The best view of Canberra is from the back of a departing train.

So this title is a cutting little remark made by Percy Deane, the Secretary of the Prime Minister's Department, in 1928.

To continue the tale, after an extensive search, the present site was chosen! Although people claim that it was chosen halfway between Melbourne and Sydney, the dodgy pastoralists of corrupt and amoral New South Wales managed to wrangle and extra 230 kilometres closer than their more cultured and classy southern rival.

Thus, utisiling nefarious means to marginalise the exceptionally superior states, the NSW government ceded the new Australian Capital Territory to the Commonwealth Government in 1910. In that same year, setting the scene for the kind of funsville that Canberra would go on to be, the ACT became an alcohol-free area!

A soulless patchwork of streets sprawled out over a flat and barren landscape, Canberra is truly the Michael Buble of Australian cities: clean, neat, polite, inoffensive and completely and utterly lacking in any character, charm or swagger.

Comments

USelaine said…

I'm sorry, did you say something? zzzzz

6 December 2008 at 04:59

Layrayski said…

6 December 2008 at 11:04

Kris McCracken said…

USelaine and Layrayski, thank you for your patience!

8 December 2008 at 11:12

Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it...

I still have the robot on the job. Here you can see the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery . And here is a poem: Soliloquy for One Dead Bruce Dawe Ah, no, Joe, you never knew the whole of it, the whistling which is only the wind in the chimney's smoking belly, the footsteps on the muddy path that are always somebody else's. I think of your limbs down there, softly becoming mineral, the life of grasses, and the old love of you thrusts the tears up into my eyes, with the family aware and looking everywhere else. Sometimes when summer is over the land, when the heat quickens the deaf timbers, and birds are thick in the plumbs again, my heart sickens, Joe, calling for the water of your voice and the gone agony of your nearness. I try hard to forget, saying: If God wills, it must be so, because of His goodness, because- but the grasshopper memory leaps in the long thicket, knowing no ease. Ah, Joe, you never knew the whole of it... I like Bruce Dawe. He just my be my favourite Austral...

There was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding; even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, good or evil, right or wrong.

Here is a self portrait. I’m calling it Portrait of a lady in a dirty window . Shocking, isn’t it? However, it is apt! Samhain , Nos Galan Gaeaf , Hop-tu-Naa , All Saints , All Hallows , Hallowmas , Hallowe'en or HALLOWEEN . It’s Theme Thursday and we’re talking about the festivals traditionally held at the end of the harvest season. Huh? No wonder Australians have trouble with the concept of HALLOWEEN. For the record, in my thirty-two L O N G years on the planet, I can’t say I’ve ever seen ghosts ‘n goblins, trick ‘n treaters or Michael Myers stalking Tasmania’s streets at the end of October. [That said, I did once see a woman as pale as a ghost turning tricks that looked like Michael Myers in late November one time.] Despite the best efforts of Hollywood, sitcoms, and innumerable companies; it seems Australians are impervious to the [ahem] charms of a corporatized variant of a celebration of the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darke...

In dreams begin responsibilities.

A life at sea, that's for me, only I just don't have the BREAD. That's right, Theme Thursday yet again and I post a photo of a yacht dicking about in Bass Strait just off Wynyard. The problem is, I am yet again stuck at work, slogging away, because I knead need the dough . My understanding is that it is the dough that makes the BREAD. And it is the BREAD that buys the yacht. On my salary though, I will be lucky to have enough dough or BREAD for a half dozen dinner rolls. Happy Theme Thursday people, sorry for the rush.

This will hurt me...

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