Downer is a suburb of

Canberra Canberra ( ) is the capital city of Australia. Founded following the federation of the colonies of Australia as the seat of government for the new nation, it is Australia's largest inland city and the eighth-largest city overall. The ci ...

, Australia, in the city's inner north. The suburb is bounded by Northbourne Avenue, Antill Street and Philip Avenue. The suburb was gazetted in 1960 and named after Sir

John Downer Sir John William Downer, KCMG, KC (6 July 1843 – 2 August 1915) was an Australian politician who served two terms as Premier of South Australia, from 1885 to 1887 and again from 1892 to 1893. He later entered federal politics and served as ...

(1844–1915) Premier of South Australia and a member of the first

Australian Senate The Senate is the upper house of the Bicameralism, bicameral Parliament of Australia, the lower house being the House of Representatives (Australia), House of Representatives. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Chapter ...

in 1901. There is no specific theme for street names.

History

The buildings which make up the Downer community centre and shops, were built for the

CSIRO The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) is an Australian Government The Australian Government, also known as the Commonwealth Government, is the national government of Australia, a federal parliamentar ...

in 1930s, and the area now comprising Downer was an agricultural research facility for the CSIRO. The area now comprising the suburb was used between 1939 and 1945 as a plantation for the growth of

opium poppy ''Papaver somniferum'', commonly known as the opium poppy or breadseed poppy, is a species of flowering plant in the family Papaveraceae. It is the species of plant from which both opium and poppy seeds are derived and is also a valuable ornamen ...

to provide a source for medications in the unavailability of imported supplies. The large pine and gum trees which surround the block around the shops were planted in this time as a wind break for the CSIRO building. Large trees (Camden Woolybutts) along Swinden street were also planted then, as Swinden street was the driveway for the CSIRO building, where it connected to

Northbourne Avenue Northbourne Avenue is a major road in Canberra, Australia. It extends from City Hill in the south, to the Federal Highway in the north. It is a north–south running road which has three lanes for motorised traffic, and one lane for bicyc ...

. With the development of the suburb the trees became diseased during the 1980s and a program is underway to replace them with more amenable local varieties of gum. As of September 2008, all but two or three of the older Swinden Street gums have been removed. Downer has a local oval between Frencham, Melba, Bonython and Bradfield streets, with a shopping centre. However, in 2005 the shopping centre was vacant due partly to the poor location of the centre away from major roads. The shops were refurbished in the late 2010s, with a new cafe and vet clinic. In May 2019 a bronze kangaroo sculpture was unveiled, to replace a previous kangaroo sculpture which went missing six years earlier. Nearby, the Canberra Business Centre until recently occupied the site of the former Downer Primary School. The school closed in 1988.

Geology

Calcareous

shale Shale is a fine-grained, clastic sedimentary rock formed from mud that is a mix of flakes of clay minerals (hydrous aluminium phyllosilicates, e.g. kaolin, Al2 Si2 O5( OH)4) and tiny fragments (silt-sized particles) of other minerals, especial ...

s from the Canberra Formation is overlain by Quaternary alluvium. This rock is the limestone of the original title of Canberra "Limestone Plains".Henderson G A M and Matveev G, Geology of Canberra, Queanbeyan and Environs 1:50000 1980.

Footnotes

Suburbs of Canberra {{Canberra-geo-stub