Canberra is a city of risk takers and thinkers, not just a backdrop for politics
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Version 0 of 1. It’s a clear, sunny winter day with big-sky blue overhead and light glints off Lake Burley Griffin. We speed in the car over the Commonwealth Avenue bridge towards the imposing glory of Parliament House, passing a leisurely parade of foot traffic. The slight breeze throws a gentle spray of water from Captain Cook Fountain across the windscreen. My husband turns to me and smiles. “Sometimes this city really turns it on,” he says. Not everybody loves Canberra and don’t we just know it. This is the city Australia loves to hate. Yawn. Oh the tedium of people who don’t live in Canberra – and haven’t visited here since school camp 30 years ago – telling us that this is a dull place full of politicians and public servants wearing cheap suits and driving around the city’s endless roundabouts. It’s a utopia-gone-wrong. A good sheep station spoiled. And where are all the people, anyway? Like “Washington,” journalists often say “Canberra” when they mean “the federal government”. This might fit into a headline better but infuriates locals and adds to Canberra’s undeserved stigma. Let me point out that you, the rest of Australia, elected 148 of the 150 politicians in the House of Representatives up on hill, effectively sending them here from somewhere else. It’s known as a public service town but actually more than half of Canberra workers are employed in the private sector. Most Canberrans don’t have much to do with politicians at all; we go about living our everyday lives in much the same way as other city folk all over the country. Except we’re breathing the clean air. Driving on uncongested roads. Bumping into someone we know at the shops, because it’s really not such a big place. Charmingly though, we can still pop in to view artworks of international significance at the National Gallery at any time. Your witty quips about Canberra’s failings are stale as 106 year-old-bread. Yes, that’s right: the bitterness goes way back to 1908 and stems mainly from the fact that neither Melbourne or Sydney was chosen as the national capital. (Now that’s a lesson on how to hold a grudge, if ever there was one.) According to eminent historian and writer Lenore Coltheart, Melburnians are traditionally the most vicious about Canberra. “The historical evidence certainly distinguishes between Sydney and Melbourne in terms of Canberra-bashing, with Melbourne being much better at it,” Dr Coltheart says. Dr Coltheart says that if you look back at editions of Melbourne’s defunct Argus newspaper from the late 1920s into the 1930s, the insults about Canberra were “amazingly inventive” and “100% negative.” “Every new achievement had a sarcastic response – from the completion of public buildings to the glorious achievement of the landscaping of the infant city,” she explains. She goes on to say that Australian federation “almost didn’t happen and Canberra represents the difficulties. “But it also represents the particular way that Victoria feels it lost out … because we are closer to Sydney than Melbourne. So that’s what Melbourne hates,” she says. Jeremy Lasek, current CEO of the national Australia Day council and former centenary of Canberra executive director, says we used to cough the word “Canberra” into our hand when a stranger asked us where we came from. But not anymore. Over the last decade things have started changing and just in the last couple of years this transformation is even more pronounced. Locals casually call it “Canberra Pride.” If you’re a Twitter user, the sentiment even has a couple of associated hashtags: #CBR and #cbrpride. It was pride that marked Canberra’s centenary celebrations last year. The-then centenary of Canberra creative director Robyn Archer asked us to “re-imagine Canberra.” And we did. By far the most stunning and controversial attendee of the 100th birthday was Skywhale, a hot air balloon designed by ex-Canberran sculptor Patricia Piccinini. Skywhale’s flesh-coloured body, serene face and bulbous breast-like appendages floating above town stirred endless debate. Some people loved her. Some people hated her. No one thought she was boring. Skywhale was a bold symbol of what we could produce and we started to understand that we weren’t boring either. Lasek believes she showed we are a city of “risk-takers” and “thinkers,” not just the seat of federal government. It also seems that the rest of the world doesn’t think Canberra is quite as crap as the rest of Australia does. Public radio in the US recently interviewed me about Canberra’s delights and just last month The New York Times published a glowing travel article called 36 Hours in Canberra, Australia. You can’t believe how thrilled Canberrans were about this latter development, which is strange because it told us what we already know about our city. We have superb food, wine, culture, subcultures, education, national institutions, sport and the glorious bush right on our doorstep. Why then did Canberrans care so much about the NYT article? After listening to an endless diatribe since Canberra was founded, the national’s capital finally had outside recognition. And it came from one of the hippest cities in world, no less. Now we just have to convince our own countrymen and women to give us a go. |