A Tennessee Girl in Oz: Canberra: the city

Canberra (which is pronounced Can-brah) is an interesting city. It was a planned city, so it's very symmetrical and organized to look at from the air (or from Capital Hill where Parliament House is located). It's like Washington, DC in that the district is the capital of the country (the ACT = Australian Capital Territory).

Canberra became the capital in 1908 when Sydney and Melbourne couldn't agree on which one of them got to be the capital. So Australia decided that neither of them got to and plunked down the capital in the middle of nowhere!

Even though it's somewhat isolated, the city has a lot going for it: there are tons of art galleries, museums, and other cultural centers around the city. Most of them are along the lake that splits the city, and you could easily spend a whole week visiting all of them. That wasn't really in our plan though: we wanted to get a feel for the city and see as much as possible.

Regardless of how nicely the city is laid out, it is not very walkable. I am pretty sure that every person that I'd talked to about our trip told me that the city is very sprawling, there was no real public transport, and that we should plan to use a car.

In typical Burwinkle style, I assumed that these weaklings didn't understand my love for walking and seeing the sights. I also assumed that there would be plenty of little cafes and cute shops in between our hotel and all the places I wanted to see. Unfortunately, both of these assumptions were very wrong. We discovered the hard way that all the green spaces on the map mean exactly that: lots of space to walk through and not much else!

These pictures sum up a lot of our view from the day: things far in the distance that we were trying to walk to!

We started the day with a walk up to Parliament House. It was across the bridge from our hotel and on top of a hill. It ended up taking us about an hour to walk there from the hotel, so we decided to have lunch in the cafe there. (We hadn't seen a single other restaurant on our walk there!) We also decided to go through the metal detector so we could explore the inside of the building, too.

After Parliament House, we walked back down toward the lake to check out the galleries and museums around it. There was plenty to see and a fair amount of walking through vast green spaces to get from one place to another!

Our other "big" stop for the day was the Australia War Memorial. We saved it for the last stop of the day because it was on the other side of the lake and an all-day meandering stroll from Parliament House.

We also saved it for the end of the day because each day at 5 PM, a Last Post memorial service is held at the memorial. People lay wreaths at the pool, a piper plays the Last Post (which I think is the equivalent to Taps), and a service member reads a short story about an Australian veteran. A friend from work had recommended that we try to catch the service and I'm so glad we did. It was truly moving (especially for the fact of how many people came to the service on a Saturday evening, given that it wasn't even a holiday or special observance day). It was a very poignant end to our day in Canberra and we left the memorial feeling extremely grateful for the lives that we lead.