In 1912 Walter Burley Griffin, an American landscape architect from Chicago won the international competition for the design of the future Australian capital: his plan envisaged a garden city for about 25,000 people, which took into account the natural features of the landscape. There were to be five main centres, each with separate city functions, located on three axes: land, water and municipal. Roads were to be in concentric circles, with arcs linking the radiating design. Construction started in 1913, but political squabbling and the effects of World War I prevented any real progress being made. Little building had been done, in fact, by the time Griffin left the site in 1920, and only in 1927 was the provisional parliament building officially opened. By 1930 some one thousand families had settled in the capital. Then the Depression set in, World War II broke out and development slowed again. After more years of stagnation, the National Capital Development Commission (NCDC) was finally established in 1958, and at last growth began in earnest.
In 1963 the Molonglo River was dammed to form a lake 11km wide, the artificial Lake Burley Griffin that is the centrepiece of modern CANBERRA. Numerous open spaces and public buildings came into existence, as a real city started to emerge. Slowly, the Civic Centre near London Circuit began to live up to its name. The population grew rapidly, from fifteen thousand in 1947 to over one hundred thousand in 1967; today, it is more than three hundred thousand. This population growth has been accommodated in satellite towns with their own centres: Woden, 12km south of the Civic Centre, was built in the mid-1960s; five years later Belconnen was added in the northwest; and in the mid-1970s Tuggeranong in the south. It was this sprawl that fostered Canberra's image as "a cluster of suburbs in search of a centre".
Inevitably, modern Canberra is mainly a city of civil servants and administrators. There are plenty of service industries - especially ones aimed at feeding and watering all those politicians and visitors - but little real industrial activity. Canberra recently gained self-government, with only the Parliamentary Triangle remaining under federal control; the self-financing responsibilities that this entails have placed a premium on tourism revenues. And indeed, the main reason to come to Canberra is for the national museums and institutions you can visit - top of the list is the National Gallery, and the stunning New Parliament House , opened in 1988 and certainly one of the principal tourist sights, with its original architecture intended to blend into the landscape. Canberra is also trying very hard to present an image to counter its reputation as the domain of dull bureaucrats. It hasn't succeeded yet: most Australians still regard Canberra as "pollie city" - a frosty, boring place where politicians and public servants live it up at the expense of the hard-done-by Australian taxpayer. They also complain about its concentric circular streets, which can make driving here seem like a Kafkaesque nightmare, and about the contrived, neat-as-a-pin nature of the place.
But the image-makers have a point, and Canberra is a far more pleasant place than it's usually given credit for. The city has wide open spaces and many parks and gardens, with the impressive architecture housing the national institutions set in astonishingly well-groomed surroundings, so that you can pad barefoot through the grass from the National Gallery to the National Library, peacefully admiring the gum trees. Right on its doorstep are forests and bushland , with unspoilt wilderness just a bit further afield in the Brindabella Ranges and the Namadgi National Park; skiing in the Snowy Mountains or surfing on the coast are only a few hours away.
Canberra's nightlife is also a great deal better than you might expect considering its reputation, in term time at least: the two universities here (and the Duntroon Military Academy for officer material) means there's a large and lively student population (good news for those who have student cards, as most attractions offer hefty discounts). The city is said to have more restaurants per capita than any other in Australia - which is saying something - and there are plenty of pubs and nightclubs to choose from, too. Many of them, though, are tucked away in hidden corners of the city or in the satellite towns. Surprisingly perhaps, Canberra also holds the dubious title of Australia's porn capital, due to its liberal licensing laws which legalize and regulate the sex industry.
The City
Strictly planned as it is, Canberra is a straightforward place to find your way around - though distances are such that only in the very centre will you want to do much walking, and even there it can be something of a test of fitness. The eleven-kilometre-wide Lake Burley Griffin pretty much marks the heart of the city, with several lakeside places of interest both north and south. North of the lake is the city centre proper, the Civic Centre , or "Civic" for short, which houses shops, restaurants, cafés, pubs, cinemas and theatres, as well as the GPO. Like many Australian cities, drug use is on the increase here, and Civic can get a little dangerous at night. The campus of the Australian National University (ANU) is just to the west of the centre in the suburb of Acton, as is Screensound Australia, the old National Film and Sound Archive. Beyond Acton, the National Botanic Gardens sit at the flanks of the 806-metre Black Mountain, topped by the distinctive Telecom Tower and just one of many scattered sections of the Canberra Nature Park. East of the centre is the Australian War Memorial, solemnly gazing back along monument-lined Anzac Parade to the Parliamentary Triangle, south of the lake, with the old Parliament House overlooked by the New Parliament House on Capital Hill? This political quarter, linked to the city centre by the Commonwealth Avenue Bridge, is where you'll find the government offices and national cultural institutions, and is the part of Canberra that is of most architectural interest. Fronting the lake, strung along King Edward Terrace, are four impressive modern public buildings: the National Library, Questacon (the National Science and Technology Centre), the National Gallery and the High Court. The prime minister himself resides at The Lodge in Yarralumla, at the foot of Capital Hill, while most of the foreign embassies - intended to resemble the vernacular architecture of their home countries - cluster around Yarralumla and Forrest.
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