‘We’d billy-cart down Mount Ainslie’: memories of living on Limestone Avenue in the 1950s

Ask Taso Samios about some of his earliest memories living at 78 Limestone Avenue, Ainslie, and he describes a lush green backyard packed full of young, fit, handsome Greek men and the smell of Greek meatballs.

The home was the unofficial club house of Canberra’s Olympic Soccer Club, a sporting club founded by Taso’s dad and owner of 78 Limestone Avenue Tom Samios as a way to connect young Greek migrants to each other and their new home in Australia.

It was 1955, and a very young Canberra was attracting thousands of men from overseas to literally build the capital “from the ground up”. Tom Samios was the unofficial head of the Greek community in Canberra.

“They were wonderful days,” Taso recalls.

“Mum used to cook for days and days beforehand and the men would all come over after their soccer game for a party.”

Taso was a newborn when he moved into 78 Limestone Avenue with dad Tom and mum Barbara in 1950. Tom had purchased the block in the late 1940s and had plans drawn up by now iconic Canberra architect Ken Oliphant. The house was, of course, built with Canberra Red Bricks, trucked over to Ainslie from the Yarralumla Brickworks.

Taso’s little brother Nick came along and then an even littler brother Arthur, and the boys had what Taso describes as “a classic Aussie childhood”, playing cricket and footy in Corroboree Park and billy-carting down Mount Ainslie.

“Limestone Avenue was just dirt and we never worried about traffic as there weren’t very many cars,” Taso laughs.

“The houses ended at Grimes Street and there was no such thing as the Ainslie Shops, if you wanted to go shopping you went into Civic.”

Taso’s dad Tom Samios was a successful entrepreneur right through the 1950s, 60s and 70s, owning the Samios Milk Bar in Kingston, then a fish shop on East Row - “he’d drive down to Batemans Bay every couple of days and remember, back then, this was all dirt” - and later a shoe shop, Civic Footwear Centre.

The Samios family’s Oven Door Bakery was an icon of Centrepoint Arcade in the 70s, 80s and 90s.

“Mum loved living on Limestone Avenue because she could walk to work at Centrepoint,” Taso says.

“That’s the beauty of this home, it’s so close to the city and just this beautiful piece of Canberra’s history.”

Tom sadly passed away in the late 1970s, and in 2010 the family added a separate living quarters to the back of the house so Taso and his wife could care for Barbara. When Barbara passed away last month, they knew it was time for the family home to have a new owner.

“I don’t mind who buys it, I know it will give them as many happy memories as it gave us,” Taso said.

78 Limestone Avenue, Ainslie, will be auctioned at 12.30pm on Saturday 5 March 2022.