Why Canberra? The city everyone loves to underestimate
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Ask a Canberran where they’re from and there’s a good chance the answer won’t be Canberra.
Our city has a funny habit of collecting people from elsewhere. They arrive from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, small country towns and places all over the world, often expecting to stay for a few years before life inevitably has other plans.
I’m one of them.
I arrived from Northern Ireland 16 years ago and, for a while, Canberra probably had no bigger critic. I’d arrived in Australia expecting Home and Away, sunshine and beaches. Friends who moved here around the same time headed for Sydney, Melbourne or the Gold Coast.
Canberra wasn’t exactly on anyone’s bucket list.
Yet whenever those friends visited, we’d find somewhere to go and have a good time. Slowly, almost without noticing, Canberra became ours.
There was also the familiar question from people back home: “Canberra? Why Canberra?”
For a while, I assumed these people must have had good reason to downplay the place. Perhaps they’d had a terrible night at Mooseheads. Maybe they’d been served a particularly dodgy batch of chips. Surely there was a story behind such certainty.
Then I started asking a few questions.
Quite often, they’d never actually been to Canberra.
Or their entire knowledge of the nation’s capital came from a Year 6 excursion to the Mint.
It’s hard to hold a grudge against a city based on a school excursion.
And Canberra has changed quite a bit in those 16 years.
Braddon has gone from somewhere you might wander through to somewhere you deliberately go. The light rail arrived. New suburbs have continued to creep further into the landscape. Buildings have appeared, disappeared and appeared again. Places that once felt like the edge of Canberra suddenly feel like they’re five minutes from everything.
Of course, Canberra being Canberra, “five minutes” is a flexible measurement.
The bush is still there, though. It wraps around the city in a way that can make you forget you’re in a capital at all. There are kangaroos appearing where you least expect them, mountains providing familiar landmarks and those spectacular autumn and spring days when Canberra quietly reminds everyone why people put up with the winters.
For all the jokes about roundabouts, public servants and everything closing early, there is something reassuring about watching a city grow while still retaining a sense of itself.
I also spent a fair bit of time looking for little pieces of home.
After a week in Bondi early in my Australian travels, I was convinced I’d somehow left Dublin Airport without actually leaving it. I still call it County Bondi.
Canberra had considerably fewer Irish accents, so hearing one here felt like winning $20 on a scratchie.
There were mixed results when it came to recreating home. On one occasion I walked into an Irish establishment, ordered a Guinness and was met with a perplexed, “What’s Guinness?”
Five months after arriving, a colleague also told me, with genuine enthusiasm, that my English was very good.
Sixteen years on, those stories make me laugh. But they also remind me why finding familiar people and places matters when you’re somewhere new.
The funny thing is, eventually, you stop looking only for people who remind you of home.
Your people might be Irish. They might be from Melbourne. They might have arrived from the other side of the world. They might simply be the people you met at work, school, a sporting club, a gig or the local café.
That’s perhaps what makes Canberra interesting.
Look around and you’ll find a city made up of people who have brought pieces of somewhere else with them. Different accents, cultures, food, traditions and stories, all gradually becoming part of the place.
And yes, we can still complain about living here.
We can grumble about the weather, the public transport, the roundabouts, the parking, the fact that everywhere closes early or whatever particular Canberra irritation has found its way onto the agenda that week.
But perhaps that’s part of belonging too.
You don’t have to think your adopted home is perfect. You just have to care enough to have an opinion about it.
So, if you arrived in Canberra from somewhere else, when did it stop feeling like the place you lived and start feeling like your place?
Was it a particular person, a friendship, a favourite café, a local pub, a school, a street — or perhaps one completely ordinary day when you realised you couldn’t imagine being anywhere else?
Maybe that’s how we find home.
Not by forgetting where we came from, but by finding enough of ourselves, and enough of our people, in the place we’ve chosen to stay.
Even if we reserve the right to complain about it tomorrow.
Feature image: Canberra Thinks You’re Boring Too mug by North/South. Credit: Andrew Ly.
