Monday Milestone: Capital

This Week in History
1913, March 12
The federal capital of Australia comes into being when Canberra is born.

“The seat of Government of the Commonwealth … shall be in the State of New South Wales,
and be distant not less than one hundred miles from Sydney.”
– s125 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution

Slip across the border from New South Wales and a number of things change immediately. The roads become smoother, they run in circles, and there’s a chill in the air.

The Australian capital, Canberra has long been the scapegoat for the country, its good name often besmirched with dodgy underhanded dealings of politicians, an inflated, lazy public service, and thin-skinned, vociferous, parochial Canberrans extolling (at length) the virtues of their city –a place with all the bands, the sport, the restaurants of bigger cities, yet you can still drive home in twenty minutes. To be fair, with all the political association it is pretty easy to blame for everything.

But somehow this week the national capital, our national capital turns one hundred. A centenary is a pretty big deal, in anyone’s book. Yet in recent weeks more seems to have been written about the return of Sonny Bill Williams than Canberra’s centenary celebrations. Frankly, perhaps someone outside the ACT should really care.

So the Milestone will fill the breach, and celebrate the century this week, remembering when Canberra was little more than grazing land, in the Yass Valley. Before local politician King O’Malley drove the first stake in 1913, beginning the capital and everything changed.

And in doing so, postulate as to what if Canberra wasn’t the capital? How would Australia be different?

Election nights would almost certainly change. The late, great Peter Harvey would have lost his famous sign-off line. Footage of Norman Gunston sniffing around Gough Whitlam as he denounced that nothing would save the Governor-General wouldn’t exist and that iconic scene in The Castle with Michael Caton and Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell outside the High Court of Australia would be gone.

Not to mention those people who owe their upbringing to the capital. Essendon wouldn’t have had captain, coach, and spiritual leader James Hird. Australia would have lost that one-day match in 1996 without Michael’s Bevan’s last ball boundary. Former NRL CEO David Gallop would never have run rugby league for a decade.

But most of all, the greatest travesty about a world with no Canberra would be no lime-green Canberra Raiders.  The “Dalgety Raiders” just doesn’t have the same ring to them, and such proximity to Victoria would question whether there would have be a national capital rugby league team at all, a disaster in anyone’s book.

After all, rugby league history without that Canberra winning streak in 1989 – when the Raiders sat in seventh with five rounds to go, before sparking a run that would culminate with their maiden premiership as John “Chicka” Ferguson shrugged off two or three defenders to tie up the Grand Final would be eternally poorer. If that isn’t enough consider this – without the Canberra Raiders – Balmain would have been premiers that year. Oh the horror.

So say what you like about the national capital. Irrespective of the politicians, the public servants, the roundabouts or the Raiders, there is little doubt the country would be different without it.

Happy birthday Canberra.

 

The Milestone Five: Things you may not have known about Canberra

5. There is a portion of Jervis Bay dedicated as part of the ACT so every state capital in Australia has a seaport.

4. In Walter Burleigh Griffen’s original design, land for the site of the Australian War Memorial was originally reserved for a casino.

3. All the number plates in Canberra begin with Y. Rumours as to why this is range from the Parlimentary Triangle to being the remaining letter in the alphabet (e.g. NSW were given A-K, Victoria were given L-P etc)

2. King O’Malley, a strict teetotaller, instrumental in the decision to create the capital in its current location lends his name to a Canberra institution. A bar.

1. The Canberra Raiders are named so because the media saw the men from the ACT as a threat to “raid” the premiership and take it outside New South Wales for the first time. These fears would prove correct in 1989.