by Bryson, Bill
Although Canberra is now one of the largest cities in the nation and one of the most important planned communities on earth, it remains Australia’s greatest obscurity. As national capitals go, it is still not an easy place to get to. It lies forty miles off the main road from Sydney to Melbourne, the Hume Highway, and is similarly spurned by the principal railway lines. Its main road to the south doesn’t go anywhere much and the city has no approach at all from the west other than on a dirt track from the little town of Tumut.
In 1996 the Prime Minister, John Howard, caused a stir after his election by declining to live in Canberra. He would, he announced, continue to reside in Sydney and commute to Canberra as duties required. As you can imagine, this caused an uproar among Canberra’s citizens, presumably because they hadn’t thought of it themselves. What made this particularly interesting is that John Howard is by far the dullest man in Australia. Imagine a very committed funeral home director – someone whose burning ambition from the age of eleven was to be a funeral home director, whose proudest achievement in adulthood was to be elected president of the Queanbeyan and District Funeral Home Directors’ Association – then halve his personality and halve it again, and you have pretty well got John Howard. When a man as outstandingly colourless as John Howard turns his nose up at a place you know it must be worth a look. I couldn’t wait to see it.
You approach Canberra along a dual carriageway through rural woodland, which gradually morphs into a slightly more urban boulevard, though still in woodland, until finally you arrive at a zone of well-spaced but significant-looking buildings and you realize that you are there – or as near there as you can get in a place as scattered and vague as Canberra. It’s a very strange city, in that it’s not really a city at all, but rather an extremely large park with a city hidden in it. It’s all lawns and trees and hedges and a big ornamental lake – all very agreeable, just a little unexpected.
I took a room in the Hotel Rex for no other reason than that I happened upon it and had never stayed in a hotel named for a family pet. The Hotel Rex was exactly what you would expect a large hotel built of concrete and called the Rex to be. But I didn’t care. I was eager to stretch my legs and gambol about in all that green space. So I checked in, dumped my bags and returned at once to the open air. I’d passed a visitors’ centre on the way in, and recollected it as being a short walk away, so I decided to start there. In the event, it was a long way – a very long way, as things in Canberra invariably prove to be.
The visitors’ centre was almost ready to close when I got there, and in any case was just an outlet for leaflets and brochures for tourist attractions and places to stay. In a side room was a small cinema showing one of those desperately upbeat promotional films with a title like Canberra – It’s Got It All! – the ones that boast how you can water ski and shop for an evening gown and have a pizza all in the same day because this place has . . . got it all! You know the kind I mean. But I watched the film happily because the room was air conditioned and it was a pleasure to sit after walking so far.
It was just as well that I didn’t require an evening gown or a pizza or water skiing when I returned to the street because I couldn’t find a thing anywhere. My one tip for you if you ever go to Canberra is don’t leave your hotel without a good map, a compass, several days’ provisions and a mobile phone with the number of a rescue service. I walked for two hours through green, pleasant, endlessly identical neighbourhoods, never entirely confident that I wasn’t just going round in a large circle. From time to time I would come to a leafy roundabout with roads radiating off in various directions, each presenting an identical vista of antipodean suburban heaven, and I would venture down the one that looked most likely to take me to civilization only to emerge ten minutes later at another identical roundabout. I never saw another soul on foot or anyone watering a lawn or anything like that. Very occasionally a car would glide past, pausing at each intersection, the driver looking around with a despairing expression that said: ‘Now where the fuck is my house?’
I had it in mind that I would find a handsome pub of the type that I had so often enjoyed in Sydney – a place filled with office workers winding down at the end of a long day, so popular at this hour that there would be an overspill of happy people on the pavement. This would be followed by dinner in a neighbourhood bistro of charm and hearty portions. But diversions of this or any other type seemed signally lacking in the sleepy streets of Canberra. Eventually, and abruptly, I turned a corner and was in the central business district. Here at last were stores and restaurants and all the other commercial amenities of a city, but all were closed. Downtown Canberra was primarily a series of plazas wandering between retail premises, and devoid of any sign of life but for a noise of slap and clatter that I recognized after a moment as the sound of skateboards. Having nothing better to do, I followed the sounds to an open square where half a dozen adolescents, all in backward-facing baseball caps and baggy shorts, were honing their modest and misguided skills on a metal railing. I sat for a minute on a bench and with morbid interest watched them risking compound fractures and severe testicular trauma for the fleeting satisfaction of sliding along a banister for a distance of from zero inches to a couple of feet before being launched by gravity and the impossibility of maintaining balance into space in the direction of an expanse of unyielding pavement. It seemed a remarkably foolish enterprise.
If there is anything more half-witted than asking six adolescents in backward-facing baseball caps for a dining recommendation then it doesn’t occur to me just at the moment, but I’m afraid this is what I did now.
‘Are you an American?’ asked one of the kids in a tone of surprise that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to encounter in a world capital.
I allowed that I was.
‘There’s a McDonald’s just around the corner.’
Gently I explained that it was not actually a condition of citizenship that I eat the food of my nation. ‘I was thinking of maybe a nice Thai restaurant,’ I suggested.
They looked at me with that flummoxed, dead-end expression that you have to be fourteen years old to produce with conviction.
‘Or perhaps an Indian?’ I offered hopefully and got the same no-one-home look. ‘Indonesian?’ I went on. ‘Vietnamese? Lebanese? Greek? Mexican? West Indian? Malaysian?’
As the list grew, they shifted uncomfortably, as if fearing that I was going to hold them individually accountable for the inadequacies of the local culinary scene.
‘Italian?’ I said.
‘There’s a Pizza Hut on Lonsdale Street,’ piped up one with a look of triumph. ‘They do an all-you-can-eat buffet on Tuesdays.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, realizing this was getting me nowhere, and started to leave, but then turned back. ‘It’s Friday today,’ I pointed out.
‘Yeah,’ the kid agreed, nodding solemnly. ‘They don’t do it on Fridays.’
I found my way back to the Rex, but got only as far as the front entrance when I realized that I did not want to dine in my own hotel. It is such a tame and lonely thing to do – an admission that one has no life. As it happened, I had no life, but that wasn’t quite the point. Do you know what is the most melancholy part of dining alone in your hotel? It’s when they come and take away all the other place settings and wine glasses, as if to say: ‘Obviously no one will be joining you tonight, so we’ll just whip away all these things and seat you here facing a pillar, and in a minute we’ll bring you a very large basket with just one roll in it. Enjoy!’
So I lingered by the entrance of the Rex for the merest moment, then returned to the street. I was on a boulevard built on an important scale, though it had almost no traffic and was mostly lined with darkened office buildings lurking in dense growth. Several hundred yards further on I came to a hotel not unlike the Rex. It contained an Italian restaurant with its own entrance, which was probably as good as I was going to get. I went in and was taken aback to realize that it was full of locals, dressed up as if
for an occasion. Something in their familiar manner with the waiters, and with the surroundings generally, bespoke a more than transient relationship with the place. When locals eat in the restaurant of a big glass and concrete hotel, you know that the community must be in some measure wanting.
The waiter took away all the other place settings, but he brought me six breadsticks – enough to share if I made a friend. It was quite a jolly place with everyone around me getting comprehensively refreshed – the Australians do like a drink, bless them – and the food was outstanding, but it was nonetheless evident that we were dining in a hotel. Canberra has quite a lot of this, as I was to discover – eating and drinking in large, characterless hotels and other neutral spaces, so that you spend much of the time feeling as if you are on some kind of long layover at an extremely spacious international airport.
Afterwards, bloated with pasta, three bottles of Italian lager and all six of the breadsticks (I never did make a friend), I went for another exploratory amble, this time in a slightly contrary direction, certain that somewhere in Canberra there must be a normal pub and possibly a convivial restaurant for the following evening, but I passed nothing and once again found myself eventually on the threshold of the Rex. I looked at my watch. It was only nine thirty in the evening. I wandered into the cocktail lounge, where I ordered a beer and took a seat in a deep-backed chair. The lounge was empty but for a table with three men and a lady at it, getting boisterously merry, and a lone gent hunched over a tumbler at the bar.
I drank my beer and pulled out a small notebook and pen and placed them on the table in front of me in case I was taken with a sudden important observation, then followed that with a book I had bought at a second-hand bookshop in Sydney. Called Inside Australia and published in 1972, it was by the American journalist John Gunther, a name that once towered in the annals of travel journalism but is now, I fear, largely forgotten. It was his last book; it just about had to be as he died while preparing it, poor man.
I opened it to the chapter on Canberra, curious to see what he had to say about the place back then. The Canberra he describes is a small city of 130,000 people with the ‘pastoral feeling of a country town’ – an easygoing place with few traffic lights, little nightlife, a modest sprinkling of cocktail lounges and about ‘half a dozen good’ restaurants. In a word, it appeared actually to have gone backwards since 1972.I was proud to see that the Rex Hotel was singled out as a stylish address for visitors – always nice to see one’s choices validated even when they are nearly thirty years out of date – and that its cocktail bar was adjudged one of the liveliest in the city. I looked up from my book and shrank at the thought that very possibly it still was.
At length I turned to the chapter on Australian politics – my reason for buying the book in the first place. Apart from the scoring of Australian Rules Football and the appeal of a much-esteemed dish called the pie floater (think of something unappetizing and brown floating on top of something unappetizing and green and you pretty well have it) there is nothing in Australian life more complicated and bewildering to the outsider than its politics. I had tried once or twice to wade through books on Australian politics written by Australians, but all these had started from the novel premise that the subject is interesting – a bold position, to be sure, but not a very helpful one – so I was hoping that the detached observations of a fellow American might be more instructive. Gunther gave it a game stab, I must say, but it was a challenge beyond even his talents for lucid compression. Here, for instance, is just a snippet of his attempt to explain Australia’s system of preference voting:
If, after the second-preference votes are added to the first, there is still no candidate with a majority of the total ballots cast, the process is repeated: the ballots of the candidate trailing at this stage of the computation are divided up on the basis of second preference. If he inherited some second preference votes from the first man eliminated, these are now redistributed on the basis of third preference. And so on.
I particularly liked that casual concluding ‘And so on.’ It’s a deft piece of work because it seems to say: ‘I understand all this perfectly, but I see no need to tax you with the details,’ whereas of course what he is really saying is: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what any of this means and frankly I don’t give two tiny mouse droppings because, as I pen these words, I am sitting in the lounge bar of a bush mausoleum called the Rex Hotel and it’s a Friday night and I am half cut and bored out of my mind and now I am going to go and get another drink.’ The uncanny thing was I knew the feeling exactly.
I glanced at my watch, appalled to realize it was only ten minutes after ten, and ordered another beer, then picked up the notebook and pen and, after a minute’s thought, wrote: ‘Canberra awfully boring place. Beer cold, though.’ Then I thought for a bit more and wrote: ‘Buy socks.’ Then I put the notebook down, but not away, and tried without much success to eavesdrop on the conversation among the lively foursome across the room. Then I decided to come up with a new slogan for Canberra. First I wrote: ‘Canberra – There’s Nothing to It!’ and then ‘Canberra – Why Wait for Death?’ Then I thought some more and wrote: ‘Canberra – Gateway to Everywhere Else!’, which I believe I liked best of all. Then I ordered another beer and drew a little cartoon. It showed two spawning salmon, halfway up a series of lively cascades, resting exhausted in a pool of calm water, when one turns to the other and says: ‘Why don’t we just stop here and have a wank?’ This amused me very much and I put the page in my pocket against the day I learn to draw objects that people can actually recognize. Then I eavesdropped on the people some more, nodding and smiling appreciatively when they appeared to make a quip in the hope that they would see me and invite me over, but they didn’t. Then I had another beer.
I think the last beer might have been a mistake because I don’t remember much after that other than a sensation of supreme goodwill towards anyone who passed through the room, including a Filipino lady who came in with a hoover and asked me to lift my legs so that she could clean under my chair. My notes for the evening show only two other entries, both in a slightly unsteady hand. One says: ‘Victoria Bitter – why called??? Not bitter at all. But quite nice!!!’ The other said: ‘I tell you, Barry, he was farting sparks!’ I believe this was in reference to a colourful Aussie turn of phrase I overheard from the people at the next table rather than to any actual manifestation of flatulence of an electrical nature.
But I could be wrong. I’d had a few.
In the morning I woke to find Canberra puddled under a dull, persistent rain. My plan was to stroll across the main bridge over Lake Burley Griffin, to a district of museums and government buildings on the other side. It was a rotten morning, a foolish day to be out on foot, made more wretched by the slow-dawning realization, once I had set off from the hotel, that I was embarked on an expedition even more epic than the one the afternoon before. Canberra really is the most amazingly spacious city. On paper it looks quite inviting, with its serpentine lake, leafy avenues and 10,000 acres of parks (for purposes of comparison, Hyde Park in London is 340 acres), but at ground level it is simply a great deal of far-flung greenness, broken at distant intervals by buildings and monuments.
It is worth considering how it got this way. In 1911, with the capital site chosen, a competition was held for a design for it, which was won by Walter Burley Griffin of Oak Park, Illinois, a disciple of Frank Lloyd Wright. Griffin’s design was unquestionably the best, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a great deal. Another leading entrant, a Frenchman named Alfred Agache, failed to read the briefing notes carefully, or possibly at all, and placed Parliament and many other important buildings on a flood plain, guaranteeing that legislators would have to spend part of the year treading water while debating. Also, for reasons that can only invite wondered speculation, he placed the municipal sewage works in the very heart of the city, as a kind of centrepiece. Despite these quirky shortcomings, his entry came third. Second prize went to Eliel Sa
arinen, father of Eero, the man who later persuaded the Opera House judges to choose the bold design of Jørn Utzon. The elder Saarinen’s design was perfectly workable, but it had a kind of brutal grandeur about it – a sort of proto-Third Reichish quality – that unsettled the Australian judges.
Griffin’s plan, by contrast, was instantly engaging. It envisaged a garden city of 75,000 people, with tree-lined avenues angling through it and an ornamental lake at its heart. Handsome and confident, majestic but not imperious, it ideally suited the modest yearnings for respectability without fuss that marked the Australian character. Moreover, Griffin had an advanced understanding of the importance of presentation. His submissions were not modest sketches that looked as if they had been scribbled on the back of a cocktail napkin, but a series of large panoramic tableaux, exquisitely drafted on the finest stretched linen. In this he was assisted inestimably – totally, in fact – by his new bride, Marion Mahony Griffin, who was without doubt one of the great architectural artists of this century.
The drawings, all done by Marion, show a silhouetted skyline full of comely shapes – a dome here, a ziggurat there – but with surprisingly little in the way of committing details. They are tantalizing impressions – ethereal, cunningly distant. These are drawings you could gaze at for hours with pleasure, but turn your back for a moment and you cannot remember a thing that was in them, other than a vague sense of a pleasing composition. Although Griffin and his wife had never been to Australia (they worked from topographic maps) the drawings show an almost uncanny affinity for the landscape – an appreciation of its simple uncluttered beauty and big skies that you would swear was based on the closest acquaintanceship. Take nothing away from Walter: he was a gifted, occasionally even inspired, architect; but Marion was the genius of the outfit.
