Monthly Archives: April 2005

Canberra Ii

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Yesterday I went to the Australian Museum. It’s a lot like Te Papa in that rather than just displaying items, it attempts to tell stories. It also reminded me of Te Papa because it seems that finally New Zealand and Australia have been around long enough to have some history and stories to tell of their own, instead of having to cling to British history.

There was plenty of Aboriginal history, including one section about a group of women who decided to resurrect an almost lost skill make a possum-fur cloak. Possums are a protected animal in Australia, so they had to get the skins from New Zealand. Well, it’s a more worthy use than those pseudo nipple warmers.

Next I walked around the lake and across the bridge to the National Gallery. This might sound like a quick stroll, but it was actually several kilometres. Canberra a very spread-out city. I was going to complain about it being more an automobile city (and indeed it does seem to have very car-friendly streets), but its spread-out design is a lot like parts of Paris and London (and probably Washington DC too) – it’s very regal and very capital city. The squat, compactness of Wellington seems like an anomaly in contrast.

The National Gallery was good. It’s an interesting building and has a good selection of art. Arrgh, see my complete lack of ability to describe art? Yes. I never studied art history at school or nothing, ow. There was one painting up in the Australian section that got me. I stood there looking at it, knowing that this painting had to be part of my life from now on. I didn’t want to take a photo because that didn’t seem adequate. I bought a print of it in the gift shop, but that’s not really adequate either.

I discovered the TV in my hotel room had captions, so I watched the live elimination of X-Factor with captions. It looked like it was done through respeaking with voice-recognition software, but they had song lyrics prepared. I wasn’t sure whether to feel trashy for watching X-Factor or nerdy for doing something kind of work-related on holiday.

Ok, today I’m going to steal a car and hit the highway.

Canberra

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Canberra is interesting, it’s unusual, it’s different.

100 years ago Canberra didn’t exist. It was sheep farms. Then, to stop bickering between Sydney and Melbourne over who was cool enough to be the capital city, the government decided to pick this spot of land about equidistant between the two and declared the sheep farms to be the site of Australia’s new capital.

The city streets were designed by and American landscape designer. He lined up stuff with mountains, so there’s this very pleasing perfection in the city. The city didn’t really start being built until after WWII, so there’s a lot of modernist and brutalist architecture, which happen to be two of my favourite styles. Canberra feels like a good city.

Yesterday I went to Parliament. It lives on top of Capital Hill (which lines up with mountains and stuff). Actually, it’s not so much on top of the hill as in the top of the hill. I mean, when you’re living in a democracy, you don’t go putting a giant palatial parliament on top of a hill for the plebs to look up to. No, instead you put it inside the hill and the plebs can go walking up the hill and below their feet are the upper and lower houses. It reminds me a bit of New Grange in Ireland. I’d link to it, but I can’t seem to be able to open any more brower windows.

The Australian Parliament buildings are so big that it’s about a 2km walk all the way around. I discovered this the hard way, yes, I did. But it’s that big because it’s designed to house everything and everyone for the next 200 years.

It makes the New Zealand Parliament’s mishmash of buildings seem very inadequate. Hey, can’t we make a new capital city in the middle of the Manawatu?

I also visited the Old Parliament. It’s just down the hill from the new one, all lined as up and stuff. It’s probably not the oldest building in Canberra, but it’s one of them. My favourite parts weren’t the older bits of the building, but the newer wings built in the 1970s. I especially liked the Prime Minister’s office, which last housed Bob Hawke, and its Bob-and-Karen-style wood-panelling.

My favourite room was the one dedicated to the 1975 Fraser/Whitlam hoo-ha. Using all the dramatic TV footage of the day (complete with ads from the era – “One day you’re gonna get caught with your pants down”) it relives the events that lead to the Governor General firing Prime Minister WHITLAM.

Y’know, somewhere in the New Zealand Parliament there is an upper house. It’s an empty room used for functions, but I like that it’s there and maybe one day New Zealand will have an upper house that will cause trouble. Yeah.

It’s nice and hot here. Like Sydney was, it’s like New Zealand on a really nice summer day (as opposed to those summer days that are freakishly cold, which seem to happen a lot lately). There are heaps of trees around here with heaps of naughty, noisy birds.

Last night I caught a bit of “The X Factor”, which is like an Idol show but includes oldies and groups and the judges mentor the performers as well as judging them. It was good, but it still had that kind of emptiness that Idol has at its heart.

Today there shall be museums and art galleries and I shall also wonder why there appear to be no convenience stores in downtown Canberra.

The dire effects of sleep deprivation

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I didn’t get much sleep last night, but that’s ok. I woke up, took the train to Circular Quay, bought a gelato and wandered around down to the Opera House and then back. It was a lovely, warm, sunny New Zealand summer’s day.

Oh, wait. Circular Quay isn’t in New Zealand. It’s in, uh, Sydney. Hey, how did I get here and what am I doing using this crappy internet kiosk with abrokenspacebar?

I’m going to have to investigate this further. Jeez, that’ll teach me to get a good night’s sleep.

Obvious to whom?

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I’ve noticed lately that the word obviously is used a lot. Someone will be talking about something and they’ll insert ‘obviously’ before they describe it, as if it’s so painfully obvious that they shouldn’t really have to mention it at all, but, you know, there might be one or two people out there who have lived simple sheltered lives and don’t actually know it.

Here’s an example from a hilarious news item. A BBC3 researcher sent the Bob Marley Foundation an email requesting an interview with Mr Marley, not realising he’d been dead for 24 years. They wrote:

…The Story of No Woman No Cry” would obviously only work with some participation from Bob Marley himself.

Popbitch put it in their weekly email and soon it was all around the interweb and in the papers. The BBC issued an apology, saying:

We are obviously very embarrassed that we didn’t realise that the letter to the Marley Foundation did not acknowledge that Mr Marley is no longer with us.

It seems to me that if they’d stopped considering all that stuff as being obvious and had instead questioned it and looked a little closer, then perhaps this kerfuffle would have not happened.