Canberra began, as it is today, a city of orphans. People came here to temporarily work but stayed because they found unanticipated promise and opportunity in contributing to a city that the rest of the country loathes but can’t really do without. An implicit sense of public service and ‘otherness’ has now come to permeate Canberra’s identity to a point that there is a great smugness, arrogance even, that the rest of Australia can hate us – but they’ll never know how good it is to live here.



Daley’s Canberra begins and ends at the lake and its forgotten suburbs, traces of which can still be found on Burley Griffin’s banks. It meanders through the cultural institutions that chronicle the unsavoury early life of Canberra, the graveyard at St John’s where the pioneers rest, the ugly suburbs that have replaced West Lake and briefly through the two parliament houses and to the South Coast, to which much of Canberra moves over summer.

It is sprinkled with the biographical experience of someone who came, moved to London and came back to Canberra with an English-raised child who looked down upon Canberra as the plane was landing and declared: ‘You told me we were moving to a city’.

The boy’s experience would mirror that of so many here. Because in Canberra people don’t ask you where you went to school, as they do in Melbourne, or where your house is and how much you paid for it, as they do in Sydney. They ask you where you’ve come from. And how long you’re going to stay.