Meanjin Vol 72, No 1

By Meanjin Quarterly

In March, Meanjin visits Canberra in the city’s 100th year to take the pulse of our elusive, much-maligned Capital.
Gideon Haigh looks in-depth at a burgeoning Australian phenomenon—The Prime Minister’s Library, Lorin Clarke holidays to Canberra and finds a city at a tipping point, and Andrew Croome visits Mount Stromlo remade after it’s destruction in the tragic 2003 Canberra fires.
Frank Bowden invites us into the infectious underbelly of Canberra’s clean streets and healthful citizenry. Drusilla Modjeska talks to Anne-Sophie Hermann and Paul Daley addresses that age-old question, what exactly does the word ‘Canberra’ mean, anyway?
Marion Halligan remembers the first years of what was meant to be a brief affair with the city, Sonya Voumard reflects on the strange life of a journalist in the middle of the action, but far from home and Yolande Norris is tired of having the same old conversations about the place she loves.
There is fiction by Canberrans whose names you’ll know, like Dorothy Johnston and Alan Gould, alongside powerful new voices like Melanie Joosten. We present a vibrant collection of poetry from around the territory from John Foulcher, Elizabeth Lawson, Adrian Caesar and much, much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Mar 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9780522862775

Book preview

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Contents

No. 1, 2013

Editorial by Zora Sanders

Perspectives

Fire on the Mountain: A Walk on Mount Stromlo by Andrew Croome

The Love that Dare not Speak Its Name by Lorin Clarke

Feral Capital by Jim Davidson

Meanjin Papers

The Genius and the Gypsy: Walt and Marion Griffin in Australia and India by David Headon

Essays

Territorial Disputes by Paul Daley

This Connected Life by Katharine Murphy

The Rise and Rise of the Prime Minister by Gideon Haigh

CanberraLAB—a mythical biography; or, the art of showing up by Gerard O’Connell and Nugroho Utomo for CanberraLAB

Contamination of the Sterile Field by Frank Bowden

A Secret Map of Canberra by Chris Hammer

Australia’s Highest Court by André Dao

Buk bilong Pikinini Drusilla Modjeska talks to Anne-Sophie Hermann

Fiction

The sky was herding disappointments by Melanie Joosten

Mrs B by Dorothy Johnston

Rinse and Repeat by Nick Smith

The Poetic Experience by Alan Gould

Memoir

The Canberra Correspondent by Sonya Voumard

Out of Town by Julian Davies

Very Happy to Be Here by Yolande Norris

Constructing a City, Constructing a Life by Marion Halligan

Conversation

Me and My Country, Where to Now? Heather Taylor Johnson talks to Christos Tsiolkas

Poetry

Dog Day by S.K. Kelen

Combat Ready Mother by Susan Hampton

A Walk by John Foulcher

From Three Canberra Eclogues  3. Weereewa (aka George) by Paul Cliff

Bronzed Aussies by Michael Thorley

The Fifth Parallel by Elizabeth Lawson

The ward is new by Geoff Page

No Laughing Matter by Adrian Caesar

Reeds by Paul Hetherington

As Flames Were My Only Witness by Russell Erwin

… ployment / Inemploymnt / Unumploymnt by Paul Magee

The Blether by Alan Gould

Contributors

Information about subscriptions

Editorial

Zora Sanders

This year, in March, Canberra turns 100.

When my family moved there, the city was still in its seventies but it had already earned its reputation as the National Capital of Boredom.

Like many others who moved there before us, my family thought we knew what to expect from Canberra. In fact, my mother sobbed despairingly in the removals truck all the way from our small town in rural New South Wales to our new home in a leafy Canberra suburb, convinced we were making a terrible mistake.

We weren’t alone in thinking we already knew everything worth knowing about Canberra before we’d even finished unpacking. People who’ve never been within 1000 kilometres of the place can gleefully list Canberra’s many failings— the endless sprawling suburbia, the abysmal public transport, the non-existent nightlife, the fireworks and the pornography (which you’d think would liven the place up, wouldn’t you?), the general claustrophobia of a city dominated by politicians and public servants ... the list goes tediously on. Canberrans, of course, are long exhausted by the task of countering these charges. As Yolande Norris describes in her essay in this issue, there is nothing more tiresome then defending something you don’t believe needs defending, or trying to convince someone of virtues that, to you, are blindingly obvious. I recognised the city I loved as a child in Yolande’s memoir, the city that was my home, the city I missed and yearned for after we moved away.

Love for a place can be as passionate and irrational as love for a person, and there is certainly no shortage of love for Canberra in these pages. Nor is there any shortage of optimism and excitement about the place. In fact, if there is a uniting idea about Canberra contained here, it is that the clichés about our capital city aren’t just out of date for people who live there, they’ve lost their currency in the rest of the country as well.

It’s hard to tell if there is genuinely a new energy in Canberra, or if it’s simply that everyone else is finally discovering what Canberrans have known all along—that Canberra is a place where weird and clever and delightful things happen and will go on happening. Where people live complex, frustrating, fulfilling lives in a city that was designed to be different, that was meant to be unlike all others.

This issue is anything but the authoritative word on Canberra and its inhabitants. We’ve approached it like we would any other issue of Meanjin and it is full of the usual eclectic mix of fact, fiction and poetry. We hope it offers a taste of Canberra as it is now, 100 years after its founding, as viewed by the people who live there, who’ve left there and who never meant to find themselves there in the first place.

Perspectives

Fire on the Mountain: A Walk on Mount Stromlo

Andrew Croome

In the burnt-out dome of the Yale-Columbia telescope, every footstep echoes. The effect is so loud that it feels deliberate, as if this building was once an acoustic chamber rather than an observatory. Missing its windows, roof and telescope, the Yale-Columbia is the first ruin visitors come by on Mount Stromlo. Rust bleeds from the machinery that once manoeuvred the dome and an electric motor rests on what was formerly the telescope’s mount, its innards gashed open.

The place feels like a monument, but to what? Outside, the sun is strong and the air surprisingly still. The observatory and its eclectic mix of white domes stretches across the length of the mountain top, a ridge of volcanic rock that runs on a north–south alignment. The long views are east, towards Canberra, and west, towards the Murrumbidgee River and the Brindabella ranges. On the far hills you can see corridors of younger, greener forest: the path of the fire that, almost ten years ago, devastated this place, claiming five telescopes, the director’s residence, the workshop and the lion’s share of the mountain’s living quarters and houses.

At that time, Mount Stromlo was blanketed in pines. The fire vanquished all but one small cluster, which sits at a bend on the road to the hilltop. These are Canary Island pines. Stromlo has always been a place of experiments, and these are one: planted early in the last century to determine the suitability of different species in a (decreasingly) Australian landscape. They survived because, unlike the rest of their cousins, their bark happens to resist fire.

To the north of the Yale-Columbia is the mountain’s high point. There sits another, older ruin—a cross-shaped concrete building with a circular chamber at its centre and four small abutting rooms. This is the Oddie telescope, the place where observing on Mount Stromlo began. That was in 1911, the year in which Ernest Rutherford devised his model of the atom, and five years before Einstein would publish his theory of relativity. The telescope was a nine-inch Grubb refractor, donated by James Oddie, a Ballarat businessman who died before it was installed. Three men came with it: Melbourne astronomers Pietro Baracchi and J.M. Baldwin, and a caretaker, Robert Magill.

The view they saw then looked over a capital as yet unmade and, depending on the cloud cover, straight up at the stars. Baracchi’s wife had recently died, and the dome must have felt a special type of isolation: a capsule on the point of an empty ridge, only the occasional farmhouse light in the darkness below.

Today, over the Oddie’s entrance, the filament hangs out of a burnt light socket. In one room is the wreck of a series of gears, in another a rusted switchboard. A third room has a tap and was presumably the kitchen, which doubled as Magill’s bedroom (Baracchi and Baldwin had their own). The floor is concrete. Before the protection of the pines the winter winds must have been bitterly cold. Much later an astronomer would fall onto the floor here, remaining unconscious and unfound until morning, detaching, of all things, his retina.

North of the Oddie a track leads into a small saddle and, after a minute or so, to an outcrop. The way is watched by kangaroos, and the ground is sparsely littered with pieces of iron. Astronomy is a practical science that remakes and recycles, and a hundred years of it on the mountain has left things scattered, cast off and discarded. It looks like junk but it could also be called invention. Long before the fires, parts of the observatory’s history were swallowed up this way. A beautiful octagonal kite house, like something from an English garden, was dismantled, and the locations and fates of what were once full buildings, including a magnetic hut, are now mysteries. In the bush sits an old radio telescope, orders of magnitude smaller than the enormous radio arrays now dotted around the globe. It feels as if the chances of a thing’s survival here depend on how quickly it can become obsolete.

On the outcrop is a white picket fence enclosing a small patch of ground. The man who dreamt of this observatory, and who lobbied hard and long to get it, was its first director, Walter Geoffrey Duffield. This is his grave. When he died of influenza in 1929, his family and staff buried him here. Photographs of the graveside ceremony show mourners gathered on a much barer outcrop, under a solitary she-oak. That tree is now gone and at the grave grow the emblems of Australian science, bottlebrush. On Duffield’s stone is a final instruction to his observatory, the words of the poet–scientist Alfred Noyes: ‘Take thou the torch, carry it out of sight into the great new age I must not know, into the great new realm I must not tread.’ Looking back at the mountain, where a Nobel prize for the discovery of the accelerating universe hangs in the observatory, you can only presume Duffield would believe they did.

This place is markedly different to what it was in Duffield’s time. The isolation that, even as late as the 1960s, was part of life on Mount Stromlo, has ended. It was a small community then, and ventures off the mountain were only as frequent as weekly shopping trips into Canberra or Queanbeyan. The artist Rosalie Gascoigne, a long-time resident with her astronomer husband Ben, once described the feeling of this isolation in terms of starvation, saying she grew hungry for human communication, that many on the mountain suffered from loneliness, and that the place—which relied on a type of pioneering subsistence living—was kept going only by the magic of the work.

A second change to life here remains, of course, the fire. It saw the loss of Mount Stromlo’s workshops, its telescopes and the original Commonwealth Solar Observatory building (since rebuilt) with its library (forever lost). Several projects went up in smoke with the workshop, including a pioneering tool for studying early galaxies known as NIFS (since reconstructed), as well as optical manufacturing equipment (never replaced). Among the telescopes lost was the enormous 74 inch and the Great Melbourne, both of which were in nightly use. Incredibly, the Melbourne was 135 years old: constructed in Dublin in 1868, it had just been roboticised, with the addition of new instruments allowing it to investigate dark matter.

Astronomer Ken Freeman, who first came to Stromlo in 1967, remembers the Saturday of the 2003 fire as ‘stinking hot’. By that day, the fire had been burning west of Canberra for more than a week. As a volunteer firefighter, Freeman had helped to extinguish a blaze that had started in a similar spot in 1973. Thirty years later he was on the mountain, watching a new fire that, fed by powerful winds, had now crossed the Murrumbidgee and was preparing to race up the hillside. There was no plan to actively defend the observatory against a serious bushfire. The idea of doing so was too dangerous. Instead, about half an hour before the fire arrived, those on the mountain retreated.

Freeman went to defend his own home in nearby Duffy, where he’d moved when the suburb first opened. There he was soon fighting a fire coming on multiple fronts. He stayed, trying to beat it, until Duffy’s water supply failed. After that, little could be done and he drove away. His home was destroyed alongside nearly five hundred others, including that of fellow astronomer Mike Bessell. Tragically that day, four people in Canberra lost their lives.

On Mount Stromlo, the fire changed things irretrievably. Hot enough to melt the domes, its wake left a brown and black landscape of burnt pines and twisted metal; a place of warp and collapse. Much of the observatory’s history was destroyed, as well as its capabilities. Two office buildings survived, so while staff were soon able to move back to the mountain (the ash in their offices included that of their curtains), there was no guarantee that the observatory would be rebuilt. On top of the physical damage was an emotional toll. Some speak of a grim and subdued atmosphere and a period of depression and stagnation. Others say it took three or four years for things to feel normal again.

Yet for all the destruction, many of the astronomers here will tell you that eventually the observatory will look gratefully at the fire and the hard decisions it forced. Rebuilding has allowed for a new focus, including the creation of an advanced instrumentation engineering centre—something that has put Stromlo at the heart of international projects such as the Giant Magellan telescope, an instrument that will use seven mirrors, each as big as the single mirrors in today’s largest telescopes. Researchers from around the world now come to explore everything from galactic archaeology to the nature of black holes, and there are plans to build a discovery centre and museum with help from the Smithsonian. Thus, while the fire destroyed much of the observatory and made stark ruins of its past, it’s also made for a brighter future—one that, beyond the heartache, has invigorated this place.

The Love that Dare not Speak Its Name

Lorin Clarke

‘W hy?’ the bloke in the corner shop near my house asked when I told him I was going to Canberra for a week. ‘What did you do?’

The idea that you would only go to Canberra because you were mandated by a court order is just one of the imputations you can expect to have made if you tell people you’re headed to the nation’s capital for a visit. Mostly, people ask simply, ‘You going for work?’

Like a tourist in customs attempting to explain away a dodgy overseas trip, anybody planning a visit to Canberra will face, at some stage, scrutiny from sceptics. Why are you going? Who are you going with? When do you get to come home? There is a social obligation to roll your eyes about the place, to mutter something about work or family commitments, thereby underwriting your visit with an emotional or financial narrative, lest it be believed that you would not rather be somewhere more glamorous.

I recently visited Canberra. Deliberately. Not for work, not because I was on the way from somewhere to somewhere else. Yes, I went because I had family there, but I also went because I quite like it. I like Canberra. There, I said it.

In fact, I bristle a bit at the Canberra jokes. People who grew up in Canberra don’t even bristle at Canberra jokes, but I do. The pseudo-patriotism that leads people to barrack for one city and heap scorn upon another has never been particularly appealing, and the idea that cities owe us a raging good time seems childish and solipsistic. It could be argued that the national eye-roll at Canberra’s expense is a socially acceptable form of snobbery designed to make the rest of us feel more interesting.

I am willing to concede that Canberra is not the beating heart of the nation, culturally speaking. It isn’t famous for its cultural energy. There isn’t wall-to-wall 24-hour shopping. Cultural events in Canberra don’t tend to have Twitter hashtags that become trending topics. In many ways, for visitors, Canberra might seem like a large country town. Parrots by the roadside, hopeless public transport, almost total silence after about 10 pm but for the occasional sound of a speeding car and the distant whooping of youths.

Canberra, I have discovered, does not advertise itself terribly successfully. Even if you never went to Canberra for school camp back in primary school, you may well feel a bit like you’re on one when you do a tour of the big institutions. There are endless pamphlets bearing the faces of Australian celebrities smiling next to quotes about the importance of ‘treasuring Australian stories’ and ‘uncovering forgotten pasts’. There’s so much official cultural infrastructure, and most of it is so grandiose and self-conscious about its importance to the nation at large, you would be forgiven for thinking museums and galleries and government buildings and institutes made up the entire character of the place.

Removed from its identity as the nation’s capital, Canberra doesn’t have a reputation that goes much further than legal fireworks and the porn industry. I went online to see if I could uncover the hidden subcultures bubbling away beneath the surface of the Canberra we all think we know. I wanted to discover what other events were on, apart from parliamentary sitting time and gallery events. That was when I really copped a kick in the teeth for my efforts to advocate on Canberra’s behalf. Type ‘Canberra events’ into your search engine and you will find the ‘Visit Canberra’ website’s events page, the opening line of which defies satire. ‘Our massive roundabouts’, it says, ‘will spin you off to many great events that take place in Canberra.’

Obviously I needed to take matters into my own hands.

During my most recent stay in Canberra I stayed at the Australian National University. The university holds regular events, as most universities do, including lectures and seminars on things like The response of rivers to climate change and Volunteerism and charitable giving in urban China: Emergent socialities and subjectivities. One of the events advertised was off-campus. It was a dance performance held at a place called Pod at Lonsdale Street Traders in Braddon. Braddon has a developing reputation as home to the ‘porceline [sic] owl and vintage T-shirt loving hip set’¹ and Lonsdale Street Traders is, for this particular demographic, Mecca.

Squeezed in between blocks of carparks and accountants’ offices in a setting that doesn’t look like an arts precinct so much as a street where you might visit your dentist, Lonsdale Street Traders is an independent collective designed as a deliberate rejection of the shopping malls across the ACT. It’s a compact little oasis of exposed wood-panel nooks consisting of independent retail outlets selling locally designed clothing, interesting jewellery, handmade wicker baskets and, apparently, porcelain owls. There’s a florist, an organic bakery, a hairdresser, a bicycle shop, and a tyre warehouse converted into a creative studio for artists and musicians.

There is an openness and sense of community about the entire place that creates a vibrant environment for ongoing discussion, projects and commercial activity, including late-night shopping over the Christmas period. Pod, where the dance performance I attended was held, is run by Craft ACT in cooperation with Lonsdale Street Traders. It is described on its Facebook page as a ‘creative hub … aimed at supporting members, emerging makers, artists, co-operatives, curators, writers and educators … [providing] a space to showcase and promote your practice’.² The success or otherwise of this venture is probably too early to determine. The venue and the people it attracts seem already to have gained a small but passionate following.

I am not claiming this is a hugely significant cultural moment in Canberra. Remember, I’m just a visitor. I don’t know a great deal about what other niche community events and cultural activities take place. It’s also worth pointing out that Lonsdale Street Traders is not huge. It was launched in late 2012 and it certainly doesn’t take up a lot of physical space. On Facebook, the collective has not quite 1000 friends. In the context of similar projects across the country, Lonsdale Street Traders is not even especially subversive or cutting edge. It wasn’t designed to be. Rather, it is set up as a retail space that knows its market. What is so interesting about the place is that it is already obvious that this is the kind of grassroots cultural project that could make a tiny dint in Canberra’s reputation for roundabouts.

As one local artist reported after the launch party, ‘I think the thing I appreciate most about Traders is that [it is] enhancing Canberra’s creative community.’ Certainly, on the night I attended the dance performance, the room was alive with a sartorially splendid crowd of people squatting on the concrete floor or perching on a wall, drinking imported beers while talking earnestly into the night. Bicycles with jackets draped over the handlebars lined the walls.

The dance performance was designed to engage with and respond to its audience and with local musicians, who improvised as the performers snaked across the space from room to room. The work was called the Austerity Project and the performers were Orr & Sweeney. The response of the crowd was warm and generous and the performers invited the audience to stay back and discuss the work, which they then did—with the performers and with each other.

Planning an entire city from scratch and then building it high and rich with symbolism at a fair distance from the other major Australian cities does indicate a rather hopeful view of the potential population’s ability to form cultural and creative communities from nothing. One of the reasons I like Canberra is that its carefully planned intentions are often ironically thwarted. It’s meant to be the centre of power and yet it is so derided. Politicians sit in the centre of it, shouting at each other and trading insults while the tour guide