Dickson

Dickson is a suburb in the Inner North of Canberra, Australia.

Dickson who was a Queensland advocate of Australian Federation and one of the founders of the Australian Constitution. There is no specific theme for street names.

Between March 1924 and November 1926, the original Canberra Aerodrome occupied the southern third of Edward Shumack's soldier settlement block (which continued to be used for sheep grazing) in what was then known as the District of Ainslie (Block 98i). The official aerodrome extended from a NW corner north of Dickson Library near Antill St in Downer to a SE corner near Dutton St and Majura Avenue, taking in the whole western portion of Majura playing fields and the entire central residential portion of Dickson between Cowper St and Dickson wetlands.The actual landing ground covered the whole of Section 72 Dickson and was marked by placements of rocks at four corners, a windsock, and a large central whitewashed marker (60 feet in diameter) visible to pilots from a distance.This was Canberra's original airport, and was used by RAAF and civilian flights.Canberra's first air crash took place here, at about 10.30am on 11 February 1926, when a RAAF De Havilland DH9 travelling from Richmond air base to survey the Murrumbidgee River stalled after making a sharp turn to land and crashed in the NW corner, within 100m of where the library now stands, bursting into flames. The 26 year old pilot, Philip Mackenzie Pitt, was killed on impact and is buried in an unmarked grave at Queanbeyan's Riverside cemetery, in the Catholic section. Pitt had trained as a cadet at Duntroon, and done his flight training at Point Cook near Melbourne in 1925. The 25 year old aerial photographer/observer in the back seat, William Edward Callander, was pulled from the wreckage by a farm worker, Walter Ernest Johnson, who had been ploughing the adjoining paddock and leapt the fence to offer aid to the victims. Callander died at Acton Hospital later that evening and is buried at St John's Church in Reid, leaving a widow and two small children. The aerodrome was surveyed six months later by the Federal Capital Commission (FCC), but unwillingness by the FCC to grant a long-term lease to the Department of Defence stymied investment in a hangar and other facilities, and urgency to prepare for the opening of provisional Parliament House in 1927 resulted in the aerodrome being transferred to the Duntroon property in Majura Valley (at the western edge of the current airport site).Dickson was gazetted on 28 September 1928 and took in the whole of what are now the suburbs of Dickson and Downer. All of the land in Dickson had been earmarked for an Industrial area on the final 1918 Griffin Plan and blueprint. However the decision to transfer the Industrial area to Fyshwick was taken by 1945, and a 25-year lease was granted in 1940 to Dr Bertram Thomas Dickson, Chief of the Plant Industry Division of the CSIR, for Dickson Experiment Station. The station covered 640 acres, comprising the eastern third and northern edge of Dickson, the whole of Downer (which at that time was named Dickson), and a small part of what is now Watson at the station's northern end. Dickson Experiment Station began operating during World War II and initially focused on trialling crops to aid the war effort including opium, rubber and pyrethrum, with assistance from the Women's Land Army. After the war ended, Dickson Experiment Station focused on soils and pasture research, food crops and sheep farming until as late as 1962. By May 1951 the Department of the Interior had determined that the land was required for suburban expansion and begun sketching plans for new road layouts, schools and a district shopping centre. Antill Street and the stormwater drain were built in 1958–59, and the first incursion into the Experiment Station was for a motel on the corner of Northbourne Avenue south of Antill Street (where the Telstra building is now). The Experiment Station's work was transferred to Ginninderra Experiment Station in Belconnen. The first houses in the suburb were built near Braddon in 1958.