In 1927, three-year old Dawn with her older sister Del, and parents Harry and Della, moved into their newly built house at 24 Mugga Way in Red Hill.
A well-known local historical landmark, Mrs Waterhouse’s childhood home, Calthorpes’ House, is now a museum.
Built on Mugga Way by her parents Harry and Della, Calthorpes’ House was designed by Oakley and Parkes, the same architects who designed the Prime Minister’s residence, The Lodge.
“The bathroom in The Lodge and our bathroom were exactly the same,” said Mrs Waterhouse.
“It was my mother’s dream home, she absolutely loved it, and she never wanted to alter it. That’s why it’s a museum because it has never been changed.”
Born in Queanbeyan in 1923, Mrs Waterhouse spent her formative years in the nation’s newly formed capital at a time when she said there was “really nothing there”.
“It was just a bare paddock,” Mrs Waterhouse said in an interview with CityNews in 2021.
“I remember when we moved into Canberra from Queanbeyan and my father waved his hand across the land and said to my sister Del and I: ‘One day, girls, all this will be a city’.”
Mrs Waterhouse, whose late father stock and station agent Harry Calthorpe, played a part in the settling of well-known Canberra suburbs Kingston, Griffith and Red Hill, lamented the poor planning of the city that had allowed parts of it to be overwhelmed with “concrete” buildings.
From close quarters, she watched the city grow, observing its transformation from sheep paddock to modern city.
Her youth was spent riding bikes, looking for fossils at Mugga, swimming at the Cotter and roaming anywhere she liked.
“One day I walked all the way from Red Hill to Mount Ainslie and back, that was a long way, it was such an adventure,” Mrs Waterhouse said.
Witnessing the first steps of Canberra’s urbanisation, she recalls with great clarity the day the Manuka pool opened in 1931.
“Dad bought us a season ticket that cost 12/6d, that meant we could go day and night. It was absolutely wonderful,” said Mrs Waterhouse.
Mrs Waterhouse attended school, first at Telopea Park, then at Girls Grammar.
Her childhood ambition was to be a nurse. However on leaving school she worked as a lab assistant at the CSIRO where she met her future husband Douglas Waterhouse, an entomologist and the inventor of Aerogard.
They married in 1944 and the couple raised their four children in Canberra.
“All the boys were heading off to war so the girls got the jobs. There were lots of experiments to do. I fed grasshoppers and mosquitoes, I learnt how to crutch a sheep and drive a gas producer,” said Mrs Waterhouse.
“I don’t like cement, I don’t like the overcrowding and I don’t like what seems to be disrespect for the city’s poorer citizens,” says Mrs Waterhouse. “Where has our community spirit gone?”
“I’m so proud I’m a Canberra girl, if only they would stop building with concrete; they have lost the plot.”
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