By Lilit Marcus, CNN
Canberra (CNN) — Canberra began life on the back foot.
Unlike Australia’s other major cities, it’s not on the ocean. It isn’t rich from opal mining. It doesn’t have an opera house.
Australia’s capital city was designed to settle an argument.
According to the Australian Constitution, enacted in 1901, the capital city had to be at least 100 miles away from Sydney (the then-biggest and most populous city) to keep Melbourne (the initial seat of power and home to parliament) happy. And thus in 1911 a mostly abandoned plot of land in rural New South Wales became Canberra, the “bush capital” of a young country still defining its identity.
For many Australians, Canberra is a place they’ve only visited on school field trips. Tourists might know it as the answer to a trivia question, not somewhere they’d plan to go on vacation.
Canberrans — there are just under 500,000 of them — are used to having to defend the reputation of their hometown.
The word that comes up the most among locals asked to describe their city is “daggy,” an Aussie slang word that can be translated as “lame” or “a bit shabby.”
Now past its one-century mark, Canberra has left behind the transitory nature of its early founding and developed into a place where people don’t just swoop in and out for temporary government jobs — they stay and build a life. Australia’s oft-maligned capital is a place of world-class food and drink, offering access to green space and some of the country’s best arts and culture.
Many Australians still won’t visit Canberra. But you should.
‘Canberra thinks you’re boring’
“The story of Canberra is like the story of Washington DC or Brasilia, artificially planned cities plonked in the middle of nowhere,” says Nicholas Brown, author of “A History of Canberra.”
“It’s an awkward city to sell.”
As Brown, who grew up in Canberra and now teaches history at the Australian National University (ANU), puts it, the city is “an experiment.” Although Canberra was built in the early 20th century and Australia’s parliament moved there in 1927, it took a while for the city to find its footing.
In 1912, American architect Walter Burley Griffin won a contest to design Canberra’s layout and its major features. Griffin, who had mostly designed houses up until then, said that his Canberra plan was his “ideal of the city of the future.”
One of the most important details was Parliament House, the center of Australia’s federal government. Griffin strongly believed that no one building should dwarf the city’s skyline, no matter how important its function was.
As a result, the landmark was built in an unusual way. Essentially, the top was removed from a hill, Parliament House was built, and then the top of the hill was plopped back on. That made it, as popular lore put it, the only place in the world where citizens could walk on top of government officials.
After World War II, as Australia tried to define its identity as an independent country and not a British colony, the question of nascent statehood defined Canberra’s architecture and urban planning.
As Brown puts it: “If we don’t have a national capital, we don’t have national institutions, then what do we have?”
Answers to that question came along at a steady clip through the 20th and 21st centuries: the National Gallery, the National Film and Sound Archive, the National Zoo, the National Arboretum and the National Library. ANU opened in 1946.
“On the negative side, Canberra represents elites and privilege,” says Brown. “But the planning of Canberra was based on equity, that kids should have access to good schools, suburbs shoul