National Circuit and staring while Sir Robert and Dame Pattie had a cup of coffee on the terrace under the wisteria.

“The Lodge, in those days, had a little two-strand wire fence around it,” Heather says.

“That's all! Anyone could walk in and out - and they did!"

Heather sometimes accompanied her mother and father to events locally, at Albert Hall and Parliament House, and joined her father on election tours nationally. She fundraised for charities across Australia, including the Red Cross, and met a 27-year-old Queen Elizabeth II during the Royal tour of Australia in 1954. The same year, when Dame Pattie was temporarily unwell, Heather accompanied Sir Robert to the Prime Minister’s Conference in London; spending the weekend with Sir Winston and Lady Churchill at their country residence, Chequers.

Back in Canberra, Heather enjoyed tennis at The Lodge, and the occasional swim in Paddy’s Creek. She’d play polocrosse at the Woden property - located at Hume - where she met husband Peter Henderson.

“Peter was from the country, the Goulburn district, and was a friend of friends,” Heather says.

“I have to confess, we did sort of snarl at each other, when we were introduced because I'd been told I would like him and he'd been told he'd like me. So, we therefore decided we would not like each other.

“Anyway, we got over that one.”

Heather and Peter married in 1955 and over the years lived in Indonesia, Switzerland, the UK and the Philippines due to Peter’s work for the Department of External Affairs (now DFAT). The couple had four daughters and despite several stints overseas, always returned to Canberra and the home they’d purchased on Wilmot Crescent, Forrest.

“It was very convenient for us being so close to The Lodge where my parents were living. My father could just walk over and sit,” Heather says.

“One day he was sitting there, and his granddaughters were climbing up the back of the chair, going head first down the front of him.

“Well when they got to the fattest bit, they’d yell out, ‘Look out, be careful!’

“I thought, what would people think if they could see this?”

Sir Robert Menzies remained Prime Minister until 1966 and died in 1978. Sadly, Peter died too, in 2016.

Now aged 94, Heather lives close the to lake in Yarralumla - a lake she watched being filled from the windows of the Canberra Community Hospital at Acton after giving birth to her fourth daughter.

Her love for Canberra is “about as strong as ever” and she hopes residents of the new Heather development “enjoy living in a city that’s been a wonderful home”.

“I've lived all over the place, and I'm very happy to end my days here," Heather says.

“It’s mostly about the people for me. When I went to the [Yarralumla] shops after my mother died, they were all rushing up and hugging me and kissing me. I can hardly talk about it.

“It was just extraordinary, and I thought, why would I want to be anywhere else?”

View the Dickson development named after Heather here.

All images within this article are courtesy of the Menzies family.