If you visit the area around the Kambah Adventure Playground, you will find remnants of Kambah Station, a grand cattle station whose owners were part of Canberra society, hosting parties, racing horses and rambling across the then vast property, with not another house in sight.
Sim and Judy Bennet were a glamorous couple who raised three children, Suzun, Sim Junior and Stephen, on the property before it was resumed in 1970 to develop the first suburbs of Tuggeranong.
Kambah the suburb was named after the farm, its first homes finished in 1974.
The homestead - where the Bennet family used to swim in the pool with nothing but Mount Taylor in the background - became a community centre until it fell into disrepair and was demolished in 1981.
Kambah historian Glenn Schwinghamer, is hosting a tour of the old homestead site on Saturday morning as part of Kambah's 50th birthday celebrations, accompanied by members of the Bennet family, including Sim's children Suzan and Stephen and Sim Junior's wife Eva and son Oliver.
It's part of Saturday's packed Kambah Heritage Day, with other events focusing on Kambah's unique planning features and a time capsule buried after the 2003 bushfires being opened at the Firestorm Story Tree on Saturday afternoon.
The Kambah Woolshed is the most obvious remnant of the homestead, still standing at what is now the corner of O'Halloran Circuit and Springbett Street. There is also Sim's old green hayshed, next to the Kambah Tennis Club. A building in Laidlaw Place now used by the Diversity Hub was once the farm manager's cottage. The homestead would have stood between the cottage and the adventure playground. The swimming pool was to the north of that, overlooking what are now the playing fields.
Eva Bennet was originally from Germany, living in Canberra while her father was on secondment to the German Embassy in Yarralumla. She was just 17 when she was invited by mutual friends to have lunch with the Bennet family at the farm, in 1972.
She and Sim Junior struck up a friendship and they married when she was 19.
That first visit to Kambah Station made her realise she never wanted to return to Germany.
"It was one of those pivotal days when your life changes," she said.
"It was a beautiful, beautiful property. I just remembering coming through the gates thinking, 'Wow'. I hasn't even met the Bennets but I felt at that moment, 'Australia is my home'. Something inside you changes and you think, 'This is just sensational'.
"The property was so well run. The fences were done. It was green. The cattle we fat as ticks. And then you can imagine driving up and stepping out to Sim Junior's parents who loved people and were very hospitable."
Eva lives in Griffith and her son Oliver in Queanbeyan. Oliver, 43, never got to see the homestead but has had a keen interest in the history of the station, with is father Sim Junior passing away in 2016.
"I just remember dad bringing us back to try to show us things and being at the adventure playground and him pointing things out," Oliver sad. "Then for me it was going through Trove and reading all the old newspaper articles about the family and trying to piece it all together."
Eva said she felt goosebumps returning this week to the Kambah Woolshed, now surrounded by suburbia.
"It's sort of trying to reconcile your memory with something that looks so different," she said.
