Canberra
Canberra
In 1890 the Australasian Colonies consisted of Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia, Western Australia, New Zealand and Fiji. They were independent and self governing, but there was a growing sense of nationalism, especially on the big island of Australia. The telegraph was tying those colonies together and people were starting to consider themselves "Australian", the bulk of them being native born on the continent. Improvements in transportation were also helping to unify the proto-country, though not as much as you might think. The rail systems were built by the individual colonies and more often than not had different gauges, so there was nothing like a continent-spanning railway. Nonetheless, and even after New Zealand opted out, the Australian colonies were considering the benefits of federation.
Federating colonies is not an easy process. The United States did it, but that had caused a civil war. Canada had done it, but that was viewed as an amalgamation and not a federation. So how do you do it?
Most of the colonies were concerned about who would end up with the power. But not New South Wales and especially Victoria, who, being the more populous states, were looking forward to receiving this power. There was also "the lion in the way of federation" - the implied free trade between colonies and the end of the tarrifs that the smaller colonies had been enjoying. But the biggest question mark was the growing Labour Party.
Labour was committed to industrial and social reforms, and were concerned that federation would take away from their agenda and strengthen the Conservative position. They were also very much in favour of White Australia, the race-based immigration policy that essentially said only white Europeans would be welcome in the new Australia. This was to be a retroactive policy, affecting those already in the country (if and when it became a country). This racist policy enraged Queensland.
Queensland was heavy into sugarcane. The cultivation of sugarcane is a labour intensive process and insanely dangerous, as sugar cane fields are magnets for rats who are in turn magnets for snakes. So the work was left for Kanaka workers from the South Sea Islands.
Kanakas were hired to help out on the cane fields by various means. Some were Blackbirded, or kidnapped at gunpoint from their various islands. Some were coerced by threats of violence against their community. Some were hired as indentured workers - slaves for hire - but at the end of their term they weren't paid, contract or no. Sixty-two thousand of them made the trek to Queensland over the years. And the largely Catholic Labour Party were going to bugger it all up with their blatantly racist policies.
Broadly speaking, Catholics were luke-warm towards Federation, and the real impetus was coming from the Protestants. And one Protestant in particular - Sir Henry Parkes, the militantly anti-Catholic Premier of New South Wales. He kept bringing up the subject of Federation with the colonies and with the British Secretary of State for the Colonies. There were a series of conferences on the subject, and related subjects - tarrifs, communication, the growing Chinese problem. But the colonies were likely to sit on the fence forever on the subject of federation, and perpetually wallow in the reasons why it wouldn't work. Until Queensland tried to annex New Guinea.
Unilaterally annexing a country was considered a "pretty cocky" undertaking for a "cheeky young colony" such as Queensland, in Britain's opinion. They were plainly doing it to secure a large non-white workforce. And the French, Germans and Dutch were already there and would certainly complain. The British Parliament rejected the move and then made it clear that they would rather deal with a federation, and not a bunch of colonies. Especially not colonies that wanted to get Britain into a war. So with this pressure from Britain, and led by Sir Samuel Griffith, premier of Queensland, the Imperial Parliament enacted the Federal Council of Australasia Act, essentially making the South Pacific Islands minus New Zealand and from time to time South Australia into a quasi country. New South Wales was oddly absent from this endeavour too. Their leaders were in favour, the people were in favour, but they put it to a referendum which failed to result in the somewhat arbitrary threshhold of 80,000 'yes' votes. So they were out.
This new federation had very limited powers and no source of revenue. That and the absence of New South Wales doomed it to failure. But they did proceed to draft the constitution of a new proposed Australia and take it to the British Parliament in March 1900. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 was passed into law on 5 July 1900 and signed by Queen Victoria four days later. So now Australians had a country. What next? They needed a capital.
New South Wales and Victoria were the powerful states, and so naturally they both demanded that the capital be Sydney or Melbourne. There was a long and bitter dispute over the choice of one or the other, until a compromise was struck. Neither of these cities would be chosen. A completely new city would be built for the purpose, and while it would be in New South Wales it would be at least 100 miles from Sydney. Nine potential sites were surveyed, with Dalgety ultimately being chosen in the Seat of Government Act 1904, and approved by all as the location of the new capital. Except New South Wales, who controlled the site. And they thought it was too far away from Sydney, which by all rights should have been the capital.
New South Wales agreed to cede land for the construction of a new capital so long as that land was in theYass-Canberra region. Much closer to Sydney. In 1911 the Federal Capital Territory was ceded to the federal government and was no longer a part of New South Wales. Although it was completely encircled by New South Wales and had no access to a port. But that will be tomorrow's story. To continue today's, we need to bring the Griffins into the picture.
The new capital was to be built from scratch as a capital city. While planned cities had been in existence since 3300 B.C. they were still somewhat of a novelty. Nonetheless, 137 plan proposals were received from around the world excluding Britain. The British guilds of architects and engineers were boycotting the competition because the Minister for Home Affairs, King O'Malley, decided that he alone would choose the winner and not some silly city planning expert. So the prize went to Walter and Marion Griffin of the U.S. Their whimsical wheel-and-spoke pattern has been described as "several suburbs in search of a city".
So all that remained was to name the new city. The public was consulted, and 750 name suggestions came flooding in. But the winner was "Canberra", after Kambera (possibly Nganbra; there are no written Indigenous languages in Australia, and so spelling is often dodgey) meaning variously "meeting place", "woman's breasts" or "hollow between a woman's breasts", and the traditional name for the area. Still others say that the original name for the region was actually Canberry, of European etymology and referring to the Australian Cranberry which grows in the area.
Be all that as it may, this is the backstory to Canberra, voted the best place in the world to live by such noted experts in the field as the Canberra Times. Let's go see for ourselves, shall we?
Yee haw.
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Finally. I didn't think this place was going to end.
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Appin, previously called the Cowpastures. This is where escapee cows from Sydney Cove would end up. It was an offence punishable by death to even travel here, let alone hunt cows. Unless you were travelling here "to inflict exemplary and severe punishment on the mountain tribes". That was OK.
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Southern Highlands. Lotsa farms here.
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Bungonia State Conservation Area, and a bit of a gorge cut out of the highlands by the Shoalhaven River. I think this is where the Highlands become the Tablelands. Not sure what the demarcation is.
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I bet the Highlands have the farms and the Tablelands are more bush.
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Nope.
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We're near Lake George, which is always windy. So much so that hang gliders can patrol up and down its shore along a standing air wave where the wind flows up a cliff. This windfarm here takes advantage of that and produces 140 megawatts of power. That's a lot. A megawatt is conservatively enough juice for five hundred homes.
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There we go, Lake George. It's an Endorheic Lake, which is a fancy way of saying a dead sea. Water flows in but ever since the last Ice Age, not out. The original name is Werriwa which means bad water, and the water here is almost as saline as seawater. There was actually a large population of introduced cod in the lake in the 1800s but they didn't survive the 1902 drought in which the entire lake dried out.The lake is either a few feet or hundreds of meters deep, depending on whether you are talking water or sediment. If you drill down into the lower sediment and then analyze whatever it is eggheads analyze you'll find it has been there for five million years. But be careful doing that. During World War II they used to drop bombs on a wooden dummy ship floating in the lake for practice. Not all of those bombs worked. Some just sank into the ooze. Might work now though. One way to find out is drill into them. Somewhere at the bottom of that ooze it is speculated that there are deep, smelly underground aquifers. Some say they are connected to other lakes in Peru and South Africa in some unlikely fashion and that explains the mysterious fluctuations in lake level. Closer to home, some others say if there are subterranean aquifers that may explain both the fluctuations and the otherwise unexplained salinity of the Yass River, on the other side of an escarpment. |
Getting close to destination now.
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There you go. The planned downtown of Canberra. Built on the concept of an enormous traffic circle. Traffic circles have quite the calming effect on traffic, because no matter where you're going, you can't get there from here.
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So here we are in Canberra. Tomorrow I think we'll travel back to the coast.
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