NOBODY SEEMED QUITE capable of distinguishing John Noble from Jimmy Clements when the pair turned up for the royal opening of the new Commonwealth Parliament building in Canberra. It was Monday, 9 May 1927. And as far as European Australia was concerned, the original inhabitants of the Limestone Plains, upon which Canberra was imposed, were extinct – vanished.

As Frederick Watson wrote in his Brief History of Canberra, timed to coincide with the inauguration of the new Parliament House in 1927, ‘virtually nothing remains to indicate the former existence of the Aborigines, the original inhabitants of Canberra, except a few place names’.