Being so close, we felt it would be ‘rude not to’, so we called into Canberra on our way to the coast. It was designed by a Chicago architect in 1912 to be a garden city built in concentric circles for about 25,000 people. It now has 300,000 residents in a sprawl that’s earned Canberra the image of “a cluster of suburbs in search of a centre”.
New Parliament House sits in the middle of Capital Circle in the middle of a very confusing double roundabout.
Centred around Lake Burley Griffin, this squeaky-clean city is full of politicians, civil servants and things for them to do. Lakeshore parks and cycle tracks, surround ultra-modern cultural institutions and there’s more restaurants per capita than in any other Oz city. Apparently, its liberal sex industry licensing laws have also made Canberra the ‘porn capital’ of Australia…. Politicians and Sex, who’d have thought it?
The Australian War Memorial on the opposite bank
Having read the ‘Events Listing’ for the Australia Day celebrations in Canberra (basically a free concert with bands we’d never heard of) we have changed our minds yet again and decided to push on towards Sydney instead.
