00:00With its manicured greens and fairways, the Royal Canberra Golf Club is the last place you'd expect to find a relic of Canberra's industrial past.
00:14But hidden amongst the stand of blue gums alongside the 10th fairway is a heritage-listed, wait for it, incinerator.
00:25Built in the late 1930s, long before the golf course moved here, all of Canberra's rubbish was brought to this architecturally designed building and burnt at high temperatures.
00:37The leftover clinker and ash was then spread on surrounding grass or used as road ballast.
00:43However, with Canberra's population growing, after about 10 years, the incinerator could no longer cope with the increased amount of general waste and its purpose was switched to burning classified government documents.
01:00It was eventually decommissioned in the late 1950s, and when the construction of Lake Burley Griffin permanently submerged the golf club's original course in the early 1960s,
01:12the club moved south to this new location and purchased the building for £100 to prevent it from being demolished.
01:23Over a dozen similar impressive incinerators were built around Australia during the same era, with some like this one in Ipswich being converted to a theatre, and this one in Sydney, a cafe.
01:40But for now, the Canberra one remains out of sight, out of mind, and hidden in our premier golf course.
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