Escape from Canberra

Today started rather earlier than I’d planned – at 3am, to be precise. I wasn’t due to start work until 9am, but then I woke up in Canberra, a good 290km from the office.

This wasn’t exactly the plan. After spending all weekend listening to senior Australian Labor MPs insisting that the party leadership wasn’t under threat – all strangely familiar stuff – I had Tuesday and Wednesday off. Given that there was no cricket to watch, I decided to pay a visit to Canberra, Australia’s capital and home to most of its national museums and art collections. Canberra looks pretty close to Sydney on the map and initially I thought I might be able to get there and back in a day. But this would have given me something like six minutes to see all the sights, so I decided to stay overnight and make an early start on Wednesday.

Unfortunately my body wasn’t quite up with the timetable at 6.30am on Wednesday morning. While my still-dreaming mind pictured a graceful gazelle-like leap from the (rather high) top bunk in the youth hostel where I was staying, my sleep-addled carcass performed what can only be described as a splat onto the floor. I escaped lightly: grazes on my left knee, a rather sinister-looking scar on my neck where it made contact with a carelessly-placed table, and painful bruising in my right thumb. I was a bit worried about my thumb, which I need for writing shorthand and giving people the thumbs up, but otherwise felt relieved that the only person who’d seen my gymnastic display was an early-rising Belgian.

I hired a bike and had a great day in Canberra. (An aside: I’d forgotten how difficult it often is to find somewhere to leave your bike. Fortunately Australian Federal Police officers are pretty laid-back about these things, and told me I could leave it anywhere as long as they couldn’t see it.) Canberra’s a funny city. It barely existed 100 years ago, and you could argue that it barely exists now. While Sydney, Perth and Melbourne developed in the places where the European settlers wanted to live – i.e. by the sea – Canberra’s location on a hillside in the middle of wild bushland was chosen as a compromise, based on its being neither Sydney nor Melbourne. But the main problem is that there just don’t seem to be enough people in Canberra. The whole city feels like a museum, or perhaps a giant film set filled with confused bit-part actors. The heavily planned street layout gives Canberra a spacious, airy feel, but it also means the city has no real heart and the attractions are a long way from each other. Still, although I wanted to dislike Canberra, I found myself enjoying its tranquillity and openness.

Conscious that I had to get back to Sydney on Wednesday night, I made sure I was at the bus station in plenty of time. Or at least I would have been if I hadn’t made a mistake about the time of my bus. Greyhound Australia said I should be able to get on the later 7.30pm bus back to Sydney, forgetting to mention that this bus didn’t exist. A helpful woman informed me that there were no more trains or flights that night: I was trapped in Canberra. So after waiting for an hour – I found it strangely reassuring that the attention to detail that went into creating Canberra extends to having drug addicts in its bus station – I made the depressing trudge back to the youth hostel.

After a pretty good night’s sleep I caught the 4.15am bus to Sydney. The service was diverted off the main highway because of bushfires in southern New South Wales, and was about half an hour late getting into Sydney. First stop was the international airport. I decided to get off here and catch a taxi back to Erskineville so I could get changed out of my sweaty t-shirt and shorts. The taxi driver swore when I told him where I wanted to go – Erskineville is only a $20 fare, and he’d been waiting at the airport for 50 minutes – but he was OK about it after I apologised (and tipped him). After a speedy clothes change – worthy I would say of my journalistic hero, Clark Kent – I jumped on a train and managed to get into work just 15 minutes late.

Work was good. I was covering an inquest, but the Coroner put a publication banning order on the whole day’s proceedings so I couldn’t write anything about it. And the family of the poor young woman whose murder was the subject of the inquest offered to buy me a beer at lunchtime. I turned them down: I’d been up since 3am.