A fairly quick internet search through Wikipedia and National Archives shows no direct evidence for this, but local lore may throw more light on the matter.

Euston history goes back to at least 1852, when the first post office was opened.

In 1876 the settlement at Euston was described in the following terms:

“Euston is a crossing-place for sheep and cattle. There is a Custom-house officer here, though I should judge that his avocations were not of an extremely onerous nature, and the township also possesses a post and telegraph office. If the building can be taken as a type of the township, Euston has not a long life before it. The walls appear as if rent apart by an earthquake. The hotels and about a dozen small houses constitute the remainder of the township.” wikipedia

The search for a national capital took nearly twenty years from 1891 to 1908, and according to a Parliamentary Paper by David Headon:

“numerous towns came and went, crashed and burned, sometimes re-emerged, phoenix-like, from the flames, only to burn again, until, in the last months of 1908, amidst controversy and name-calling, brinksmanship and hectic behind-closed-doors number-crunching, the site that was marketed as ‘Yass-Canberra’ emerged victorious.”

Whether or not was one of the numerous towns that crashed and burned his hard to say definitively, but,  in the end, the contest came down to three sites: Bathurst, Dalgety and of course, Yass Canberra.  For any site to be considered it had to satisfy the following criteria:

  • the site had to be in NSW, a hundred miles from Sydney;
  • the site would be inland, for a coastal city risked both the outbreak of disease and bombardment from foreign ships;
  • the site must have a plentiful water supply;
  • the site must be a beautiful one, a place where Nature could elevate and inspire—a place combining the attributes of the ‘City Beautiful’ and the ‘Garden City’; and perhaps most significantly at the time,
  • the site must be in a cold region.

The choice of a National Capital was the subject of many a feisty debate, and Headon’s paper provides a very entertaining and worthwhile  read! Wanted: Treasure House of a Nation’s Heart: The Search for an Australian Capital City, 1891–1908

References:

Wikipedia

Wanted: Treasure House of a Nation’s Heart…

Image: Euston Court house,  attribution: By Mattinbgn – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7564261

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *