Painting

In January 1950, the Commonwealth Minister for Immigration, the Hon. Harold Holt convened the first Australian Citizenship Convention. An Arts and Crafts exhibition associated with the convention was held at the Canberra University College then located in the Melbourne Building in Civic. Above the main entrance to the exhibition, was a large oil painting on canvas by the father and son artists Verners (Werner) and Gurt Linde, recent migrants from Latvia. The subject of the painting is migration and the contribution of migrants to Australia. Sometime after the Convention, and before April 1963, this painting was relocated to its present hanging space at the school.

Verners Linde trained as an artist in the Stieglitz Palace, now the School of the Decorative Arts in St Petersburg around the time of the Russian Revolution. The size and style of the painting reflects that associated with 20th century Russian art. Linde went on to become a prominent artist and newspaper cartoonist in Latvia before the Second World War, but was forced to flee the country by the successive invasions by the Germans and the Russians. Neither side appreciated his satirical depictions of them in his newspaper cartoons.

Information about the life of Verners Linde was supplied by his younger son Dr Werner Linde, a medical practitioner from Adelaide, .Werner Linde is a former well-known basketballer who represented Australia at the 1964 Olympic Games in Tokyo. Gurt Linde is depicted in the painting holding the Australian flag and Verners is in the blue shirt below him. Artistic license has shown him with hair as he was bald at the time of the painting. Vemers and Gurt Linde both died in the 1970s. The painting and the story behind it is due to feature prominently in a new official history of Canberra by ANU academic. Dr Nicholas Brown.

Stairwell Area

The school has witnessed interesting and sometimes troubled times. In May 1927, it was closed for nine days and used as an emergency hospital for the opening of the Provisional Parliament House. In 1933, an eleven year old student, Joyce Holden, was killed near the front door of the school when the brakes on a school bus failed. During the Second World War, students practiced First Aid and air raid drills, made camouflage nets and mourned for more than forty ex-students who were killed in the conflict.