Australians think this place is boring. Here’s why you should visit anyway

By Lilit Marcus, CNN

Canberra, Australia (CNN) — Canberra began life on the back foot.

Unlike Australia’s other major cities, it’s not on the ocean. It isn’t rich from opal mining. It doesn’t have an opera house.

Australia’s capital city was designed to settle an argument.

According to the Australian Constitution, enacted in 1901, the capital city had to be at least 100 miles away from Sydney (the then-biggest and most populous city) to keep Melbourne (the initial seat of power and home to parliament) happy. And thus in 1911 a mostly abandoned plot of land in rural New South Wales became Canberra, the “bush capital” of a young country still defining its identity.

For many Australians, Canberra is a place they’ve only visited on school field trips. Tourists might know it as the answer to a trivia question, not somewhere they’d plan to go on vacation.

Canberrans — there are just under 500,000 of them — are used to having to defend the reputation of their hometown.

The word that comes up the most among locals asked to describe their city is “daggy,” an Aussie slang word that can be translated as “lame” or “a bit shabby.”

Now past its one-century mark, Canberra has left behind the transitory nature of its early founding and developed into a place where people don’t just swoop in and out for temporary government jobs — they stay and build a life. Australia’s oft-maligned capital is a place of world-class food and drink, offering access to green space and some of the country’s best arts and culture.

Many Australians still won’t visit Canberra. But you should.

‘Canberra thinks you’re boring’

“The story of Canberra is like the story of Washington DC or Brasilia, artificially planned cities plonked in the middle of nowhere,” says Nicholas Brown, author of “A History of Canberra.”

“It’s an awkward city to sell.”

As Brown, who grew up in Canberra and now teaches history at the Australian National University (ANU), puts it, the city is “an experiment.” Although Canberra was built in the early 20th century and Australia’s parliament moved there in 1927, it took a while for the city to find its footing.

In 1912, American architect Walter Burley Griffin won a contest to design Canberra’s layout and its major features. Griffin, who had mostly designed houses up until then, said that his Canberra plan was his “ideal of the city of the future.”

One of the most important details was Parliament House, the center of Australia’s federal government. Griffin strongly believed that no one building should dwarf the city’s skyline, no matter how important its function was.

As a result, the landmark was built in an unusual way. Essentially, the top was removed from a hill, Parliament House was built, and then the top of the hill was plopped back on. That made it, as popular lore put it, the only place in the world where citizens could walk on top of government officials.

After World War II, as Australia tried to define its identity as an independent country and not a British colony, the question of nascent statehood defined Canberra’s architecture and urban planning.

As Brown puts it: “If we don’t have a national capital, we don’t have national institutions, then what do we have?”

Answers to that question came along at a steady clip through the 20th and 21st centuries: the National Gallery, the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Zoo, the National Arboretum and the National Library. ANU opened in 1946.

“On the negative side, Canberra represents elites and privilege,” says Brown. “But the planning of Canberra was based on equity, that kids should have access to good schools, suburbs should be planned, roads should be good.”

Present-day Canberra looks like many other major upper middle class urban cores around the world. Saturday afternoon farmers’ market? Check. Street art? Check. Cafes and restaurants full of dogs in strollers? Double check. A craft beer trail? Yep, that too.

That burgeoning sense of local pride also has a capitalist arm in the form of Pop Canberra, a bright yellow shop on busy, fashionable Lonsdale Road. The store’s aesthetic celebrates Canberra as an ironic comeback kid via Instagram-ready trinkets like “Canberra thinks you’re boring” drink coasters and pencil cups shaped like the city’s iconic round cement bus shelters.

“I think the people who love Canberra really, really love Canberra,” says Gabe Trew, Pop’s founder. He tells CNN that although the store sells locally made goods like wine, soap and jewelry, it’s the Canberra-branded items that consistently sell the best. Postcards and T-shirts depict local curiosities, like a giant owl sculpture nicknamed “Penis Owl” for its phallic shape and an orb-shaped science building jokingly called the Embassy of Mars.

Embracing Canberran pride has paid off. Trew says that local business owners come in to buy corporate gifts like mugs and keychains, while influencers and celebrities who are passing through town love to get selfies in front of the neon-yellow walls.

“Canberra takes time to unfold,” says Trew. “It’s not the big city, it doesn’t have a famous sports team, but it is a town that’s really good to live in. It’s only a matter of time until more people start seeing it.”

‘Lean into the dagginess’

Instagram-friendly memes aside, it has been hard for Canberra to shake off its legacy of being a quiet, dull one-industry town.

“When I was growing up,” says Brown, the history professor, “it was unusual to be born in Canberra. Most people came to Canberra because their father got a job. But in my lifetime, increasingly, people who move have children and those children stay. From the 1990s onward, Canberra had to start paying for itself, so it developed industries.”

Bureaucrats, after all, still have to eat. Today, Canberra has the highest concentration of restaurants in the country. Gone are the days when there was only one café that would serve cappuccinos — craft coffee thrives here, just as it does all over Australia. And people who are interested in the arts don’t just have to go to the big national museums to get their fix.

Anne Masters, a ceramicist who grew up in Canberra as the daughter of a government worker, lived abroad in Vienna and the UK before feeling the call home to Canberra. And an idea came with her return — she decided to launch an art gallery to show off work by local Canberrans.

In September 2017, she opened GOST — Gallery of Small Things — in a six-square-meter outbuilding behind her home. After it was determined to be Australia’s smallest art gallery, the resulting flurry of attention brought travelers from around the world into Masters’ backyard. The role has given her a chance to not just celebrate art but to be an ambassador for the city she loves.

“I make little cards of things to do in town,” Masters says. “I recommend restaurants, wineries, other galleries. People are out and about, they love nature, cycling around the lake, walking. They’re very friendly. People always say hi; we just do it without even thinking.”

In some ways, this neighborliness is baked into Canberra’s origin story. Until the 1970s, Canberrans were not permitted to have fences in front of their houses. The “salt and pepper” urban planning strategy put single-family homes next to public housing estates. Shops couldn’t post signs or billboards until the 1980s, meaning that if you needed to buy groceries and didn’t know which store sold food, you had to ask a neighbor. For years, there was only one pub.

Some people found Canberra stifling. But others say that the “bubble” helped them thrive.

Sia Ahmad grew up in Canberra’s close-knit Bangladeshi-Australian community and has lived almost most of her life in the capital.

“I will always advocate for Canberra as a great place to come to,” she says. “If you get to know it, it’s really amazing. There’s people who will come here and they just will not jam with it, and they’re gone in a year. Or there’s people who thought they wouldn’t jam with it, and then something clicked, and they’ve never left since. I think people who come to Canberra in formative stage of their life really get a lot out of it.”

Ahmad, who runs a local arts organization, says that bands who come to town are often surprised by how big a turnout they get in a city that doesn’t have a reputation as a hub for independent music. She grew up as a trans kid on the fringes, going to punk rock shows and figuring out where she belonged. Canberra gave her the space to find her way, she says. “We have to own a lot of things and kind of lean into the dagginess.”

Canberra is the site of an interesting paradox: can you be the underdog and the overdog at the same time? As a national capital, it has a regular influx of money, people, and ideas. Cool or uncool, its status as a center of power and influence is undeniable. But Canberrans still have a bristly undercurrent that wouldn’t feel out of place in a city like Marseille or Detroit.

Still, Canberra is not a perfect place. The single-family homes that lured bureaucrats to the city still dominate housing stock, making it difficult for new residents to find an apartment.

The national institutions around the city also require all employees — from CEOs to gift shop managers — to be Australian citizens. That can block out many work visa holders or non-naturalized residents.

Public transit is limited to a few buses and trams, which means most Canberrans rely on cars to get around. Masters says that if she were mayor for a day, her first order of business would be expanding the city’s tram network.

So, do Canberrans have a chip on their collective shoulders? Brown would say no.

“The rest of the country has a chip on their shoulder about Canberra.”

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