Is Canberra a hard place to live?
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We face up to one of our biggest criticisms…
A post on Buzzfeed yesterday seeking to lampoon the desirability of the ACT has led to another bout of defence from our city’s cheer squad. I’ve been an outspoken advocate of Canberra many times in the past, and continue to hold this place in my affections. It’s easy to dismiss criticisms when they run along the lines of “it’s boring, there’s nothing to do, it’s cold, it’s too spread out” – these are all a matter of taste, and depend on your point of comparison, and the things that turn some off will appeal to others in equal measure; each to their own.
What’s not so easy to dismiss is the lived experience of people who have been hurt by their time in our town. A commenter on a HerCanberra link to a Buzzfeed rebuttal really resonated with me. Here was a woman who had a very difficult time living in Canberra, who encountered the silos and cliques and never broke through them to feel at home. There is a reality we should probably own up to. Living here can be hard.
Is there something distinctively difficult about living in Canberra? We have a reputation around the country for being a cold, disconnected place – not only in geographical terms, but in terms of human relationships. I grew up in country NSW, in the Aussie home of country music, Tamworth. One of the biggest differences I experienced here – aside from the myriad options for dining, shopping, art, & music – was how people don’t just drop over to each other’s houses. Part of it must be the tyranny of distance – going for a 20 minute drive to find no one home is a bit more frustrating than if the trip took two minutes – but I always got the sense that people didn’t want or expect their friends to just come over. Things had to be planned, times set up, RSVPs given. Perhaps this is less a Canberra-specific thing and more about being a grown-up, but because the experience coincided with my emerging adulthood, I associate it with Canberra.
I wonder if that is part of the issue? It would be interesting to get a handle on the proportion of Canberra-critics who were born here, those who moved here for uni, for work, or for other later-in-life reasons. I personally came here for uni, but lived three years in the artificial reality of an on-campus college before becoming a proper ACT resident. Many people move here for grad positions with the APS, or are transferred here for work and away again after a time. Others come as part of the machinery of parliament, drifting in and out of town in concert with sitting weeks.
Is part of the sense that this place lacks some basic sense of self the culture shock of moving out of our comfort zones – be that the long term friendships built at school, the shared busy-ness of study, the familiarity of the shops, churches, communities we know and rely on? Rebuilding the scaffolding of a life is hard in any new place, but in a city where such a high proportion of the population is relocating from elsewhere, often on a short-term basis, manufacturing a sense of home must be doubly hard.
I’ve lived all over the ACT – Weston Creek and Gunghalin are the only town centres I’ve never called home – yet I have never had more than a cursory-nod-hello level of interaction with my neighbours. I’ve never popped next door to ask for a cup of sugar, or to pick up my mail / bring the bins in when I’m out of town. Never dropped over any ‘welcome to the neighbourhood’ baking. Is this my own shyness, or a trait of life in the Can? My friends who were born and raised here all know their neighbours, is it the relocated who don’t make the effort and expect the established population to make our neighbourhoods neighbourly?
I never really felt like part of the Canberra community until the bushfires of January 2003. Suddenly there was a public enactment of shared experience, shared trauma, compassion and charity. I had a phase of listening to Dan and Lisa in the mornings on 106.3 – and was always moved and surprised when they would do an appeal for people who’d lost homes to fire. Within hours the displaced people would have offers of food, blankets, clothing and toys from complete strangers who were moved to help. Are these things that happen in other towns and cities? I’m sure they are. But for an overgrown town or undersized city, depending on your perspective, these actions represent the proof that we are not the cold, unkind place we have been depicted as by the narrative of the nation.
I love living in Canberra. I think it’s a wonderful place with great facilities and opportunities. I met my husband here, as well as many of my closest friends. But I have known loneliness here too – friends moving away for work, study, family; the desolation of Civic between Christmas and New Years, when until a couple of years ago everything was closed and not a soul to be seen; the isolation of singledom in my late 20s – it is a hard place to be alone. Like anywhere else perhaps, but I wonder if the difference is in how hard it is to shift from alone to connected if you don’t have the inside knowledge and networks many of us take for granted.
If you’re looking to make friends in Canberra, check out one of these past articles:
Meeting place – ideas on how to meet new people in Canberra
Let’s meet up – making new friends in Canberra
Image of lonely woman on a hilltop from shutterstock.com
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