This year marks 60 years since the National Capital Development Commission defined the boundaries on suburbs and released housing contracts in the Woden region. To celebrate the milestone, the Woden Valley Community Council is hosting a community focused fun day at Eddison Park on Sunday 16 October from 1pm.

The birthday will be celebrated with free activities the whole family can enjoy. Kids can take part in various activities like hoop shooting, teens are encouraged to enter the skate competition, while yoga and other workshops will be offered throughout the afternoon. There will be live music, dance performances, and local makers offering their wares at the art markets. Attendees will be able to learn more about the region from local groups like Landcare and Friends of Mawson Pond.

But for Woden Valley Community Council president, Fiona Carrick, the birthday is not all fun and games; it’s also a time to reflect on how the region has changed over the past six decades.

Ms Carrick says Woden once had a thriving recreational precinct which has been torn down or moved; now all they have is more high-rise apartment buildings.

“All our social side of stuff is diminishing while we are having residential towers and the government will say more residential towers means more people, brings more activity. Okay, maybe, but there is already 100,000 people living around here. If this is not a nice place, people won’t come here. The people in the towers will get in their cars and go elsewhere,” she says.

Ms Carrick has lived in Woden since 1968, occasionally moving suburbs but always staying in the area. When she was a child, she recalls there was nothing further south and her family used to make day trips to picnic at Pine Island. As development continued, Woden became the central hub of the south, once bursting with nightlife at clubs and pubs.

Ms Carrick believes the focus shifted to the city, which is understandable as that’s where tourists go, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of the local town centres.

“We could have had better planning for social infrastructure and for public spaces. We got some new coloured street furniture, but it takes more than coloured street furniture to attract people here,” she says.

The community council president says she used to play hoops with friends at the basketball stadium before heading to the Slovenian club for beers. She is saddened that the youth of Woden don’t have options like that close to home anymore. Once she started noticing how much they were losing, she decided to get involved and challenge the changes.

“I started to see the closure of the CIT, the demolition of the basketball stadium, the pitch and putt has gone, the tennis courts, the Yamba club, the pool is on its way out, the ice skating is moving to Tuggeranong, we lost the bowling alley. I started noticing the loss of all these amenities and I was like ‘hang on a sec, what is going on here’,” she says.

Recently, a local young person told Ms Carrick that bored ‘teenagers break things’, something she says is important to remember during Mental Health Month.

“This month is about awareness, a sense of belonging and connectedness. So, when we look at that, if we think about planning our town centre with those things in mind: where are we having this sense of belonging, where is the connectedness, where do young families, mothers with kids, where does the broader community go to get together? And to build that social capital and to support each other,” she says.

According to Ms Carrick, people living in the suburbs love their local shops and community. She believes that more needs to be done to create engagement opportunities for the different suburbs and surrounding areas to come together.

“What has stopped them in 60 years of investing in the community, so that we are in a better position than we are now? Why did we go backwards and lose our amenity. Why would anybody from Belconnen come here? It’s this structural imbalance in where the community amenity is and the government investment in it,” she says.

In her eyes, the next 60 years for Woden would see the life, activity and culture return to the region. She says Woden has the potential to become a destination in its own right, for people from across the Capital to be drawn here.  

“Woden is a major hub for Canberra’s south and the broader community. It’s accessible by public transport. It should and it can be a great place for us to meet and to connect with each other.”

Celebrate Woden this Saturday 16 October 1-4 pm at Eddison Park, weather permitting; tuggeranongarts.com

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