Meet the woman behind Describing Things in Canberra
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You intend to just quickly glance over it in your lunch hour, or at night before getting stuck into a worthy book.
Yet an hour later, there you still are – reading one post after another and quietly chuckling to yourself. This is the quirky and addictive Facebook page, Describing Things in Canberra.
The page is magnetic; it feels like the author is talking straight to you.
“The terror of the unairconditioned bus,” she writes in one post. “The sadness of living on a route of low importance.”
People smash laughing emojis underneath her posts and chat away about bus routes. Then there are the almost daily so-called “weather reports”.
A typical one might read: “Canberra weather: well it looks all right. The magpies seem happy.”
Sometimes the reports are darker, of course, capturing emergency information or our black feelings in the endless summer of fire—and we are HEARD.
Canberra weather: hot with “hot enough for ya hot?” to follow.
Total Fire Ban. Hazardous air quality. Fire in them thar hills.
Far-Southlings will be keeping up with the bushfire apps and the wind direction. Let your Northling friends and relations know if you need somewhere to stash your cat, or yourselves.
Hope we all learned the motto of the scouts – Be Prepared.
Describing Things in Canberra kicked off in late 2015 and now has an amused and loyal following of more than 2,000 people. The page’s author prefers to stay semi-anonymous and aptly labels herself “a describer.” Let’s call her AD for the purposes of this story.
Thinking back to where it all began, AD says: “The page started with brief and poetic observations about nature and views and such like. There’s a lot of nature in Canberra. You can’t really avoid noticing it. It’s precious and wonderful. But after a while, it felt like I had described that enough.”
These days she sees her Facebook page as more of an “…attempt to manage the dissonance of living in a place that is beautiful, important, unique, peculiar, and also just the place where we all live our ordinary day to day lives.”
“The city receives a lot of attention and scrutiny, but not generally in ways that feel familiar or right to those of us who live here,” AD adds.
AD herself lives in the southern suburbs of Canberra with a cat and a human. (She notes that someone did once ask her to describe her cat on the page—which she did.)
She loves Coolemon Court, frocks, cake and swimming in the river. On the other hand, she “…does not love northsiders who make ill-informed comments about the southside, non-Canberrans who make ill-informed comments about Canberra, or using the term ‘Canberra’ as a metonym for the federal government.” (Hear! Hear! Don’t you hate that?!)
Our fondness for AD’s life commentary swells as she hits one proverbial nail on the head after the another.
For example, this post cheekily captures exactly what it’s like to work in the public service. Pay particular attention to point 4:
New APS Code of Conduct
- Turn off the sound for ALL your notifications.
- Never leave a grimy desk for a new starter.
- No one shall be expected to produce any item with home-made creme patisserie for morning tea.
- Do not speak to the Deputy Secretary about your policy pitch when he is wanting to tuck into his schnitzel sandwich.
- Never reheat salmon in the communal microwave.
- Wash your own rude word cup.
Although AD is generally upbeat about life, some posts include scathing assessments of specific places—like Woden Bus Interchange and Erindale.
“I don’t really love Erindale. People are too desperate for their take-away dinners to pay attention to courtesy and road rules. But plenty of people do love Erindale. So, I don’t feel too badly about neglecting it. It’s held in enough hearts,” she says.
AD isn’t crazy about telling me her age. She does, however, suggest that she’s not a spring chicken and “…this is the main reason I have never been able to fulfil requests to post about night life in Canberra. My experience of local night life is somewhat limited, and I don’t feel like I am in the right stage of life for a night out at Mooseheads.”
Then she quips: “As a life-time cardigan wearer, it’s quite possible I was never in the right stage of life for a night out at Mooseheads. It’s possible no one ever should be in the right stage of life for a night out at Mooseheads.”
To me, one of the most delightful aspects of the page is when people chime in with their own thoughts, comments and memories.
AD also gets requests to describe certain aspects of Canberra—and loves the ongoing conversation on her page.
“I very much like it when people add their own comments and bits of arcane Canberra knowledge, it feels more like a conversation. My favourite thing is when people correct my terrible errors, or ill-informed views. It’s like an argument between siblings, sometimes—not easily understood by outsiders and could go on forever.
“The pride and affection people have for their little bits of Canberra disarms me utterly. The satire can be ruthlessly accurate, but I think it’s always affectionate. People love the vegan sausage sizzles of North Ainslie,” she says, underscoring that fact.
Like many of us, AD hasn’t always lived in Canberra. She was originally a Queenslander. And this partly explains why she writes about the weather so much. AD was initially shocked by the cold. (How could it be sunny and cold at the same time?!)
“It turns out, people really care about the weather. People care about weather, trees, and changes to public transport timetables,” she tells me.
Reflecting on her move to Canberra in 2008, she “fell immediately in love with the whole place.” (Aside from Erindale, that is).
“It’s incredibly good luck to live in a town where beauty was one of the foundational principles, even if things have sometimes gone a bit astray since.
“One of my earliest jobs in Canberra was looking into the establishment of the national capital and its meaning in the Commonwealth. This was a fabulous opportunity to get lost in planning documents, parliamentary debates and photos of naked, bearded senators swimming in rivers.
“I found a brochure for the design of my own house in the National Capital Authority library. Not everyone was as excited about that as I was. I was pretty excited. I also found early planning documents from the period where the Griffin Plan was being, ah, adapted by public servants.
“Things became less artistic but possibly more practical. One public servant was clearly very bored and had drawn all over one of the maps, adding random features like the ‘Bishop’s diving board’. This unknown public servant is my greatest role model,” she says.
Feature image: via Facebook
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