A river flows beneath Canberra's largest suburb.
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00:00We all know that Canbar is Canberra's biggest suburb, a super suburb of over
00:0614,000 people and it's celebrating its 50th birthday this year but it also
00:11harbours a few secrets including a hidden creek. With its headwaters on the
00:21southwestern slopes of Mount Taylor, Village Creek winds its way through the
00:26spine of Canberra before spilling into Lake Tuggeranong. Sim Bennett Jr. who
00:33lived at Canberra Station before the farm was resumed to make way for the
00:37suburb in the early 1970s described it as a character creek with big buttresses
00:44of clay that stick out and in a child's mind were like the Grand Canyon. In his
00:53oral history interview with Canberra historian Glenn Schwinghammer in the
00:57early 2000s Sim also recalled the reason he didn't want to swim in the creek
01:03leeches. Today squirreled away in the National Library of Australia are early
01:10plans of Canberra which was initially to be called Village Creek after the
01:15waterway and which clearly showed the course of the creek running through the
01:21centre of the suburb. So where is this leech-infested character creek now? Well
01:29it's underground. In a way it's Canberra's answer to Sydney's tank stream
01:36only much longer. The Village Creek runs virtually its entire length of about
01:42seven kilometres in pipes beneath the suburb. While engineers who worked on
01:48diverting the creek underground have passed on to that even bigger suburb in
01:53the sky it's understood that flood mitigation was the main reason the creek
02:00was buried. I'm sure the timing of the tragedy at Woden in January 1971 when a
02:06raging torrent of water flowing through an open drainage channel of the Yarra
02:11Lumla Creek washed several cars off the road resulting in the death of seven
02:16people was also a factor. The Village Creek hidden but not forgotten. Happy
02:2450th birthday Canberra.