We wind back the clock to Canberra’s big events of 1924

While we were officially declared Australia’s capital in 1913, it took some years for the building to begin.

But by 1924, thousands of men had converged on the treeless plains of the region to start to erect Australia's new capital. With every new building, every new road and a sewer being carved out underground, our city began to emerge.

Here are the big events that took place 100 years ago.

The Burns Club is born.

Many of the 1,400 men working to build Canberra in the 1920s were Scottish. They’d gather on the banks of the Molonglo for ‘Burns Evenings’, where the works of famed Scottish poet Robert Burns would be read out loud.

These evenings were formalised with the establishment of the Burns Club in 1924; a club for Scots to socialise, maintain their Scottish cultural interests and ties, and provide each other with moral and other support in their new country.

Within weeks of forming, the club had hosted a Halloween concert, formed a choir, hosted a Highland Gathering (the profits of which were donated to the P&C Association of the Telopea Park School) and formed a soccer team. The Burns Club is still a much-loved club within the Canberra community today.

An observatory opens at Mount Stromlo.

The Commonwealth Solar Observatory was established in 1924, on Mount Stromlo, on the outskirts of a very new Canberra. Founded mainly to study the sun and support research into geophysics, the complex included residences, plant and maintenance buildings, as well as scientific observation and recording equipment.

Hostel No. 1 (now the Hyatt) officially opens.

Canberra’s first hotel (at first named a ‘hostel’ due to the prohibition of alcohol in the territory), opened in December 1924, just in time for the first auction of residential land in the capital.

The hotel was designed by federal architect John Smith Murdoch, and used an unusual scheme of pavilions arranged around garden courts.

In 1925, it became The Hotel Canberra, and its guests were mostly politicians and senior public officials waiting for their homes to be built in Reid, Kingston and Griffith.

The first commercial leases are sold.

On 12 December 1924, Herbert Colman acquired Canberra’s first retail lease, at Kingston (and a gold pen from the government in recognition of the historic event).

Exactly a year later, in December 1925, he opened the first JB Young’s department store on Giles Street, Eastlake (now Kingston). Colman’s motto was reportedly ‘enterprise before population’.

The first Canberra ‘airport’ is declared.

Northbourne Aviation Ground was declared operational on 4 March 1924. Essentially a cleared paddock in Dickson (about where the playing field behind Dickson College is today), the aviation ground was mostly used for emergency landings between Melbourne and Sydney (airlines at the time didn’t offer Canberra as a ‘destination’, funnily enough.)

The aviation ground operated for a couple of years before it was deemed unsuitable for the massive influx of aircraft that would arrive for the official opening of Parliament House in 1926. Instead, a paddock in the Majura Valley – owned by the Campbell family at the time – was chosen as the new airport.