Disturbing undertones
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 15: Divided Nation
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Dorothy Johnston
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Dorothy Johnston's biography and other articles by this writer
Australian fiction writers have, until the last few decades, avoided settling in Canberra and writing about the city in their novels and short stories. In Wild Weeds and Wind Flowers, Ric Throssell's biography of his mother, Katharine Susannah Prichard, he notes her comment that the national capital was "like a town made by Pinocchio. All that neatness and prettiness, so far removed from the struggle for existence." Historian Keith Hancock recalled his impressions of returning after an absence in his autobiography Country and Calling. "Canberra, now that I saw it again, both irritated and charmed me. Charles Hawker used to say that it was a good sheep station spoiled."
The same put-down has been repeated in countless clichés since, from "soul-less city" to Prime Minister John Howard's air of surprise as he remarked, after the 2003 bushfires that killed four people, injured several hundred and destroyed 491 homes, that Canberrans were reacting just like other "normal" Australians to their loss.
The point – whether made subtly or not – is that, while Canberra may possess certain physical attractions such as clean streets, plenty of trees, jobs in the public service and a lack of congestion, the city will somehow forever remain a stranger to passion and grief; that matters which fully engage the human heart will be shed at its borders – like a coat, if hearts were worn on sleeves, but more like an emptying of the spirit and a form of voluntary evisceration. This activity, leading to a kind of death, spells death also to the creative imagination.
The first published novel set in Canberra, Plaque with Laurel by M. Barnard Eldershaw – the pen name of Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw – first appeared in 1937. There is an irony and aptness in Plaque with Laurel being about a writers' conference, whose characters converge from elsewhere (mainly Sydney) and return to other, more interesting and absorbing places at the story's end.
T.A.G. Hungerford's Riverslake , set in a workers' hostel, was published in 1953, then there is another long gap before Robert Macklin's The Paper Castle in 1977. In 1981, Blanche d'Alpuget's The Turtle Beach followed Macklin's example of combining various Asian settings with a Canberra base, and ushered in two decades during which prose fiction has flourished.
Clichés and misconceptions have not lost their force. During his decade as Prime Minister, John Howard has steadfastly refused to live in the Lodge. A ubiquitous form of synecdoche in which "Canberra" elides to "Federal Parliament" – as in "Canberra decides", "Canberra to blame" – makes it harder for anybody living outside to understand the place as a collection of citizens, or even to want to. Canberrans enjoy high incomes and education levels relative to the rest of the country. Over 63 per cent voted "yes" in the republic referendum, by far the highest percentage of any state or territory, and we consistently vote Labor in federal elections.
The Griffin Legacy Plan, which advocates returning to Walter Burley Griffin's 1918 blueprint as a guide to Canberra's development over the next thirty years, was unveiled by the National Capital Authority in 2004. If the plan is followed, a "curving sea" of buildings will accommodate an additional 60,000 people in central Canberra. An unspoken question behind this plan, as with all previous ones, is how the affected citizens will live up to it. It's between the grandeur of the democratic vision and the human falling back – perhaps falling back right inside the earth – that the idea of the Gothic is born.
WHEN I MOVED FROM MELBOURNE TO CANBERRA in the late 1970s, I'd published the odd poem and short story, but nothing substantial. I was working on a novel. I moved because my partner was offered a job in the press gallery and I worried, among other things, about whether I'd be able to write fiction in Canberra, what I would write about – whether my imagination was stuck somewhere in Victoria and, if not, how much of it might be transportable.
It wasn't until several years later, when my son became very ill, and spent time in the infectious diseases ward of the old Canberra Hospital, that I was able to answer part of this question for myself. A child lying near to death in a hospital above an artificial lake led to my first story about Canberra, "The Boatman of Lake Burley Griffin". It's a short piece in which the lake takes on an undertone of the River Styx, the boatman unable to find his way across. Our lake was flooded in 1963, drowning a farmhouse, sheep paddocks and racetrack. At the centre of the city said to have no centre, it seemed to me then – as it has often since – an instance of the gap, or hole, between nature and culture. In those terrifying days, it was also an unnavigable passage between life and death.
It is gaps, disjunctures, edges that don't fit that have come to interest me most in this city where I've lived now for more than a quarter of a century. And in those gaps, what can – and sometimes inspiringly does – grow up is a form of theatre, a parody of public faces and publicly acceptable facades.
The best known of these is the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. First erected in 1972, in protest against the McMahon government's refusal to recognise indigenous land rights, the tent embassy has achieved an almost permanent presence on the lawns opposite Old Parliament House, though a proposal for its replacement by an "education" building is being considered as I write.
The term "embassy" implies a sovereign state, yet this one has been condemned as an "eyesore", "disturbing undertone", "blight on the national capital" and "a squalid slum that should be removed". The embassy has made good use of Canberra's physical and political landscape: the nearby streets lined with luxurious embassies in Red Hill and Yarralumla have given the symbols of tents, Aboriginal flag and sacred fire an added potency. For over three decades, it has asserted its provocative status, a thorn in the side of successive governments. It has been forcibly and violently removed, only to return with greater strength. It has been listed on the National Estate by the Australian Heritage Commission. Funeral and wedding ceremonies have been held there. A long and honourable tradition of protest in front of the Parliament has been maintained.
This tradition was changed fundamentally by the move up, and into, Capital Hill. The new Parliament House, in spite of the planners' and architects' intentions, has turned out to be a much more effective fortress than the old one ever was. Soon after arriving in Canberra, I took part in a demonstration inside Kings Hall, against budget cuts to women's refuges. We banged garbage bin lids and made a nuisance of ourselves. Kings Hall in the Old Parliament House was a genuine meeting place. Paths crossed between the chambers, members from opposing sides brought together. The public was allowed to mingle. The Members' Hall at the centre of the new building is a pale replica. It is just a crossing space between the chambers, closed to the public, who must content themselves with looking down on their politicians from an upper level.
Our Parliament is even more of a fortress now, with bollards and prohibitions against walking on the roof. Yet demonstrations still occur on the lawns outside – huge, imaginative demonstrations, like the Sea of Hands, made huge to correspond with the long, green, undulating space. Gigantism and parody effectively evolved.