Wednesday 18 September 2024 – Given that we had the day all to ourselves and that the weather outlook was decent, I doubt that many of my loyal fans, such as you, dear reader, will be surprised to learn that we went for a walk. Of course we did.
Jane had, of course, done her preparation, and so we had a general sense of which direction we would head out in without actually having any real knowledge of what we’d see. I’d read and heard that Canberra is an odd place because of its provenance – a city custom-built between Sydney and Melbourne, to shut down the late 19th-century arguments the two cities were having about which should the capital of a newly-federated Australia. Canberra was formally declared as the capital on March 12, 1913. This is going to be a long enough post without my going into its location – where aboriginals had lived for 21,000 years – or how it got its name; its Wikipedia entry is a good source for those seeking details.
I have to say that in the initial stages of our walkabout, the place did feel weird. Looking at the street layout, it’s quite clearly a confected city.
It has many architectural flourishes and artistic touches which don’t quite gel into a place with a soul. It’s interesting to walk round, though.
The first place we explored was City Hill (centre of left map above). It’s not much of a hill, but it’s been planted with conifers and a sodding great flagpole, flying the ACT (Australian Capital Territory) flag.
On the hill’s periphery, there’s the Canberra Centenary Column
which contains a time capsule containing 100 representative items of Canberra’s history. A lot of thought has been put into alignment of things.
Wanting to walk around the city, we found our way to City Walk in the hope that it would be helpful in shaping our strolling. To get there we passed the Melbourne Building
which, completely unsurprisingly, given Canberra’s provenance, is opposite a mirror image of itself called the Sydney Building. Both buildings have a nice cloister along the sides
and the Sydney Building even has a Tardis halfway along one side,
though quite why I’m not sure; a couple of locals walking past it were puzzled – clearly not Whovians.
Although most of the people we saw seemed perfectly affluent, it’d clear that not everyone is comfortably off.
Generally speaking, the buildings in that area are functional, rather than photogenic
but we passed many artistic installations of various sorts as we walked along.
We found murals in a couple of places
though there were many unofficial additions to the originals.
There were also many floral touches.
OK, I’ll confess: we did have a specific objective to include in our walk, as the hotel receptionists had told us about it when we checked in. We were lucky enough to be visiting Canberra when Floriade, the biggest celebration of spring in Australia, was on. There were pointers to it all over the place
and so we made our way to Commonwealth Park to see what it was like. It was lovely. If you like tulips, it was positively orgiastic.
There were some non-floral artistic touches on display
There were various stages (yes, there was a Tulip Stage among them); on one of them, a bunch of kids were singing
to an audience, who were sometimes joining in
each in their own key, of course.
There were many retail opportunities
the most striking of which, for us as UK residents, was
Christmas items. Perfectly normal here, of course, but I don’t associate celebrating spring with celebrating Christmas, so I was a bit startled.
One retail opportunity was, however, right up our street.
so we popped in to try a few samples.
After Floriade, we turned our steps towards what is pretty much the city’s raison d’être – the government centre. We could see bits of it across the lake from Floriade.
Our route there took us past the Cook Memorial Globe
beyond which we could see that, sadly, the Cook Memorial Jet (i.e. fountain) was not operational today. The globe is a detailed piece of work, showing the routes that Cook sailed in his explorations from Plymouth
and around Australia.
The Government Zone has many imposing buildings,
and, of course, the Parliament Building on Capitol Hill (which is not much of a hill either, to be honest)
with its very dramatic, though somewhat leaky roof.
OK, it’s not really the roof, it’s just a, erm, well, how would you describe it? [ An over-the-top flag holder? – Ed ]
We did go up on to the real roof, from where we could see the old Parliament Building
with a bloody flagpole in the middle of the bloody view (grrr!). A further piece of designed city alignment here – as you can see, the route from old to new Parliament buildings aligns exactly with the peak of Mount Ainslie.
The inside of the new Parliament Building is quite impressive,
(I sneaked a look through an open door and saw that there was a massive piss-up on the cards in the near future)
and, outside, the alignment and symmetry continue.
We had passed by the Old Parliament Building on the way to the New One, but its rather lovely garden was full of schoolkids on an outing. In fact, I think that Wednesday must be National Schoolkids Visit Government day, because there were several parties of schoolkids all over the government estate. However, they’d left the gardens by the time we passed by going back, so we could see (and smell) the fantastic wisteria that was blooming there.
We saw some birdlife in and around these gardens. One bird I saw walked like a pigeon, but Jane thought it couldn’t be one because of its crest.
Google Lens showed us that there is, after all, a (rather alien-looking) bird called a crested pigeon. Sulphur-crested cockatoos were in abundance – probably loathed by the locals, but for us a lovely sight. We spent several happy moments stamping around after them to try to get one to show us its crest.
Hurrah!
And so, some 11km later, we arrived back at the hotel, having had a very engaging walk around Canberra. Yes, the bits we saw felt a bit odd, because it’s a confected city, but it was very interesting to see it; and Floriade was lovely.
We only have the one full day here. Tomorrow we travel to Sydney.
Well, we might.
Virgin Australia, who have managed, in ways both large and small, to bugger us about for every flight we’ve taken with them so far, have warned us that high winds are expected and this might affect our travel. Listening to the wind whistling round us on the sixth floor of the hotel, I wonder indeed what outrages outages we might expect tomorrow.
