Corinna’s Canberra: Swinger Hill

Swinger Hill is not a suburb as it is not gazetted, but rather a housing estate that’s part of Phillip. Swinger Hill is also a local unofficial name for the hill on which the trig station is located, the Swinger Trig Station.

The Swinger Hill housing estate is located in Phillip but separated by Hindmarsh and Athllon Drives from the main part of Phillip. The name Swinger Hill follows the pattern of calling local trigonometrical points after the surveyor who surveyed them, in this case Louis Walter Henry Swinger (1901–1943) who surveyed this area. Streets in this area are named after architects. You’ll recall from an earlier instalment of Corinna’s Canberra that Phillip’s streets are named after colonial pioneers and they also use names associated with the First, Second and Third Fleets.

The Swinger Hill development was built in the 1970s as an estate of mixed townhouses, some years after Phillip itself. Some of the houses in Barnet Close in Swinger Hill are listed by the Royal Australian Institute of Architects as significant 20th century architecture, and were given heritage listing in the ACT in late 2011.

Swinger Hill is closest to our Woden rooms (Phone: 6282 2605), just 2 kilometres away.