Canberra
About as exciting as a wet afternoon in Milton Keynes
March 1999

I don't understand Canberra.

But then I don't understand Australia in general and I've been here quite a while now. Sydney is where Captain Cook first landed. It's the oldest and largest city in Australia. It's arguably the most important and famous. So they made the Australian capital... Canberra.

They built a capital. It didn't naturally evolve and grow like pretty much every other country in the world (note: since this was written I had the chance to visit America and found out that Washington DC was planned too. The best way to do it, or another case of the Australians aping the Americans? You decide...), they just built the whole damn thing effectively from scratch. Why?

After exhaustive research I'm still don't understand, but it apparently has something to do with a wrangle between Sydney and Melbourne. In a similar Glasgow / Edinburgh vein (to use an example from home) both were important, but rather different cities. In the Scots example, many Glaswegians think that Glasgow is more of a capital to Scotland than Edinburgh, the true capital. They're wrong obviously, but that's what you get for being a bunch of head-butting inbred shipbuilders.

You can tell I'm from Edinburgh, can't you?

Anyway apparently Melbourne and Sydney were fighting over who got to be capital, and lacking the kind of historical precedents that places like Scotland have, the solution to the problem was that neither of them would be. Instead they chose a place roughly between them, which would be turned into the capital.

So Canberra was developed. It's new. It's modern. It's tidy. And above all... it's deserted. Well, okay, some people live there. Tim's friends Adrian and Felicity and there son, Thanapol, are just three examples. But the streets are eerily empty. The parks and open areas are vacant. The footpaths have no feet on them. It got to the point driving through the town where we started excitedly pointing at solitary people walking along the street. There are cars driving around, but it's not exactly hectic.

The reason for this is simple. Canberra is really dull. There's no point to the place beside the grey machinations of government. I'm not overly fascinated by the political processes back home and I have a vested interest in those, so I'm afraid when it comes to Australian politics I really just don't give a toss. Being honest, most Australians don't seem to give a monkeys either.

Two illustrations of this are firstly that Australians get fined if they don't bother voting, presumably as otherwise it would only take about three people to count the votes. Secondly the sheer number of people I had to ask about why was Canberra the capital before I got an answer besides "Dammed if I know..." Basically besides government, there's not much else to Canberra...

But I didn't know this, at least before I went there. Tim, my Thai friend, was driving to Canberra for the weekend to visit some friends of hers, and in the quest for new experiences, Preston, Mike and myself accompanied her. We had minor problems navigating to their house despite having written instructions, a road atlas, and a photocopied map with arrows drawn on it to indicate the route. It's not that we're that bad at navigating. It's back to the newness of Canberra. Places weren't located because they were where things naturally flowed over time. Rings of housing were created around the centre of Canberra with ring-roads, roundabouts and bypasses in a manner that appropriately enough winds up sending you round in circles.

And everything is so spread out. Large stretches of scrubby bush exist between identical suburbs for no adequate reason that I could find. Perhaps they're leaving room for future development? It can't be for aesthetic reasons as the areas don't appear landscaped, and are not exactly abundant with natural scenic beauty. So we spent a not inconsiderable amount of time trundling about the area trying to determine where we wanted to be. Eventually though, we managed to find the house.

Tim's friends, Adrian and Felicity, graciously allowed us to take over their lounge for the weekend, and also took us for a barbecue and to a local nature reserve, which were the best bits of the weekend. They have an adopted son, Thanapol (I think that's the correct spelling) who's from Thailand, as is Tim. He was a fairly sweet wee kid, although his habit of getting up at 4:30am and watching "Bananas in Pajamas" on the video in the kitchen was a little less than endearing. He was also particularly fond of a yellow cloak he had, which he decided that Tim should wear at one point. I think I can confident in sayings that Tim's career as a Superhero did not take off to a flying start, if you'll excuse the pun...

The barbecue and nature ramble were both fun, the former being brightened up by the presence of several kangaroos which were interested in what was going on. For wild kangaroos, they came reasonably close (enough for me to take a picture, see below), which is more than I can say about the Koalas in the nature reserve. We all meandered around the tracks, staring up into the trees, but only saw one koala in the whole place. It was sitting huddled in the branches so high that it was little more than a grey fuzzy blob in the distance. (see right)

I took a photo anyway, but frankly I'm not going to try to convince you that it's there. Hell I can't see it in the shot and I took the photo!

One other thing I must note, but of which there are no photos here, is that there is a severe lack of decent pubs in Canberra. On the Saturday night we went into town and wandered around for quite some time before finally finding one. It was an Irish theme pub (inevitably) but one thing that amused me was that 4 of the 5 bar staff were actually from Scotland. Australians, much like Americans, can't tell the difference between Irish and Scots, so if any fellow Scots reading this are in need of employment in Oz, try Irish theme bars. You will have to put up with being asked if you've ever been involved in "the troubles" and so forth, but you can just lie.

Anyway, given we had come all the way to Canberra, we felt we really ought to go and see the Australian Parliament, despite all of us having the only the most tenuous of grips on Aussie politics. It didn't help it was pouring with rain as we bundled out of the car, frantically took some snaps and then legged it into the building. The parliament building can be seen at the top of the page, and below is, actually I don't know. Probably some important government building...

I know that Australia is a new country, but even I was surprised when I found out that the Parliament building was only completed in 1988. That's newer than my highschool, and I remember that being built! The building is roughly split into two sides, a bit like the House of Commons and the House of Lords, back home. Aside from that I didn't actually pick up how the Australian government works, as it appears to be a hybrid between Britain and America, what with both a Prime Minister and Senators. If we'd managed to find a guide, or had read some information on the Parliament I might be able to tell you more, but after an amount of wandering around we came to realise the fundamental truth that we just didn't care. So we got back in the car and started home.

It was still a fun weekend though, even if a lot of it was due to poking fun rather than appreciation. Mike and I were laughing at the desolation of some of the landscape on the way home which in places could pass for some barren distant planet. I even took two photos to prove the point. One I've used further up the page to indicate the general scenery around Canberra, and the other is left, taken from the car on the way home. Dull aren't they.

Time to move on, I think. Which is what I did. Packing up my stuff I headed up with coast with Kev and Mike and our first destination was Byron Bay .

© Barny Russell 2005