Gibbney’s book, published in 1988 as part of the Bicentenary celebrations, documents the slow progress of Canberra towards the city it is today. His description ends at ‘the beginning’, the time when Canberra had taken root, and when it began to acquire its reputation as a friendly small safe place, a little dull, but generally agreeable. Just as today’s residents point out the city’s convenience and friendli­ness, the people who lived there in the 1950s enjoyed the privileges that came with life in Canberra even while suffering the jibes of those who lived in more sophisticated environments. Gibbney writes:

Because of the frequent appearance in the newspapers of the state capitals of stories denigrating Canberra, many arrived with doubts about the course that they were taking, doubts that were easily strengthened. To go home on leave could well mean the need to face a barrage of mockery or criticism in which all the sins of the federal government were exemplified by the word Canberra.

Of course, the word Canberra might never have had a chance to provoke reaction – if the capital had been sited at Bombala, as some had wished, the jokes may well have been worded differently. Gibbney comments that the ‘name was a matter of intense public interest and nearly a thousand suggestions poured in from all sides’, some of which, such as Swindleville, the Holy City and Gonebroke, were not to be taken seriously, while others, such as Wheatwoolgold and Boomerang City were rather too seriously patriotic. And so Canberra it was, and the fact that no one knows the origin or meaning of this word lends force both to jokes about the city and to gently insistent defences of its pleasures, in about equal proportions.

Nothing much has changed, perhaps, since the naming of the city established Canberra’s unknowable nature. Academics faced with the delightful prospect of working at the Australian National University in a city that houses the Australian National Library and the Australian National Gallery (for starters) will still frown and mumble, ‘But I’m not sure I can stand living in Canberra’. Ask a resident and they positively enthuse about the advantages of Canberra life, about its warmth and energy. Eric Sparke, who takes up the story from Jim Gibbney in Canberra 1954–1980, notes the pride of the people who live there, their concern with and commitment to their community. He writes:

While never true, the fatuous claim that Canberra had no soul – no less fatuous for having been repeated by a visitor from Buckingham Palace – gave its proponents so little to support it by the mid-1980s that it lost its slander value and was seldom heard. Time, and the deep interest and involvement of Canberrans in their city, had cultivated to a discernible level the elements of soul – tradition, roots, memories, heritage, shared experience and the familiarity and pride which endows a place with a special presence.

The Word Festival held in Canberra every two years in March has become a new tradition, and its growing success reinforces Sparke’s opinion that the interest of the locals is taking Canberra away from its soulless past. It provides a fine opportunity to take a look at this city, to look at it through the eyes of its people, its writers and its residents. It is clear, immediately, that Canberra is no longer the dull isolated bureaucratic place its reputation would suggest. When Walter Burley Griffin wrote in 1913of the wonderful morning and evening lights of Canberra and the ‘shadows of the clouds and the mists as they cross the mountains’, he was anticipating the reaction of many Canberra residents when he said, ‘It is a good site for a city’.

The colours of Canberra, the skies and the Brindabella ranges, the clouds and the light, preoccupy many of the poets who are represented in a new anthology edited by Phillip Mackenzie and published by his Polonius Press in Canberra. Poems such as Judith Wright’s ‘Nobody Looks Up’ or Hope Hewitt’s ‘Indian Summer’ celebrate the sky as though it’s a democratic work of art, shifting nonchalantly in a pattern of glorious rebuttal to the ordered streets below.

Nobody Looks Up (by Judith Wright)

Canberra
specializes in clouds -
great haughty ones
small frisky ones
marble acropolises
whiteheaded eagles
tableaux, processions,
galloping cavalry,
cottonwool snowscenes
with snowmen by Thurber.

They act so extravagantly
swirling their cloaks
and striking great poses -
Look at me. Look at me.

Canberra residents
don’t seem to find them strange, but
maybe the newspapers
ought to review them.

It is the sky shown in Tim Storrier’s painting Landscape and Clouds, which is illustrated on the cover of Canberra writer Geoff Page’s Invisible Histories, published last year. Page’s contributions to Phillip Mackenzie’s anthology show his interest in juxta­posing the dramatic skies of Canberra with the con­structed city and the constructed lives of its residents - the polished steel of a mast against the clouds, the Brindabellas ‘slurred by rain’ forming the backdrop for a suburban wedding, white cars and clouds ‘a definition / scribbled in the air’.

Add to the beauty of the sky the pleasing harmony of the landscape and you’ve got a formula to inspire the most lyrical of writing. In Canberra Tales (Penguin 1988), the most substantial collection of creative writing to have come, perhaps, from any city in Australia about a city in Australia, the descriptions of Canberra often highlight this lyricism. Here is Dorothy Johnston in ‘The New Parliament House’:

Driving home, Phoebe saw a pelican. She was crossing King’s Avenue Bridge when she first saw it, and it was a long way from her, circling high over the lake, its large wingspan and slow grace seeming to create a space around it, seeming to create, in the uplift of its flight, by its presence there, in that precise place and no other, that combination of light and water which is suggestive of limitless space.

The lake itself could be like that. Seen from certain places and at certain times of day, it could appear much larger than it was, as if it covered great distances and joined one city to others. At others it seemed an ornamental pool, scarcely large enough to carry the reflection of a single Narcissus.

And yet, for all its natural advantages, Canberra is a constructed place, and it is its buildings, its looping roads and planned spaces, that draw most attention. Several writers in Canberra Tales examine Parliament House from different perspectives, and the buildings of Civic, the university and other institutions crop up many times. In a book on Canberra’s Embassies (ANU Press, 1978) Graeme Barrow gives a diplomat’s eye-view of the city:

There is no consensus of opinion on Australia’s national capital as a place in which to serve out a few years. Some like it because it is easy to work in, because of its garden setting, the purity of its smog-free air, its proximity to the coast and the snow. Others find it depressingly suburban, a city of petrol stations, shopping centres, and vast tracts of look-alike houses, a place where all activity ceases at 6p.m. ... Others shrug their shoulders and say diplomatically that they have served time in worse places, it’s quite nice and, gushingly, it’s a lovely place to raise a family.

However mild the outsider’s opinion of Canberra may be, it has a literary reputation which somehow de­fies the notion that it is merely ‘depressingly suburban’. A.D. Hope heads a list of writers who have for decades dominated various sections of the Australian literary scene. Among the poets represented in Phillip MacKenzie’s The Poetry of Canberra can be found such well-known writers as David Campbell, Alan Gould, Dorothy Auchterlonie, Judith Wright, Geoff Page, Les Murray, Anne Edgeworth and Rosemary Dobson. Although none of these writers’ work (except perhaps that of David Campbell) will be immediately recognisable as Canberra inspired many of them have fostered the literary commu­nity in a. mariner which is not often associated with the bigger cities. Dorothy Green (Auchterlonie) is deeply respected for both her work and her championing of Canberra writing.

The seven women writers whose stories appear in Canberra Tales (Margaret Barbalet, Sara Dowse, Suzanne Edgar, Marian Eldridge, Marion Halligan, Dorothy Horsfield, Dorothy Johnston) have, as Liz Murphy of the Aboriginal Studies Press comments, been inspirational to the writing community there, providing an example of how writers in a group can encourage and support each other. In the Afterword to the book, the writers explain the origin of their group and the way it works and note that when the first meeting was held, eight years before, ‘no one had published more than a few short stories or poems. Now several of us have had novels published, one a book of short stories and there are several more novels and short story collections about to be published.’

The networking of small groups is one of the major strengths and attractions of Canberra. Sue Kosse, Executive Director of the Library Association, situated in Canberra, talks of an ‘underground’, the powerful and energetic concern of the many people interested in things cultural in a city where the level of education is probably the highest in the country. You might have to travel a few hours to get to Sydney is you want to see one of the blockbuster shows, but, as writer R. F. Brissenden notes, just about everyone who’s important will pass through Canberra. And, of course, if you’re wanting to read an Australian book, look at Australian paintings or get access to historical information, Canberra can’t be beaten.

In Inner Cities, a collection of writing about place and its impact on lives edited by Drusilla Modjeska (Penguin, 1989), Amirah Inglis writes that Canberra is ‘no power house of civilisation’ but that it catered very well for a ‘mother, teacher, student and political activist’: ‘The lavish and imaginative public tree planting concealed much ugliness, the circles of the oldest suburbs were charming, the planned localities and Civic Centre had been designed for people like me.’

That’s one side, the academic side, where much of the country’s high-powered research takes place (even if, as Marion Halligan notes, many of the people beavering away in the National Library are researching their family history). The other side is the Canberra that Halligan herself writes about in Hanged Man in the Garden, a Canberra of welfare recipients, boredom and fear. R. F. Brissenden, in his new crime novel Wildcat, published this month by Allen & Unwin, describes yet another slice of Canberra life – Fyshwick, the industrial region:

During the daylight hours, and especially on Saturday and Sunday, the Fyshwyck Fruit and Vegetable Market is the most democratic, polyglot and multicultural place in Can­berra. Unshaven diplomats in casual weekend gear rub shoulders with kids on the dole. Tousled departmental heads smile cheerily over the pumpkins and passionfruit at base-grade clerks. Long separated divorcees exchange unexpectedly friendly civilities with one-time partners. Salesmen outside every stall cry the age-old virtues of cheapness and quality and press fresh-cut slices of Batlow’ apples and Araluen nectarines and peaches on potential customers. And in the parking areas ambassadorial Meres and Rolls sit comfortably beside battered utes and beaten up V-dubs.

After five on Sunday afternoon the shutters go up and the market falls quiet. Scraps of paper, cardboard and plastic, cabbage leaves and orange peel litter the empty carpark. A styrofoam cup rolls in the gutter. And the cats come out.

In the loading bays and parking areas behind the hollow square of shops and stalls things are quiet too. In one shed, however, the lights burn on into the small hours of Monday morning. The groups of men sitting round the tables don’t talk much - but the piles of notes and coin in front of them speak loudly enough. The Sunday night poker game at the Fyshwick markets is a serious affair.

The Sunday night poker game seems to be a serious affair wherever it’s played. This ‘other side’ of Canberra is not the one we get from the newspaper, where Canberra means Government. The violence beneath the surface is a theme that connects a number of the stories in Canberra Tales. For example, here is Margaret Barbalet, in ‘A Season Under Snow’:

He liked to watch the trees on Yamba Drive change as the seasons changed. In summer they were lush with a green about their leaves that made him think of French films or paintings: the contrast between light and shade. Then with the cold they began to change bit by bit to a yellow that with every day dwindled to brown. Ruth had left in the winter and that was how they were: stripped of leaves by the freezing winds that scoured the valley. Those were the days when he would see dirty water steering its way dangerously along the massive concrete storm drain that separated Curtin from the freeway. Someone had drowned there once, years ago in this tumult, but he knew none of the details. The trees were bare: sketched not painted.

Drowning in Canberra is not a fate commonly feared by either its residents or its visitors. If getting lost in the pattern of arcs and circles of its streets is much feared by its visitors, getting run over, if one is silly enough to try walking in this car-driven town, is rather feared by its residents. Perhaps the moebius strip would be a suitable symbol for Canberra.

And yet poles, flag and otherwise, would pass much more readily as the appropriate symbol. Fixed to the ground, marking out straight lines and rigid before the curves of the Brindabellas, poles nevertheless draw the eye skywards, to that Canberra sky with its clouds ‘striking great poses’.

Marion Halligan, one of the best-known Canberra writers, chose to use the aeroplane warning pole atop Mount Ainslie as a point from which Canberra’s bearings could be taken. The perspective that the immigrant Mikelis has from there, described in the story ‘Most Mortal Enemy’ in Canberra Tales, combines many of those elements that make Canberra so interesting, so versatile and so functional for writers:

Canberra lay spread like a map before him, and in this part the patterns were close to Burley Griffin’s prize-winning idea, not the bastardized bowdlerized versions that obtained elsewhere. He liked the circles and arcs, the ovals, the concentric curves, the straight lines that bisecting them formed triangles. The whole thing was completely linear. It was a pity the buildings hadn’t remained true to that conception. He’d seen pictures of Marion Mahoney Griffin’s suggestions for them, lovely traceried constructs elegant in the manner of Parisian buildings, with highly ornate decorations controlled by repetition, and themes never quite lost in variations. To think that there had been a chance to achieve such grace and lightness here, and it had been ignored. Had been rejected, with the obscene gesture of brutal concrete bunkerism. He stared down the land axis at the emerging Parliament House. Solid enough, and bunkerish too, half underground as it was, but with some attempt at linear grace. Spoiled by the clumsy weight of the flagpole. At least the building was symmetrical; enough of the original spirit had been absorbed to see the need for that ...

Sometimes he looked across towards Forrest and thought how beautiful suburbia could be. Its elegant lines, as formal as a parterre, were obscured by the huge blossoming shapes of the trees. That place was good for people, with wide footpaths curving along the lines that the map had drawn on the gently accidental terrain. You could imagine walking there. He remembered Veronica’s words. Would they have been different people, living in Forrest? He quite liked the person he was, living in cruder O’Connor. Given that it was all exile.