This is the last night when Canberra will be my permanent home.
I’ve spent it as I did my first, back in late 1993, alone in the same modest motel in the inner south (park anywhere, dinner until 8.30, free newspapers and checkout at 10am, sharp). There was bad stuff going on from a war I’d just visited, my personal life was a shambles and the only thing keeping me in journalism was the city I’d just arrived in.
Running? Not exactly. Staying? A year at best, ‘til I could escape some stuff. Building another life here never occurred to me.
The last two decades and a bit is improbable history for me. I hated the city at first. It gave me reason to. The retired public servant in the flat downstairs (he wore chinos and an ironed polo shirt to tend his modest garden) complained when I left the packing boxes on the verandah for a few weeks and after every time I flushed the dunny.
Eventually the body corporate sent me a formal letter of complaint about the untidy state of my flat’s externals (this will amuse many; I’m the neatest, most ordered person they know).
“Fuck Canberra,” I said to everyone.
Then I got into the work, back when a newspaper was going to be printed every day and forever and you could turn off after you’d filed a story daily (or in my case, weekly) and do other stuff, like exercise and cook and meet people. I met someone and of course it all changed and it became the best place in the country to be a journalist if you wanted bang for buck. And, yes, if you wanted to make a difference, which of course I did (want to, that is).
Like so many people in Canberra with kids, I was seduced. It is a great lifestyle, with ridiculously short front door to school/childcare drop-off possibilities. But that’s not really enough reason to stay if your work is meaningless or you’re isolated and lonely or among the city’s invisible but numerous poor. I never noticed, because I was in Parliament House (or often overseas), how desperately quiet were the streets.
I only noticed this (and so much else about the city) when I became a self-employed, full-time writer in January 2008. I wrote my first book at a desk facing a broad window looking out on a street named after a famous exploratory ship; all the streets in my vicinity have nomenclature of famous explorers or ships: La Perouse, Arnhem, Beagle, Endeavour. How lonely, I realised, it must be for some, in these isolated places, in these big houses quarantined by bush corridors, who have no families and jobs they dislike. The vast bush around us here echoes loneliness or love, inspiration or desperation. It’s not an idyll for all, though it has, mostly, been for me.
I’ve felt the isolation too, though – longed to leave my door, like I did in London and Melbourne, and be part of a life on the street right there. A folly, I’d tell myself, then, for everything else this place gives me.
And that’s the thing here. You embrace the bush and the communities that revolve around it, or you don’t ever quite connect. Like the poor. I’ve often thought that this city – with its vast middle class (there are few super rich or landed types here, like in Sydney, Perth, Melbourne and Adelaide) – is a terrible place to be poor. The rest of the county assumes there is no underclass here.
But the rough sleepers – in those bush corridors and in the streets – and the beggars are everywhere. It saddens me that the public housing estate close to my house, soon to be razed, will make pitifully little allowance for social housing, under a Labor government. It pleases me, however, that, in too many other ways to name here, my city – and the Australian Capital Territory – is the most socially progressive place to live in the country.
There is a pounding heart and a warm, generous soul in this city. Communities thrive almost in spite of the serene suburbia. Artists of all sorts riff off the difference, the uniqueness of living and making life and love in a capital that is small, spread out and held in contempt by the rest of the country.
I get it. Completely. I could have had no better muse than Canberra, where intellectual life is deep and wide, where people look out to the country and the world, where the memory of the nation – incarnate in its institutions like the National Library of Australia and the Museum of Australian Democracy – is everyday.
It’s misunderstood, even within the city itself. The marketers will say this is the city of Walt Griffin and Marion Mahony Griffin. That’s a fallacy. You can see the ghostly visage of their geometric dream from atop Mount Ainslie or Red Hill. But the dream died with the Anglophile planners who bastardised their blueprint and super-imposed a vast, sprawling suburbia for too few people on top of it.
I love it here (not in the motel, but the city). I’ve called it an accidental miracle of a city. Because it thrives when the planners and two world wars almost killed it, and ironically, now, because it grows in the shape Walt and Marion had envisaged, with greater inner-urban density, with cutting edge architecture and well planned communal spaces.
It’s a great place to be a writer, although I’ve learnt “Canberra writer” can be something of a pejorative. And I don’t need the OECD tell me it’s one of the best places in the world to live.
I’m grateful to have spent 20-something unlikely years here in Canberra. I’ll take away more than I’ve given, including a family, for which I’m lucky and so very thankful. And half a dozen books and a million or so words of journalism. Or does their home remain here?
And then there’s the motel. I’m in the same room as I was in 1993. Nothing’s changed. But me in the mirror.
And there’s still no fucking mini-bar.
Goodbye Canberra.
Thanks.
